Should I always be tolerant?
Hi Bhante, I am a Buddhist starter.
The renovate worker next to my room works until midnight every day and plays loud music.
I talked to them many times but they didn't listen.
Should Buddhists be always tolerant?
It's not really the most important thing to ask, should Buddhists always be tolerant?
Obviously that's what most people would ask, but just to point out that, let's approach this from the point of view of what's really going to benefit me.
I mean, obviously this isn't benefiting you, talking to them, being intolerant.
And I would say,
anybody who wants to be happy should be tolerant.
Because intolerance, and there's going to be a provisional here, there's a qualifier here, but for the most, in general, tolerance is always going to make you happier.
It's always going to bring you more peace than intolerance.
Now,
there's a point where intolerance becomes delusion, where it actually is the covering up of your inclination to change things.
So, there's many cases of that.
Tolerance of your own faults, tolerance of evil in the sense of condoning it.
When you have a chance to help someone,
even just to advise someone.
So you see someone doing something that's going to cause them suffering and right away there should be the inclination in a good person to help them, to want to help them to see and help them to become better people.
But by quashing that and by tolerating their evil,
times you know at least when it's your place to say something like if it's your children parents who indulge their children and allow them to do whatever they want or let them explore that's fine if they want to do drugs or whatever let them explore if they want to get drunk and so on and so on of course there are times where you can't control other people but there are times where you would just
I mean, just let it go.
And it's not even letting it go because there is the inclination to help.
In a clear mind, there will be the natural inclination to do something about it.
It's the correct thing to do, the correct response.
And by quashing that, which many people, I think, confuse with true Buddhist practice.
They say, well, you should just let it go.
But you're not really letting it go because there's the inclination, the default is the inclination to help, the inclination to engage, which is natural.
Human beings are engaged with each other.
We're a part of the universe.
To be detached is not really Buddhist.
We're part of the process.
There is an engagement there, which I think is quite crucial and many Buddhists don't realize.
That's not what you're asking.
Obviously, it's not your place to help these people overcome their music addiction.
If you were the landlord, it would be your place to tell them to quiet down for the neighbors, for example.
But certainly loud music should not bother your sleeping, should not bother your life.
This is something that absolutely you should meditate on and cultivate tolerance and equanimity and understand that it's just sound.
Obviously we're conditioned against that in the West, in Europe, in Canada, in Europe and North America.
We're conditioned to expect things from other people.
We're conditioned to expect quiet and so on.
If you go to Thailand, it's quite an eye-opener and it's humbling because the things they tolerate there, it's amazing.
In our monastery,
there would be two weeks out of every year, two solid weeks where basically 24-7 they would have music blaring into the monastery, like really loud speakers up on the stage.
I don't know, maybe not during the day.
Yeah, I think it was basically 24-7, like really 24 hours a day, loud music.
And I can't remember, it may stop somewhere in the early morning and pick up in the morning, but it just seemed like...
impossible.
How could you possibly meditate through this?
But Thai people were unfazed by it.
And so they meditate, it's like, it's not really a problem.
Or they were less fazed by it.
And in general, the amount of noise that people in Asia put up with.
So it really is just a problem of the
highly developed and privileged world, the imperial world, the people who went and conquered the rest of the world and got really rich off of it, because we expect something that is unreasonable.
We expect to be treated like royalty, so we expect others to respect us.
I mean, this is not obviously what you're going through your mind, but it's ingrained in us.
So we have these expectations that, well, if nothing else, are harmful, are causing us suffering.
Without your expectations, it's probably a lot easier to bear people around you blaring their loud music.
and so I would work very much on your expectations and on your views and come to see that it's really just a cultural thing where we require things from other people like quiet and civility and we expect them to we expect as the Buddha said speech at the right time speech that is polite we expect speech that is truthful speech that is beneficial but he said
you're always going to have speech that is unbeneficial, speech that is harmful, and so on.
You're always going to have things that disappoint you.
So it's like, I think Milarepa was the one who said, if the whole earth was covered in broken glass, you have two choices.
One, you can cover the whole world with leather,
Or two, you can wear sandals.
And the metaphor kind of breaks down because we're not trying to cover up the problem, but we're trying to change ourselves.
It's clear what he's saying is, you have two choices, change the world, make the world so it's always as you would have it, or change yourself so that you can deal with it.
Because in the end, think of what some people in the world deal with.
There are people in the world who deal with starvation, who deal with the constant threat to their very survival from military or corruption or disease or famine.
So it's quite clear that we're just dealing with our own expectations that are actually unreasonable.
And the point being that any of these things can come to us at any time.
So if you're always expecting something from the world around you, you're always vulnerable.
The only way to be invincible
is to have no faults, to have no hooks where if this then that, if this comes then I react, to where you no longer react to the vicissitudes of life.