Praise and blame. They are a pair of opposites we all meet throughout our lives, you've heard me say that before. Now, does everyone get some praise throughout their life, does everyone get some blame? Even the Buddha got blamed. If you don't believe that, I will say that again: Even the Buddha got blamed. He got attacked, people tried to kill him, people abused him, people lied about him, they tried to trick him, all sorts of things. So everyone gets blame, and everyone gets at least a little bit of praise along the way, too. For most people, they want praise, and they don't want blame. Praise feels great, right? Praise makes us happy. Whereas blame, it makes us angry.
If the praise, though, is coming to you for something you didn't do, do you like that praise? When you know you don't deserve it? Do you actually feel good when people praise you for doing something you didn't do? Not really.
Now, if you get blamed at a time when you know you did something wrong and the blame actually points out what you did wrong, then it is actually helpful, isn't it? And we can actually thank the person who blamed us. So this is interesting. Sometimes as much as we want praise and we don't want blame, at times we don't want that praise because we know it is not deserving, and we are thankful for blame when it is deserving, because it often helps us. So dealing with praise and blame, begins with understanding whether it is deserving or not. To actually consider this praise that I am getting from somebody, is it deserving? This blame that I am getting from somebody, is it deserving?
And, as much as the Buddha got blamed by some, he certainly got praised by many. So that is sometimes how we judge whether we are doing something well or not. For example, if you got 100% in a Math test and the teacher praises you, that's fine. That is a praise that is deserving. And it can actually encourage you.
Now, if you do your Math test and you hand it to somebody who doesn't speak English, and they look at this paper written in English and they go "Oh, that's very good". Does it make any sense? It makes no sense at all for them to praise you, it makes no sense at all to blame you, because they actually don't know what you did at all. That is helpful to know at times, because often we get blamed by people who don't really know what we've done. When it is actually unjustified blame. So you don't have to take that blame.
If you know what you have done was good and beneficial, your speech, your thoughts, whatever, when you know what you have done was actually okay but somebody blames you, then you know that they actually don't understand what you did, and you don't have to take that blame, you can have equanimity with that. That's a time when we have equanimity with what was said, and we have compassion and understanding for the person who is making a mistake. That's important.
The actual wanting praise, when you are craving praise, often it's like you are "empty". But there can be another time when we want praise but we are not really empty. For example, if we are working with somebody, and we want to learn their skills. Let's take something mechanical, like working on a car. A new young fellow's working on a car and their boss who has thirty years experience, praises them. The young fellow goes, "Yup, I did do it right, I did do it right". They get motivation from that praise. So that kind of wanting praise from the boss to a certain degree is okay because it will help them see how well they are doing something right.
Now, the not wanting blame from the boss, that can actually help, too, that's part of Moral Shame, actually. They don't want to make a mistake on the car and get blamed because then the boss thinks they are stupid. And the boss may not want to have them around anymore. So by being more careful to avoid blame from their boss, it actually helps them to be better at their work.
This is an example when not wanting blame is a bit close to not wanting shame, and it helps us to grow in our relationships. So there are many times when wanting praise is a kind of emptiness but there are also many times when wanting praise is something useful, because by wanting praise from somebody whom we respect means we are more likely to develop.