Praise and encouragement

People usually find it easy to see other people's faults and hurry to disparage them. Something in the mind pulls us toward picking at others' mistakes and then blaming them. It is something very hidden, and it makes us feel that everyone is poor at things but one person, and of course that one person is ourselves.

Disparagement offends people. Offending people slowly damages social relations. A society with less affection is a less happy one. A person who is quick to disparage makes life gloomier. When we disparage, people resent us. We also make many people who trust us gang up in disliking the one we disparaged. For this we lose merit.

Habitually disparaging others is also cruel. Harming another person's honor is cruel. By cause and effect, people who often disparage others will meet much misfortune and suffering, repaying the mouth that made others suffer.

Still, disparaging is addictive. Once someone is in the habit of disparaging people it is hard to stop, because disparaging others brings a secret pleasure. That pleasure hooks us. After a short conversation we are looking for someone to disparage. The more we disparage others, the more wrong we do and the more addicted we become, and the more addicted, the more we like disparaging others. The wrongs pile up very fast.

Just from a mouth that likes to disparage others, all our merit is washed away.

Disparagement makes people dislike us and keep their distance. Praise and encouragement, on the contrary, make people warm to us and come closer. Disparaging others creates wrongdoing, and praise creates merit. But it is not easy to find words of praise for someone.

To praise someone, we must see their strengths. That is very hard. Something hidden covers our eyes so we struggle to see the good in anyone. It takes a fair degree of wisdom and morality to notice other people's strengths.

Praise has at least three benefits. First, it makes relations in this life better. Second, it brings us merit. Third, it encourages the other person to try harder.

Of course some praise makes a person more proud and complacent, and they settle and stop striving. But some praise comes at just the right time and lets a person pick up their spirits and step forward.

Someone who knows how to speak words of praise is already a decent person. It is no wonder British and American people respond to a compliment with "Thanks, you're very kind." A narrow-minded person sees someone doing well and will not praise, stingy with compliments. A generous person praises at once whoever they find doing well.

Sometimes there is no need to praise to their face. Praising behind their back, to other people, also makes life lovelier. Disparagement smears the picture of life, and praise brightens it.

By the law of cause and effect, when we praise someone for a particular strength, we come to have that strength ourselves. When we disparage someone for a particular fault, we end up with exactly that fault. Why would we be so foolish as not to praise often and avoid putting others down?

Yet there are bad people in this world who do inhuman, immoral things, who plot against others or grab and plunder for themselves. Sometimes we do not have enough merit to reprimand them, enough moral authority to punish them or enough words to advise them. If we stay silent, it is as if we were accomplices, and we are guilty before heaven and earth. If their merit from a past life still holds, no one can bring them down now. It is a very awkward position.

Then someone asks us about that wicked person. If we are afraid of the wrongdoing of disparaging others and do not dare to tell the truth, we are exactly guilty of covering for them. In that case we must speak plainly. Not to slander out of rivalry, but to state the truth so as to find a chance to fight for what is right and to defend the many people being plotted against and oppressed.

Otherwise, in ordinary times, we practice praise, to build up, to encourage and to create merit.