Don't Blame Others

In the hallway of the TựQuang pagoda in Montreal hangs a quotation from its head monk, Thích Tâm Châu: “Điều mình không ưa, chớnên trách người”(Don’t blame others for the things you don’t like”). For many years now, I try to live by those simple words of wisdom, and it helps. 

Consider this: Blaming others seldom solves inter-personal problems. It only builds resentment and anger, those same feelings that make us unhappy, more stressed out, and lead us to behavior and actions we may later regret. It takes away the notion of shared responsibility. Not blaming others allows us to understand how we may have contributed to our own problem, to reassess our weaknesses and strengths, and to affect positive changes.

We now have a leader who consumes his waking hours not just blaming, but even vilifying others for things he does not like: public scrutiny, staff “disloyalty”, and past policy “failures”.  Crimes are blamed on immigrants and other minorities, not on the failure of our institutions or agencies. Trade deficits are blamed on other countries, ignoring that we too play the same game of subsidies and tax credits to protect our own farmers and corporations. We import more because, more than any other society, we have an insatiable hunger for material goods, from cheap toys and luxuries we don’t need and buy on credit. Perhaps minimizing our national trade deficit abroad has a simple starting point right within our homes: want less, buy less, consume less, waste less.  I know that things are not that simple, and economists may disagree with me, but I still believe that no foreign countries force us to buy anything. The final choice is ours. Don’t blame others.

Those for whom frugality and humility are not virtues but signs of weakness may also find the above quotation too simplistic to be useful. Neither would they realize that self-grandiosity is not only blinding, but also dangerous. He who communicates and governs with impulsive and vindictive tweets in the dark of the night or the wee hours of the morning would do well to heed another Buddhist advice: “Your worse enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded.”

Chinh Le

(A shorter version of this letter was published in the Gazette Times, Corvallis, June 21, 2018)