Blessing Eight:
Artfulness in Application
Artfulness in Application
C. CULTIVATING ARTFUL APPLICATION
C.1 Transforming Knowledge into Skills
If you want to transform your academic knowledge into applied ability, you have to possess the following qualities (Patthanā Sutta A.iii.154):
1. Believe in what you do [saddha]: You have to believe that you what you are doing is really beneficial and virtuous. You should be enthusiastic about doing it and have the confidence that you can make a success out of it. Some doctors graduate in medical science, but have no confidence in their ability to heal people. Some are more confident in their own ability to construct buildings. In the end, they become building contractors! They can achieve more success that way than they ever could by being a doctor! You need to have to believe in what you are doing if you are to be able to dedicate yourself to it.
2. Safeguard your health: Don’t be the sort of person who bursts into coughs and sneezes when exposed to the merest cold draught. If you let your efforts destroy your health, it will be hard for you to succeed in learning a trade. A practical way that safeguards your health from all the possible risks is very simple — keeping the Five Precepts strictly. If you neglect your health and go looking for things to destroy yourself by doing unhealthy things, you will find it hard ever to achieve success in learning a trade.
3. You must avoid arrogance and boastfulness: Those who spend all day speaking about what they will do, but never getting round to doing it, will never manage to master a trade. No one wants to accept someone who is boastful as an apprentice. The only skill which boastful people manage to develop is the ability to find fault with other people in order to let other people know how wonderful they are themselves. By pushing others down they are able to hoist themselves up in the estimation of others. The habit of a boastful person is to take a very minor virtue or ability and magnify it beyond all proportion.
4. You must avoid laziness: If you have only knowledge but you are too lazy to do anything with it, then you will be no more than knowledgeable for the rest of your life.
5. Cultivate wisdom: Wisdom is cultivated by being observant and reflecting on new skills and techniques.
C.2 Instilling yourself with “Artfulness in Application”
You cannot acquire wisdom just by eating and sleeping. You have to be active in your search for wisdom according to the following steps:
1. Be observant of yourself and the things around you: It is all very well to say ‘be observant’ but in fact, it is important to know what to observe! In a nutshell, our powers of observation should always attempt to seek out the good and useful characteristics of the things we observe. You have to start by observing yourself first — because to observe yourself is theoretically the simplest. You should start by noticing aspects of your lifestyle, (for example our habits of eating or sleeping) to try to define what is appropriate or inappropriate and where the point of equilibrium lies for various factors. If you eat too much it will make you sleepy. If you eat too little, your stomach will rumble at night. You have to notice what happens to us if we go to bed late. You have to notice what happens to you if you get up late. What is better for you — to go to bed at ten at night and wake up at dawn, or to go to bed at midnight and to wake up at seven in the morning? Once you know how to be observant of yourself, you can gradually extend your observation to the things around you. We notice our clothes. How our clothes get dirty at the collar or around the cuffs. Notice what sort of clothes is suitable for what sort of situation. We gradually extend our mindfulness to the things more distant from us — noticing how to speak to people in an appropriate way, how to speak to people to inspire them instead of making them lazy. Notice the characteristics of the things around you. If you train yourself to be observant even of yourself, the skill will soon be developed and wisdom will follow.
2. Train yourself to do everything better than best: Never look down on any work that comes your way. Never think any task you do is unimportant. Even simple things like your handwriting should be done with care. From the time when a child is young, they should be trained to write neatly whatever they do so that ‘being careful’ about whatever work they are to do in the future will be ingrained from the earliest age. Some people write with such messy handwriting that others can only barely decipher what has been written. Someone who writes like that since their youth until adulthood will soon get themselves in the habit of doing everything in a shoddy way — never achieving anything better than ‘passable’ quality. If you do everything to the best of your ability, skills and abilities will soon come your way without you even having to spend time looking for them. Even if you don’t study the specific qualities of a particular art, if you are always observant of quality, and do things cleanly and in a detailed way, even though you cannot produce artwork for yourself, you will be able to tell quality in the work of others. Once you have trained your mind to be refined and to notice details, even the way you speak will start to be of higher quality — more based on reason and more confident (because your train of thought will be more systematic).
3. Be refined in all you do: Some might accuse you of ‘nit-picking’ but if you insist on high quality in your work, even in the details, before long, you will start to pick up artfulness in application.
4. Always look for better ways to do the same thing: Sometimes you can already do a task, but if you always look for quicker, more efficient, more cost-effective ways of doing the same thing, it will force you always to improve on your skills, never sitting on your laurels.
5. Apprentice yourself to a craftsman: Seek out craftsmen in the field which you want to master and become apprentice to them. Be respectful and helpful to him so that he will have the compassion to push you further in the direction of craftsmanship.
6. Meditate regularly: The art of training our capabilities of action and speech is rooted in our capability to train the mind. Systematic thinking and observation can only be developed when the mind is well-trained. Training the mind through meditation will make the acquisition of other capabilities easy, because to be able to meditate is the ultimate skill — because it deals with refinement at its root.
C.3 Applying knowledge for your own benefit and the benefit of others
In continuation of the “Learning Process already described in Blessing Seven”, Blessing Eight concerns the last two steps of the knowledge acquisition process which involve the application of that knowledge for the good of ourselves and others.
Some people use their knowledge and skills only for their own selfish benefits. Sometimes they are afraid that if they teach all they know to anyone else then they will be giving away their trade secrets or that that other person may overtake them and make more progress than they have done.
The attitude which is the most healthy for rounding off a body of knowledge that you have learned is to use your knowledge both for your own benefit and the benefit of others too. Like the example of the College of Surgery with the policy “See One - Do One - Teach One” where capable students were not only those who could witness and perform surgery — they were also able to teach surgery to others too! In that way, all your mastery of the knowledge will not be limited to overcoming your own shortcomings — the application of knowledge can also be used to overcome the shortcomings of others.
C.4 How not to instil yourself with “Artfulness in Application”
If you want to learn artfulness in application quickly, you have to make sure that you are not the sort of person who can do nothing better than find fault with the work of others — unless you are training yourself to be a professional critic! If you have done nothing but criticise others, when it comes to your turn to show off your craftsmanship, you will not have the confidence to let others see what you have made or done — for fear they will criticize you in the same way as you have done them. In such a case, you will end up as someone who never achieves anything.
Desktop Version
