tolerance

  I was reading Thich Nhat Hanh's commentary on the Lotus Sutra, called Peaceful Action, Open Heart, and he talks about the theme of tolerance in one of the chapters which is referred to in the sutra as "dwelling in the place of Action" (p.90). Hanh remarks: "'Dwelling in the place of action'  means practicing patience and seeking harmony with others in everything that you do. If you are patient and tolerant of others, then you can create peace and joy for yourself, and thanks to that, those around you will also feel  peaceful and joyful." (ibid). I was thinking, where does this view of tolerance begin? Does it start, for instance, from the view of passively accepting everything that people say or do at face value? Or is there a deeper meaning to tolerance that Hanh describes?
     Certainly in the Lotus Sutra, tolerance is not portrayed as a passive quality but as something that actively meets people where they are, comparable to the rain falling on all plants. Just as each plant has a certain form which allows it to take a unique place of sustenance from the rain, so all beings have different requirements in order to receive wisdom. I would have to say that tolerance would need to begin with a basic faith that all beings are able to act from the deepest wisdom, even if wisdom is not fully known or revealed. For instance, if I 'tolerate' someone only for the sake of keeping the peace, this kind of tolerance only gets me in the door...it doesn't quite help me to fully understand and honor the wisdom of all beings. But if my tolerance means that I see the highest and deepest qualities in a person, that seeing is no longer limited to appearances. It is actually peering into the deep potentialities that are already there in a person waiting to be seen and revealed.
    There is a wonderful scene in the movie Waiting for Guffman, where the actors are putting on this amateur performance and really giving it their best, because they believe that someone in the audience is a famous critic. At the end of their performance, the actors gather around this one man who is sitting in the front of the room and start showering him with questions: what did he think? Was it a pass? Did he like the performance? And the man meekly nods his head and says yes, it was great. The actors start to become super ecstatic, thinking they are going to get a positive review in the newspaper by this famous critic. But then, so it turns out, the person in the audience wasn't a critic after all. The critic who was slated to come was unable to show up, so the reserved spot had become vacant for another audience member. The humor of this movie is quite obvious, if not familiar: the way we treat people according to our preconceptions of them can make a vast difference in who they 'are' to us.  Perhaps the movie also cynically hints that people construct perceptions about others that have no correspondence in actual reality.
     According to the Lotus Sutra, this seeing the ultimate in someone else is not just an intellectual exercise. It is reality. If as Buddha suggests, all beings (down to a blade of grass) possess Buddha nature,  or the deepest wisdom nature of the mind, then all things are worthy of the highest idealization. But of course, ordinary human beings will find it difficult to believe this, so they do need to start with those with whom they have close affinities and to whom they find endearment. Otherwise, it is like trying to see the Sistine Chapel in a blade of grass. It would seem a stretch of the imagination. Perhaps even when a person is in love, they are getting glimpses of that true nature in someone else. But of course, the key is not to idolize or try to make a person all-powerful while diminishing oneself. It should be more similar to a mirror, where mind is reflected in all things, and there is no attachment to one reflection or the other.