Seven Points of Mind Training

Point 6 : Disciplines of Mind Training

25: Don't talk about injured limbs.

Point Six : Don't talk about injured limbs.

Commentary :

Because of your arrogance and your aggression, you prefer to talk about others people's defects as a way of building yourself up. The point of this slogan is not taking delight in somebody else's defects or injured limbs. "Injured limbs" refers very literally to people's psychological or physical state: being blind or dumb or slow. It refers to all kinds of physical defects that a person might possess. This seems to be the general ethic already set up by Christianity, that nobody should be condemned on account of his or her physical defects, but everybody is regarded as a person. We generally don't do that anyway, in any case.

This is not a puritanical approach to reality, but simply realizing that if a person has problems in dealing with his or her life, we do not have to exaggerate that by making remarks about it. We could simply go along with that person's problems. If somebody is completely freaked out and exaggerating his or her particular realm of phenomena, or freaked out about having an encounter with somebody, that is not regarded as an ugly manifestation of that person. It is just a general sense of his or her response to reality, which takes place all the time.