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TEACHINGS | EASTERN HORIZON 33

The first example uses a circular way of thinking such as action, reflection, learning
and strategy to know the person's position or status, and exploring his feelings, needs
and interests.

The second method looks at the possible consequences of strong ill will or hatred
towards others. As soon as very strong ill will towards another person develops, peace
of mind immediately disappears, which will affect one’s peaceful sleep; if unchecked,
one then resorts to taking sleeping pills, loses one’s appetite, and physical health
deteriorates. Strong conflicting emotions will create lots of destruction to oneself and
others. If you have very strong negative feeling towards others, eventually you feel
that other person also have that same kind of attitude. As a result, when you meet
someone, you become suspicious, nervous and uncomfortable; this may eventually
lead to a nervous breakdown. This kind of suspicious attitude is against human nature
because human beings are social animals. Whether we like it or not, we have to live in
the human community, and we can't survive in isolation. We put ourselves in a very
difficult situation when we deal negatively with others.

For instance, in big cities, people live in a community, but many of them feel lonely,
suspicious, and distrustful of their neighbors. Due to a lack of community spirit,
many young people ended up as alcoholics, delinquents, and dependent on drugs.
There are incidents where some inhabitants die in their homes but for weeks nobody
knows about their deaths. Within any human community, though some people may
be mischievous, but generally if you treat people with genuine friendship they will
respond in a positive way.

I would like to share various methods to resolve conflicts through common sense as
taught by the great Nalanda Pandit, Shantideva (8th century) in his classic “Guide
to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life”. The most important quality to develop to resolve
conflict is patience with understanding. Shantideva beautifully argued that the
ordinary person attributes his or her anger to an external cause, thinking, "If this
person or situation were different, I wouldn't be angry." If we have this outlook, we
need to change the external conditions in order to calm one's own anger, but consider
how many beings there are, and how all of them have different attitudes and ideas.
Thus it will be an impossible task to make everybody conform to your ideas. Instead
of attempting to overcome and change others, it is much more practical to change
yourself, training your own mind to eliminate the anger that arise in you. There is a
saying that if the ground is covered with sharp thorns and stones, it is more practical
to protect your feet by wearing a pair of shoes than to try to remove all of these thorns
and stones.

It is indeed true that you cannot control how others behave or what they say. But
when you develop patience, external people and situations do not bother you
anymore. In fact, the source of the problem does not lie in the external person or
situation, but in your own conflicting state of mind. When one of our sense organs
encounters an object, it initiates the process of perception in our consciousness. From