[Buddha-l] Re: Niceness

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Thu, 2005-06-23 at 04:40 -0700, Catalina Castell-du Payrat wrote:

> Like Curt says, I think this niceness is not so contagious, but gives
> you that: hope.

We are all surrounded all the time by a multitude of diseases. We get
ill only when our immune system is compromised in some way, through
fatigue or stress or an overabundance of harmful alien factors in the
environment (such as Republicans). The same is probably true of catching
kindness. People can be surrounded by it all the time but not be
infected by it until their resistance is worn down. There is an often-
repeated dictum in Buddhism that a spoon left in soup for a very long
time will never taste the soup, but a tongue will get the taste if only
a drop is placed on it. Reception of anything occurs only if their is
something capable of receiving it. 

The big question is how the capacity to receive occurs. Can one
cultivate it through practice, or does receptivity come about through
some form of grace? If it comes about through grace, is there anything
one can do to make oneself more likely to receive grace? I am still
reading a long book on the the history of religion in the Americas, and
just last night I read about how New England was torn asunder over this
question of grace. Some argued that a person must "till the soil" so
that when the seed of grace is planted, it will grow. They emphasized
doing works and practices. Others felt that doing anything at all for
oneself was tantamount to confessing a lack of confidence in the power
of God's grace. As I was reading about New England's Christians in the
17th and 18th centuries, it occurred to me that a somewhat similar issue
is very much alive among Western Buddhists in the 21st century (or
whatever century we are now in--I keep losing track).

> I am a little more able to experience compassion than niceness, any
> ideas about why it is more difficult to be nice than to be
> compasionated? or do you think those are same aspects of the same?
 
I think they are different aspects of the same thing. Being a hopeless
addict of etymology, I can't resist pointing out that the word "nice" is
derived, through medieval French, from the Latin "nescius", which means
ignorant. The word "nice" used to mean simple-minded, foolish,
unsophisticated, ignorant. A simpleton often makes pleasant company,
because one can easily take advantage of such a person. We usually think
of people as nice when they don't get in our way very much. People who
really help us in an active way, by pointing our our own foolishness
(niceness?), usually don't seem very nice to us.

So it could be, Catalina, that when you say that all the nice idiots
around you have not rubbed off on you very much, it is because you have
enough wisdom to see that nice people are the last thing you need to
make further progress along the path.

I don't care what people think of me, so long as they don't think I'm
nice.

Richard

-- 
Richard Hayes
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes