Blessing Seventeen:
Looking After One’s Extended Family
Looking After One’s Extended Family
A. INTRODUCTION
A.1 Place of Blessing Seventeen in the sequence
A notable quality of the numerical teachings of the Lord Buddha are they become successively deeper in the order in which they are taught. There is never an example of teachings of the Buddha skipping details. Dhamma is like a coastline which gets progressively deeper as you go further and further out to sea until at its furthest extent it comes to the deepest point at the bottom of the ocean. (Uposatha Sutta: Ud.51) If you learn the teachings in the order they were intended, you will be able to discern the progression of complexity that is contained in the order. It is not like conventional work where you can do things in any order. Furthermore, in Buddhism we always start with ourselves and gradually expand the circle of influence of our good deeds for the benefit of those around us. With the Manual of Peace, we start with ourselves, learning about how to do good deeds, we learn how to make ourselves useful to society. Once we have taken care of ourselves, only then do we turn our attention to looking after others in our family. We start by looking after our own parents, offspring and spouse. Once our close family is harmonious and well off, we can further enlarge the influence of our good deeds to look after our extended family. From our extended family we can spread the goodwill further and further until our goodwill extends to everyone in the world.
Looking after our extended family looks as if it ought to be easy but when it comes down to it, it is not as easy as we imagined. You may have heard examples of families where the whole of the family has always helped one another until everybody in the family manages to set themselves up properly in life. On the other hand you may have heard of families where the internal politics is so complicated that no-one dares to associate with them. One strange thing for “care of the extended family” is that instead of tacking it on to the end of blessings eleven, twelve and thirteen as the fourteenth Blessing, the Buddha first inserts teachings on how to earn our living (Blessing Fourteen), the art of generosity (Blessing Fifteen) and how to practice Dhamma (Blessing Sixteen) in between. Some people might dismiss this as insignificant, but there is a reason why looking after our extended family comes much later than looking after our close family:
• it is not so urgent as looking after the members of our close family.
• it is a major investment of time, energy and money.
• done in a clumsy way, it might be misunderstood as favouritism or nepotism.
Thus we need to know how to earn our living in the proper way first so that we will have a good enough financial position to help others. Also we have to practice Dhamma, i.e., we must be fair, because otherwise favouritism will creep in as our motivation for helping those around us. Instead of making the world a more peaceful place, our bias will make the world worse rather than better. Thus when you help your extended family it must not be in things that are causing a break with the Precepts or with virtue — otherwise some will use this blessing as an excuse for corruption.
A.2 Definition: ‘Looking after one’s extended family’
We can divide all our acquaintances in the world into two groups:
• our close family: our parents, husband, wife, parents in law and our sons and daughters;
• our extended family: all of our blood relations apart from our close family (e.g. aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents etc.), those who we trust and have concern for, close friends (but maybe not those who are no more than acquaintances or colleagues), spiritual teachers and fellow spiritual practitioners.
For the group of our close family because of our debt of gratitude to our parents (see Blessing Eleven) or because if we have a husband, wife or children they are as a result of our own choice, as we have seen from Blessings Twelve and Thirteen our duties and our fulfilling of the “Emotional Bank Account” [saṅgahavatthu] towards these groups needs to be unconditional.
For your extended family, usually the degree of expected commitment is less. You don’t see your extended family every day or have to live with them. Therefore you have space to breath between visits (unlike your close family where you have no space to breath). It may only be now and then that you have the opportunity to help a member of your extended family or a trusted friend, but when you do have the opportunity, you have to make a good job of it, or else it may destroy or make awkward your previously good relationship. Because you have not ‘chosen’ your extended family voluntarily/intentionally, the expectations for how much support you can give them, is less. It is usually expected to be ‘conditional’ i.e. to give support, something is expected in return. Thus when we talk of looking after our extended family, we mean giving assistance according to the Emotional Bank Account [saṅgahavatthu] on a conditional or ‘one-off’ basis.
A.3 Finding out who your extended family is
Sometimes we are not sure of the size of our extended family (both our blood-relations and our trusted friends), but we will surely find out when we are in our times of need.
Once close to Dhammakaya Temple, there was a boy who came and helped with the building of the temple road seven or eight years previously. When the road was finished, there was a lot of surplus timber. The boy had not yet set himself up in life and had no house of his own so the vice-abbot gave him the timber to build himself his first house. The young man was very appreciative of the timber but he admitted that if he had to work on the house himself (he could not afford to hire a carpenter) it would take him many months to complete. The vice abbot asked him how many people he had in his family. He said that he was related to practically everyone on the waterfront. The vice-abbot said that within a few days of starting to build his house he would know how many members he had in his extended family — the vice-abbot asked him to go to everyone he thought was one of his extended family and explain that he was short of the wages he needed to employ a carpenter. The man went to everyone who he thought had goodwill towards him. It turned out that all along the waterfront no-one would help him except for two people — his stepbrother who lent him what he could and a farmer from another province who had stayed in the family house of the boy when he had first arrived in town and was looking for a place to stay. Thus from thinking that he had relatives all along the waterfront it turned out that in actual fact he had only two people who were his true extended family — one was a blood-relative, another was a neighbour who remembered a favour.
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