3. The Perfection of Patience

We, with our deluded minds allow the practice of patience to be more difficult than it really is. In our modern world, life is a compromise, inherently unsatisfactory and troublesome. Work, money, people, travel, noise, pollution, all conspire to make life difficult for us. It is very easy to blame others for our misfortunes and get upset with them when things have not gone right for us. The first person to get hurt when we get angry is ourselves! But by practicing patience we gain an inner strength and the courage to face difficult situations, we gain the strength not to get angry or abusive and the strength to stay calm.

When we face difficult situations, problems or anger, we suffer. Accepting that suffering with patience we recognise that these transient conditions will pass. If we stay calm with an angry person they too will eventually become calm, and in staying calm you will have become the stronger person by default.

Patience is a virtue that we all gain from!

The joys of practicing patience can be illustrated by the life and poems of the eighteenth century Japanese poet, Kobayashi Nobuyki who used the pen name “Issa”. Issa's life was full of misfortunes, he lost his mother at an early age, his stepmother mistreated him, he suffered extreme poverty, his children died, and his marriage with his second wife was more than unhappy. Issa's poems often reflected the small joys he found when depicting his life and the difficult poverty driven life of Shinshu peasants. He found beauty, virtue, and merit by practicing patience in his harsh surroundings. For example he was able to transform his irritation with the fleas that lived in his clothes into patience with this Haiku poem:

Now you fleas!
You shall see Matsushima
Off we go!

Or, with this observation of the flies that was irritating him in a temple…

The flies in the temple,
Imitate the hands
Of the people with prayer beads.

We can not prevent problems from occurring, but if we analyze the things that irritate us and cause us to loose our patience and regard lifes irritations like Issa's fleas, then they can become our friends and teachers, providing us with the opportunity to learn, and in learning we become less stressed.