Hold your own worth and others’ as the same

Recognise buddha-nature in yourself and in others in the same breath, so it lifts self-respect without feeding self-importance.

Warum es wirkt

Zimmermann observes that having such a “statue” within oneself, and knowing it to be present in all other beings, could only increase respect and appreciation toward others and toward oneself. The Ratnagotravibhāga also lists excessive self-love among the faults the teaching corrects, alongside discouragement and contempt for others — so one recognition is meant both to steady a low self-view and to deflate an inflated one. Psychology suggests why holding both sides matters: people tend to judge their own true self as better than other people’s, so a sense of inner worth that is not explicitly shared can drift toward superiority.

So gehst du vor

1. Bring to mind your own basic worth, simply, without listing achievements.
2. Now bring to mind someone ordinary in your day — a cashier, a neighbour — and recognise the same worth in them, not less and not more.
3. Alternate a few times until the two feel like one recognition rather than two.
4. Notice which side resists: if it is hard to see in yourself, stay there longer; if it is hard to see in them, stay there.
5. Close by including someone you find difficult, if you can.

Evidenz

Zimmermann’s observation (p. 52) and the list of faults at Ratnagotravibhāga I.156–157 (p. 82) are the textual basis. Zhang and Alicke found across five studies that people judge their own true selves more favourably than other people’s; De Freitas and colleagues found the belief that others’ true selves are good held across several cultures and even among people with a pessimistic view of humanity. The practice itself has not been studied. (mechanistic)

The studies measure beliefs about a “true self,” a lay psychological idea, not buddha-nature — which several Buddhist schools would deny is a self at all.

Quellen

• Zimmermann, M. (2002). A Buddha Within: The Tathāgatagarbhasūtra — The Earliest Exposition of the Buddha-Nature Teaching in India. Bibliotheca Philologica et Philosophica Buddhica VI. Tokyo: International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Soka University (open-access edition).
• Zhang, Y., & Alicke, M. (2021). My true self is better than yours: Comparative bias in true self judgments. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 47(2), 216–231.
• De Freitas, J., Sarkissian, H., Newman, G. E., Grossmann, I., De Brigard, F., Luco, A., & Knobe, J. (2018). Consistent belief in a good true self in misanthropes and three interdependent cultures. Cognitive Science, 42(S1), 134–160.

Häufiger Fehler

Feeling your own buddha-nature as deeper or more realised than other people’s — the comparative bias the research describes, in spiritual clothing, and the excessive self-love the Ratnagotravibhāga says the teaching exists to remove.