Skillful Means RePost from 2012

Skillful means (Upaya) was a term I used to think made Buddhist teaching more significant than many other teachings I had come across. The stories I found that were used to explain skillful means often gave an account where a teacher had used subtle deception in order to aid someone in the greater goal of gaining enlightenment. This can seem like a laudable goal however recently I realised that my understanding of this concept was flawed and even the way I had explained it to other people was so flawed as to be misleading. To those who in the past I have tried to explain this to. I apologise my understanding was not deep enough to try and explain it properly. Skilful means on it's most basic level means the use of clever (skilful) methods of teaching others the dharma (buddhist teaching). When I first encountered this it was in the context of hearing how a zen master has used his words in a way that was understandable to those who he spoke to. I was imagined it in my head as the idea of an undercover zen master in bar telling a story and people finding a moment of enlightenment from that story. To me this lack of clinging to a central way of delivery of a message which is so common in so many religions and philosophies meant I found buddhism to be more realistic and relevant. However I found that using skilful means became something of an excuse for some negative things. When I think back now I found some disciplines to have too much restriction of my "natural" behaviours. I was a guy in my early twenties so you can use your imagination. Skillful means at it's core meant to me that I could treat people like shit and rationalise it in the name of helping then gaining their enlightenment. Think about it! You could technically shoot and kill someone and justify it by saying you helped on their way to the next karmic stage, if their death brought about more perceived good. Bullshit, right! That was the kind of self talk bullshit I had started to buy into. What I mean by that is that I was able to use skillful means as a way of bypassing guilt sometimes. However the fact I was feeling guilt was and should always be the indicator that I had done something wrong. Recently I had been thinking about empathy and how difficult it is to really listen to people (see my previous post on relearning to listen) and it is such a difficult think to achieve consistently in our conversations with other people that I suddenly realised that skillful means was not the flexibility to "teach" the dharma any old way you felt like but in actual fact skillful means is the ability to really "be" the person you are talking to, the ability to understand them from their very core, their own perspective and wishes. It is this empathy which is the skillful part and the ability to communicate with such empathy that makes us skillful.