Transforming Derision into the Path

If an equal or inferior person

Disparages you out of pride,

Place him, as you would your spiritual teacher,

With respect on the crown of your head—

This is the practice of bodhisattvas.

Squashing Our Ego

Placing our spiritual teacher on the crown of our head is a valuable practice. Imagining our spiritual teacher in the form of the Buddha, Chenrezig, Tara or another deity, we visualise him or her on top of our head. Then we do the seven-limb prayer, the mandala offering, purification and so on. After the meditation session, we again visualise our spiritual mentor on the crown of our head as a witness to all our actions and as an inspiration for our actions during the day. This is a wonderful practice that makes us feel close to our spiritual teacher even when we live far away.

This verse speaks about somebody who has equal or less skill or talent as we do in a certain area. This person disparages you out of pride because she’s jealous of you. She behaves just as we do to towards the people we’re jealous of. We find faults with them and harp on their bad qualities because we can’t stand that they are so successful, skilled, athletic, or whatever. Our pride is piqued and in a misconstrued attempt to restore it, we tear down our detractor, thinking it will build us up.

We want to be the best one and what better way to be good than to make somebody else bad? We do that, don’t we? So, that’s what somebody else is doing with us. He is suffering from arrogance and disparaging us in an attempt to feel better about himself. Of course this doesn’t work, just as it has never worked any of the times we’ve acted that way towards others. Instead of retaliating and disparaging her in return, we put her respectfully on the crown of our head, as we would our spiritual mentor. In other words, this person becomes like a spiritual mentor to us.

What is she teaching us? She is showing us the foolishness of being proud and of being attached to our good qualities. Perhaps the reason this person is disparaging us is because we acted puffed up, thinking we are better than she is. So she is pointing out to us that humility, not arrogance, is a quality of a bodhisattva.

By putting the person who disparages us on the crown of our head, we learn humility. By paying respect to her, our arrogance is reduced. If your deluded mind thinks, “Why should I respect her? She’s worse than me. She’s inferior to me or, at best, just my equal. Moreover, she’s criticising me,” think, “No. she is a human being who is worthy of respect. She has the potential to become a fully enlightened Buddha, therefore respecting her is suitable. I don’t have to make myself Number One, and be the best at every activity and the most outstanding at every gathering.”

Such an attitude contradicts our upbringing, in which we were taught to want recognition and to proclaim our achievements. However, in Buddhist practice, being arrogant is not conducive for accomplishing the Path. In fact, talking about all of our strengths and putting ourselves forward can create obstacles in our meditation practice. So humility is very important.

Humility doesn’t mean a lack of self-esteem. It doesn’t mean we put ourselves down. It just means that we don’t go around broadcasting everything we’ve done or are capable of doing. We’re completely satisfied without anyone knowing our good qualities. We don’t have to be the most prominent one, to be on display, or to make a big show about ourselves.

These verses are quite potent ways to fight the self-centred thought, aren’t they? They strike our self-centred intentions and our deluded needs to be noticed, to be the best, the most famous, the most highly praised, the most loved. We are quite attached to these things and become arrogant or complacent when we have them. Arrogance and complacency are antithetical to the spiritual path. There is no such thing as an arrogant Buddha, so cultivating arrogance will not make us closer to enlightenment. Humility, respecting others, praising others—these are traits of the enlightened ones, so cultivating them makes our mind more like the mind of a Buddha.

~Commentary by Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron