{"id":829,"date":"2009-09-28T11:12:42","date_gmt":"2009-09-28T11:12:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/onecity\/2009\/09\/buddhist-quote-pema-chodron-war.html"},"modified":"2009-09-28T11:12:42","modified_gmt":"2009-09-28T11:12:42","slug":"buddhist-quote-pema-chodron-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2009\/09\/buddhist-quote-pema-chodron-war.html","title":{"rendered":"Buddhist Quote of the Day: Pema Chodron on Tea Boys, Race Riots, and World War III"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"buddhist_quote_pema_chodron.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/124\/import\/buddhist_quote_pema_chodron.jpg\" class=\"mt-image-right\" style=\"margin: 0pt 0pt 20px 20px;float: right\" height=\"215\" width=\"168\" \/><\/span>A good <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/onecity\/2009\/09\/buddhist-quote-of-the-day-what-kind-of-karma-do-you-drive.html\">Buddhist quote<\/a> on how annoying people can turn into bitter enemies, and how <a href=\"http:\/\/theidproject.org\/\">Buddhism<\/a> uses the &#8220;tea boy&#8221; analogy to keep your enemies as close as you can.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The story goes that <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Atisha\">Atisha<\/a> was told that the people of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2009\/POLITICS\/09\/26\/new.york.maloney.husband\/\">Tibet<\/a> were very good natured, earthly, flexible, and open; he decided they wouldn&#8217;t be irritating enough to push his buttons. So he brought along with him his mean-tempered, ornery Bengali tea boy. He felt that this was the only way he could stay awake&#8230;.In our own lives, the Bengali tea boys are the people who, when you let them through the front door of your house, go right down to the basement where you store lots of things you&#8217;d rather not deal with, pick out one of them , and say &#8216;Is this yours?&#8217;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\n&#8220;Usually what you do is to get everybody else on your team. You sit around and talk about what a creep this person is who confronted you. If the disagreement happens to be in the realm of politics or &#8220;isms&#8221; of any kind, you get a banner on which you write how right you are and how wrong this other person is. By this time the other person has got a team, too, and then you have race riots and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nostradamusonline.com\/\">World War III<\/a>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>-Shambhala Acharya <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shambhala.org\/\">Pema Chodron<\/a><br \/><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Start-Where-You-Are-Compassionate\/dp\/1570628394\">Start Where You Are<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A good Buddhist quote on how annoying people can turn into bitter enemies, and how Buddhism uses the &#8220;tea boy&#8221; analogy to keep your enemies as close as you can. &#8220;The story goes that Atisha was told that the people of Tibet were very good natured, earthly, flexible, and open; he decided they wouldn&#8217;t be&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-buddhism"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Buddhist Quote of the Day: Pema Chodron on Tea Boys, Race Riots, and World War III - One City<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2009\/09\/buddhist-quote-pema-chodron-war.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Buddhist Quote of the Day: Pema Chodron on Tea Boys, Race Riots, and World War III - One City\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A good Buddhist quote on how annoying people can turn into bitter enemies, and how Buddhism uses the &#8220;tea boy&#8221; analogy to keep your enemies as close as you can. &#8220;The story goes that Atisha was told that the people of Tibet were very good natured, earthly, flexible, and open; he decided they wouldn&#8217;t be&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2009\/09\/buddhist-quote-pema-chodron-war.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"One City\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2009-09-28T11:12:42+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/onecity\/files\/import\/buddhist_quote_pema_chodron.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Ethan Nichtern\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Buddhist Quote of the Day: Pema Chodron on Tea Boys, Race Riots, and World War III - One City","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2009\/09\/buddhist-quote-pema-chodron-war.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Buddhist Quote of the Day: Pema Chodron on Tea Boys, Race Riots, and World War III - One City","og_description":"A good Buddhist quote on how annoying people can turn into bitter enemies, and how Buddhism uses the &#8220;tea boy&#8221; 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His writing has been featured in numerous print and online publications. He is the founding director of the Interdependence Project and the host of the I.D. Project\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s popular weekly podcast (available on iTunes). He is currently on the part-time faculty of Eugene Lang College at New School University in NYC, where he teaches Buddhism. Ethan lectures regularly at universities and venues around the country on Buddhism, meditation, contemporary culture, and activism.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/author\/enichtern"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}