Change a Perspective, And You Will Find Sunshine Above the Dark Cloud

​​When Confucius and his disciples were trapped around the realm of Chen and Cai, they ran out of food after seven days.  ​His disciple Zi Gong managed to buy some rice after going through much trouble.​

​When another disciple, Yan Hui, was cooking, some dust fell onto the rice. He felt it was wasteful to throw the rice away, so Yan Hui ate the rice contaminated with the dust. Zi Gong saw this from afar and thought Yan Hui was stealing the rice. He was very angry.

​In Buddhism, this behavior of "finding the mistakes of others and feeling dissatisfied" is called "Guan Guo" in Chinese (which means "observing faults"). Zi Gong was dissatisfied with Yan Hui to the extent that he resented him, but this only caused Zi Gong himself to suffer. If you were Zi Gong, how would you calm yourself down from the emotions caused by observing faults?

There are many remedies: You could trust that Yan Hui had to do this for some reason, you could try to understand by figuring out the reason behind his action, or you could tell yourself, "If I looked for others' mistakes, I would make myself suffer. Thus I shall not do it".

​Most of the time, we suffer from not seeing the reasons behind things clearly. We judge and measure people and things based on our preconceived notions. Even worse, we are not self-aware of this. If we can put ourselves in others' shoes, we can observe and understand the people and things surrounding us more objectively, and thus become closer to the truth.

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