Welcome to the real world. This is not black and white. Here at Wat Kow Tahm, because Thailand monasteries have a fairly sexist attitude, in the early days I got tons of praise, for everything Rosemary and I were doing. Rosemary got fairly ignored. Even when it was something she did, I got praised for it and she got ignored.
It didn't change the Kamma that she actually did the good thing, so she didn't worry about it. I would say, "Oh it wasn't me, it was Rosemary who did that." Some of the Thai's didn't believe me when I said it, - they still thought only a man could be that smart, right?
Nowadays, after nineteen years, things are very different. Rosemary usually gets more praise than I do. She does get acknowledged for everything she does here, and they often expect that she did more than I did. So it's reversed a bit. It's balanced out, to say the least.
When you're at work, if there's no big problem with someone else getting the praise of your idea, fine. Does it change the fact that it was your idea? It doesn't change it at all.
Now if the other person gets a big raise; gets promoted; gets a bonus of $20,000, should we mention something? Probably, yes, but not so much because, "I want the $20,000" though. This is interesting, it's not so much that "I want the praise", or "I want the bonus", it's the fact that if someone else gets promoted, what might happen to the business? The boss thinks they're smart, but they're not. They've promoted the wrong person.
Somebody who took someone else's idea in order to get promoted, doesn't actually have the wisdom to stay in that job. The whole business might suffer. Do you see how this got changed into "compassion for everyone", when usually we are upset, "they took my idea"; "I should get the promotion"; "I..., I..., I...", with aversion to them, aversion to the guy who took my idea; aversion to the boss who gave it him the pay rise and promotion. Instead of stewing all the time, we change it into compassion, we actually consider, "Well, wait a minute, this might cause problems for the whole business here", then we're looking at it from a totally different direction without a selfish eye. Just to help solve a problem, that we see may happen.
This is not very "black and white" is it? But it certainly helps to have more wisdom with what the possible results of someone else getting praise might be.
A lot of us have similar stories from our past, when we were kids. Rosemary has one from her school and so have I. We were supposed to get an award and someone else got it. Huh? What happened? But kids don't know what to say, don't know what to do, or anything. Yet often, years and years later, it didn't really matter anyhow. It didn't really change who we were. It didn't really affect me, as much as I thought it was so terrible at the time. So sometimes at work, someone else takes our idea, they get praised for it. That happens.
It's not easy, I know. But what is really getting praised? Isn't it the idea that's getting praised? The idea is the main thing. If you know for yourself, you thought up the idea, then aren't you actually getting praised in a different way, although nobody knows. Nobody knows, but we know.
Many of you have heard this one:
If we do good Kamma, and we get praised by someone else, does that change our good Kamma? No, it's still exactly what it was.
If we do good Kamma, and we get blamed by people, by mistake, does that change our good Kamma? No it doesn't.
If we do good Kamma, and somebody praises us, and we think, "Yeah, aren't I good?" Does that change our Kamma? It sure does, we've just added an ego trip in on top of the good stuff and made it a kind of negative on top of a positive
And if we do good Kamma; someone blames us, and we get angry at them. Have we changed our good Kamma? Yeah, because we've just added a negative to our good Kamma.
It's our reaction that's going to change our good Kamma. It's not whether people praise or blame us that's going to change our good Kamma.