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Respect

I want to start today with three little vignettes that were important for me in my life. The first one was when I was a relatively new Zen student. I was living at a Zen center, San Francisco Zen Center, back in the 1970s. There were not very many Zen masters in the United States at that time, but they decided to have a meeting among themselves, a gathering to talk about whatever they had in common or issues they had. And so they gathered for, I think, two or three days and had these private meetings among themselves. But then one evening, they offered to be available as a panel to take questions from the students who lived there and students who were taking care of them and hosting them.

I was in the audience, and they were all sitting behind long tables—seven or nine of them. It was, for me as a young and impressionable person, a pretty formidable group of teachers sitting there. I was watching them, and at some point, someone came along to give them tea or water. Each of them maybe came with a tray and came up from behind them like a good server, reaching over to put the cup in front of them so they'd have something to drink. They all just accepted it. The Zen teachers had no reaction; they just received it and it was there. They didn't react or respond to receiving it at all, except for one.

When the server came to offer it, one of them turned completely around to the server, acknowledged the server was there, and thanked the person who brought it. The contrast between the ones who were almost oblivious to the person offering and the one who took the time to act like that person was the most important person at that moment—to turn and really be there and see and recognize and thank the person—I was so impressed by that. Oh, that's quite something. What are the other people doing? I thought. So that inspired me. That was one vignette.

The other vignette was in the same Zen center some years later. There was a visiting monk from Japan who was sitting next to me at sesshin^[1], a seven-day retreat. He was sitting next to me in the hall, and the way that it worked then is that every afternoon during the retreat in the meditation hall, we'd be sitting facing the middle of the room, everyone around the edges of the room, and people would come in and offer us tea and a cookie. The first day of the retreat, the first afternoon, they also came with a tray of cups, and we each kept our own cup next to our seats for the week.

At the end of the retreat, they came in to gather the cups we'd been using. They gave us tea, they gave us a cookie, and when that was finished, they came to collect all the cups used for a week. So the visiting Japanese monk who was sitting next to me—you know, it's all choreographed in Zen. You're supposed to know exactly when you're supposed to bow and chant and stand up and sit down; it's all choreographed on schedule. So if someone does something that is a little bit out of the usual, it stands out. His cup was on the platform in front of him, and before the server came, he bowed to the cup. Wow. That's respecting, appreciating, having gratitude for the cup. I don't know what he was expressing, but I thought it was partly gratitude, but the fact that you would express this to a cup—that was inspiring as well. Not just people that you'd respect, not just people you would thank or express something to, but to a cup. That was the second vignette.

The third was when I was in graduate school. I was studying Buddhist studies at the religious studies department, but I took a class from the history department. I think the class was something like the history of Japanese Buddhism, or maybe it had to do with Japanese history. Somehow we were learning all these facts about history, and there was some little fact that was told. We were preparing for the finals or something, and so I said to the professor, "So this particular fact is not so important, right, that we have to know this?" And he looked at me and he said, "Gil, everything is important." Wow, that was quite something. Oh, everything is important. This idea that when you're studying history, everything has its value. It kind of echoed in my mind in all kinds of situations: everything is important, everything is respect-worthy.

I think what these three stories have in common is the idea of respect. Respect is a very important attitude or behavior in many societies and for many people. I have never heard a dharma talk about respect. I've been listening to dharma talks for almost fifty years, and I've never heard one about respect. I've never seen anybody actually writing about respect. There must be someone, but I'm not that well-read.

But if you go back to look at the teachings of the Buddha, the concept of respect is all over. It's sprinkled all over; however, it's not on any list. So if you like to teach lists, it's not there. It's not described as having a specific role for the path of awakening, because that's a very specific listing of practices and mental experiences that happen on that path, and respect is not listed there. The things that people often use for dharma talks are important things. They are understood things that stand out, the things you'd read in an introduction to Buddhism book where it says, "This is what it's all about." Respect doesn't rise to the surface high enough to be talked about in introduction to Buddhism texts, or in introductory dharma talks in all kinds of places that I've heard, though maybe some of you have heard differently.

However, it's sprinkled all over, and the impression I have is that respect was just an assumed important quality of society at the time of the Buddha. It was just assumed to be a very important quality people have that you didn't have to teach it specially, you just mentioned it. In fact, it gets mentioned in all kinds of places. One place is that it's mentioned together with gratitude and contentment. I think also there is something that I've been translating into English as deference. Respect, deference, contentment, and gratitude are great treasures or great blessings.

In the discourse on loving-kindness, there's an emphasis on respect. One of the wonderful teachings about it is where the idea of respect is connected directly with love, piya^[2], the love or care or appreciation or deep regard for other things. It's also connected with social cohesion, non-dispute, concord, and unity. Those wonderful things are all connected somehow in association with respect. The Buddha teaches four things that are conducive to this love, respect, cohesion, non-dispute, concord, and unity: loving-kindness or friendliness—if we live a life of kindness, that conduces to love and respect; generosity—if we live a life that's generous, that also is conducive to love and respect; living an ethical life is conducive to love and respect; and finally, developing the insight that leads to awakening, liberating insight. Having that insight, having that experience of liberation, our being on the path of that also is conducive to love and respect. I think when you meet someone who is very mature in dharma practice, it tends to bring up a certain level of respect, an appreciation of that person.

There's a fascinating story of the Buddha soon after he was enlightened. He said to himself that someone will live an unpleasant or uncomfortable life if they don't have respect and deference, and a certain kind of reliance on others. It's an interesting idea. So he looked around and he said, "Well, actually there's no one who is more realized than I am. So it doesn't make sense for me to have respect and deference, or to rely on someone, to have a certain kind of dependence on them, because I'm complete in my awakening. So what should I have respect for then, if it's not a person?" And he said, "I'll have respect for the dharma by which I was awakened." He actually said respect, homage or honoring, and reliance. So the idea of respect, honoring, and reliance—not in a person, but in the dharma, the teachings, the truth, the processes of awakening that exist within each of us. Here also the idea of respect appears.

Respect is a fascinating social attitude. It's complicated because it means so many different things in English. We use the word respect, and sometimes it has more to do with fear than it is really respect. We might say, "I have respect for something," but the person who's saying it really means they fear it. But as an attitude of appreciation of others, an attitude of valuing another person, seeing their worth or their importance—everything is important, including each person. To have an appreciation for the value of others, when there's respect, it's a very interesting mental process.

To do respect, to have respect, involves seeing again, taking a deeper look at what's going on. In Latin, respectus—like spectator or spectacle—means to look, and then re- means again: to look again. So if something is respect-worthy, we want to take a deeper look at it. But a deeper look is also deeper listening, as if this person is worthy of me paying attention to. It's not only about me, myself, and mine. It's not only about what I want, or what I'm afraid of, or how it supports my self-centeredness. There's a dropping of self-centeredness, a dropping of my likes and preferences in order to hear or listen or take in the other person in a good way.

There is a healthy deference to others when you have respect. There's a putting yourself aside slightly in order to take them in, to register the person, to make space for the person. Even just to listen to what someone has to say is a kind of deference. We put aside me, myself, and mine a little bit. Respect involves an attitude where other people are important enough that we do put some part of ourselves aside, and the focus becomes the person or object that we have respect for.

But it's not a giving up of oneself, because at the same time, when we have respect for someone else, we're the agent of the respect. We're the one who is empowering the respect, we're the one who is living the respect. It comes from a place of a certain kind of confidence, a certain kind of ability to offer something here. So we ourselves are the subject of the respect. As the person who has respect, part of who we are is put aside—our preferences and our likes, our self-centeredness—so we can take in and really register the other person, but part of us comes forward—the ability to do that, and the ability to appreciate somebody else, to value them. This is a mental movement. This is not just a casual thing, just stumbling along and bumping into someone. It takes a certain kind of stopping and taking in and registering, and having a mental process that appreciates and values the person that we're with.

You wouldn't get the message that this is important when dharma teachers, for example, teach about some of the higher reaches of dharma practice where they talk about not-self. You know, you're supposed to feel the self disappears completely, or sometimes they talk about knowing that there's no separate self, and some idea of merging or disappearing of the self and the other person. Respect doesn't involve that. Respect involves a very clear distinction between you as the subject and the person as the object of that respect. The advantage of that is that there's a synthesis, a chemistry where something beautiful can happen. There can be love, there can be respect, there can be appreciation, there can be a dropping of self-centeredness and self-preoccupation, and the strengthening of a kind of confidence.

I would like to propose that healthy respect involves a healthy confidence to offer respect. If you have no confidence, the respect might be more of a belittling of oneself, making oneself small in relationship to the other person, almost subservient sometimes. But I think the more confident we are in ourselves, the more value there is in our respect. The more we belittle ourselves, the less power or energy there is in the respect itself.

Does respect have a role in Buddhist practice? Apparently it does. At least for the Buddha, maybe it's so fundamental he doesn't have to say it's part of Buddhist practice, it's just assumed as a foundation. I find that having respect for my teachers has been very important for me. There was a time where I felt like I wasn't really going to study with a certain teacher anymore, but I still had tremendous respect and deference to them. I gave my teachers authority over me; I said if they ever come to me and say, "Gil, you have to stop teaching," I would have said okay. There are a few people who, if they told me that, I wouldn't question it. I would say okay, because I had that respect and that reliance, that dependence on them that felt important for me to have so that I wasn't just barreling ahead with my own self-centered orientation. There was someone I was accountable to, or someone that I was willing to listen to and hear from.

Even more significant for me is the respect I have for the dharma, for the practice, and also karma. I've learned through my life experiences that these are powerful forces in the human heart and the human mind that are non-personal, but how I personally live affects them. It's connected to the personal, but it's somehow bigger than us, a larger process too. So for me, trusting the dharma, or trusting meditation, or respecting it, is to respect this process, this force, these natural processes that are valuable and important and profound, that I get out of the way for. If I respect my meditation, respect my dharma, here also I put aside my preferences and my likes and dislikes, what I want, in order to make room for something deeper to happen, to allow myself to listen and hear and see something that's happening here that is different than me, myself, and mine.

I've seen this transformation, this movement, this change that happens in meditation over and over again. Sometimes it's only in meditation I realize I've been spending the last few hours caught up in my thoughts or caught up in some personal concern, and then I watch and see it melt away or drop away. To be able to see through it in meditation to the other side—there's more going on here than what I was allowing myself to tap into when I was going around my life caring for things.

So we have this respect for that process, respect for meditation, respect for dharma. When we show up to meditate, there is a kind of putting ourselves aside and bringing ourselves forward at the same time. Putting ourselves aside because it's not about me, myself, and mine only. It's not about my likes and dislikes, my preferences, what I want. So that's putting that aside. But it's also about coming forward more fully because I'm here to listen, I'm here to really wake up and see, to allow life to show itself, allow myself to receive, allow myself to be impacted by the dharma. The dharma is operating here; let me show up and be available for it. This wonderful combination and this dance between letting go of self and bringing self into the picture is expressed very well with the word respect, at least the way I'm talking about it today.

Perhaps there's a wonderful place for respect in our dharma practice. And maybe dharma practice has a different kind of confidence in it, and a kind of freedom in it when respect is brought along in paying attention. Maybe you have thought about this a lot, but for those of you who haven't, maybe it will be well worth some deeper reflection about your relationship to respect. In what way for you does respect involve valuing what you respect? What kind of valuing? What does it mean to see something as worthy? What if everything is important? What if every teacup is to be respected? What if everyone you run into is someone who warrants respect? Wouldn't you like to live that way? Respecting everyone. And who would benefit the most from that? You, or those people being respected? It'd be nice if it was equal for both. Respect doesn't diminish us. A respect that brings forth some of the best qualities of who we are is conducive to love, cohesion, non-dispute, concord, and unity. It is a very nice thing.

Those are my thoughts for today.

Q&A

Gil Fronsdal: Do you have any things you'd like to say about respect, thoughts about it? If you can bring the microphone to him, and then if you can please say your name.

Barry: Hi, my name is Barry. I was thinking about mutual respect. That that is maybe the substrate of connection. Mutual respect, yes. And that feeling respected by another makes it easier to respect them, and vice versa. I was thinking about your story about talking to your teachers in a respectful manner, respecting their opinions, and I was imagining that they were respecting you too as a student.

Gil Fronsdal: Yes, thank you. Yes, right here.

Jill: Good morning, my name is Jill. I'm sitting here with two thoughts that are struggling to come out as one question, and I can't quite get there. The first thought is, perhaps there's no actual teaching of respect in the suttas. Could it possibly be a matter of translation? I know we struggle with so many words; maybe there's some little nugget in there that didn't quite make it into the English translation. That combined with the fact that the word respect in our Western culture has so much baggage with it. When I was raised, the phrase it always was used with was the word "show"—you are to show respect. And showing respect is very different than what we've spoken of today. So somehow I'm rolling through those two things together, which may mean that we just don't have a common language about it yet.

Gil Fronsdal: Yeah, I think that's very nice what you're saying, that the word respect is so complicated because of all the different meanings of it. There's a whole slew of meanings, and some of them are not so healthy, like showing respect if it's only a show. That's why I was calling it an attitude at the beginning rather than a show.

Whether it's an issue of translation, I don't know. It's very hard to know how properly to translate these words. But there's a bunch of words which are closely related that sometimes appear in lists, and in English they get translated as respect, reverence, veneration, and homage. So that's the family that we're talking about, exactly what it means in the different ones.

And also there's the word that sometimes translates as deference, which could also mean something like being gentle, things like that. What's interesting is how often it translates as deference. If you read modern psychology or philosophy about respect, deference is often considered closely related; it kind of goes along with it. When I first saw that, I thought, Deference? That doesn't seem like a good thing. But I think maybe it is a good thing in a certain way, or it can be a good thing.

Part of the task is to discover how to do these things not as a duty or an obligation, but how to do them in a way that's healthy, that's supportive and beneficial, and that's the task of each person. I think mindfulness can help give us the inner information we need in order to understand when we're doing things in a healthy way and when not in a healthy way.

There's one more place where respect appears in the suttas, and it's another thing. I said that respect is maybe just assumed because it's a cultural value of the Buddha; he doesn't really teach it explicitly. But another thing that's also found, that is the same way—very foundational, yet he doesn't teach about it particularly, and so it tends to be overlooked very often in the suttas or gets mistranslated—is anukampa^[3], which I translate as care. Sometimes it gets translated as compassion, but compassion requires someone to suffer, technically—you know, the dictionary definition. There has to be suffering for there to be compassion, or some reference to suffering and wanting to alleviate that suffering. But care can involve caring for people who aren't suffering. The caregiving emotion that the Buddha uses repeatedly is this word anukampa. Karuṇā^[4], the common Buddhist word for compassion, the Buddha never uses as a caregiving emotion in his teachings; it's always this anukampa.

But then the question is, what motivates anukampa? What motivates care? There's very little said about this, but where it is discussed, it's motivated by respect. By respect, reverence, veneration, and homage in one place, and in another place, just respect. So these two fundamental things, respect and care, are hooked together. We care for people not because we have compassion for them or love for them; we care for them because we have respect. Maybe respect is a more universal or more foundational or broader thing. Love and compassion are wonderful and profound, but they do require a more active engagement. Maybe respect is more basic, and we can respect people that we don't love, we can respect people we don't have compassion for. So our care of each other coming from respect seems to be one of the teachings of the Buddha. I don't know if that was addressing your two thoughts.

Jill: Very helpful. Thank you so much.

Shawnee: Hi, this is Shawnee. I think you were just starting to get to my question, but I'm also struggling a little bit with what I perceive as different definitions of respect. I can understand care as an attitude towards maybe everything and not worrying so much about what the object is. But for respect, it seems with some of the words you're saying like deference or veneration, it seems like there's a positive connotation towards the object. So if there's a difficult person or a violent person or things I really don't agree with, how would you approach respect in those situations?

Gil Fronsdal: Some people say what you do is you separate out their behavior from the person. So for someone who's difficult, maybe even dangerous, it's possible to respect their humanity but not their behavior, and the behavior has to be addressed in a particular way. But you never lose sight of the respect for that person. So the person feels all along—you just call the police on them, but, "Boy, that person did it in such a respectful way. He told me they called the police, you know, 'This is not really good, and I wish you well, I would like to support you but this can't continue, so I'll call the police. But I'll stay here while the police come and make sure they treat you well.'" I don't know, just making up a scenario. But I like to believe that we can find a way to have respect for the humanity of people that's not dependent on their behavior.

Shawnee: Thank you.

Jan: Hi everyone, my name is Jan. What came to my mind was also, since Barry and I have been leading the sangha group after the talks, how much I respect the sangha and have learned from the sangha. No matter how long people have been practicing, it seems like there's always something to value and learn about what someone is experiencing through the practice. And also I was thinking about something related to this from a talk that Thanissara^[5] gave recently on the climate crisis, about how consumerism really comes from a feeling of disconnection and not feeling like we belong to each other, and how important it is to value and respect our connection to others in addition to the dharma and the teachings of the Buddha.

Gil Fronsdal: Nice. And this connection to others is related to the way in which self-respect and respecting others are connected to each other. Disrespecting the humanity of others is one way of talking about it, but another way of talking about it is that if you have self-respect, you wouldn't want to have any disrespect for anyone else, because the act of disrespect is a way of diminishing oneself. Of course you'll have respect if you have self-respect, because that's what you're left with: respect for others. To not appreciate others is not a neutrality, but a kind of movement of disrespect. What else? Anything else?

Tanya: I'm Tanya, and I was just imagining how the Buddha often defines things by their opposite. I didn't find the word disrespect very visually or imaginably helpful for me, but I was thinking about the word respect as "re-look," and that to respect is to look right. And the opposite of that is to not look, to not see, to not regard, to not take in. And how that's very painful. That's sort of like the climate crisis: not looking, not seeing, not respecting.

Gil Fronsdal: What comes to mind is that if you're calm and present for things, of course you'll take another look. So not looking is a kind of disregard. Not looking is a kind of turning away. Maybe respect means we never turn away or never turn our back on someone or on the planet.

Okay. I hope this was nice for you. I've never given a talk on this topic, but lately it's been on my mind and my heart quite a bit, and I find it meaningful to spend time reflecting on this topic. So maybe you will too. Thank you all very much.