Competition and Spiritual Life

During the study group meeting today, we explored the question of what kids of competition might be considered acceptable to Buddhists. According to Master Sheng Yen, competition “represents the nature of animals, not the nature of humans, least of all does it represent Buddha-nature. So this competitive attitude brings affliction to human beings.” (Chan and Enlightenment, p.208) While we were discussing this topic, something that came to my mind was, are there situations where competition becomes a social situation with which people simply need to contend? Or is ‘competition’ more like a state of mind that can be reversed or eliminated through a spiritual practice of compassion and tolerance?

It’s quite clear from our discussion and from the readings that people do supposedly need to create in order to survive. Competing with others and trying to view oneself in comparison with others has often been a strategy used to measure a person’s performance, particularly with Bell Curves in schools. It is said to ‘motivate’ people to create more or perhaps create the best product there is out there. But when I examine these premises more closely, I start to see how suspect they really are. When something is so ingrained in one’s mentality or education that it seems ‘obvious’, that obviousness is sometimes a clue that suggests an entrenched attachment to an ideology. After all, it might be easy to conclude that we need pressure from other people to bring out our personal best, when this does not necessarily bear out in reality. Most people don’t need any prodding to do something passionate, especially when they are not pressured by a final outcome.

To go deeply into a spiritual viewpoint, one must be able to account for the social ‘obviousness’ of competition, and to know that it is deeply a part of the social conditioning. It seems that the roots of this conditioning are the view that there is a separate which I call ‘mine’, as well as the view that I am measurable in terms of the outputs of other beings. What isn’t said here is that the belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more I see myself in relation to what others achieve, the more I am bound to work harder to keep ‘myself’ abreast and not fall behind. It is rare for someone to willingly risk ‘falling behind’ in order to penetrate the illusion of falling behind. And because it is a collective karma to believe that competition is required for human survival and progress, it is perhaps difficult for individuals to break out of that and see that all competition is relative to an isolated set of qualities. It just so happens that the more abstract, de-contextualized, and isolated the qualities or variables happen to be,  the further removed they are from capturing the efforts and thoughts of a real person. Numbers can only speak for these isolated qualities. The more a person describes them, the less they capture a person, and how they truly work, or what complicates the nature of work itself.

But there is a deeper legacy to competition in the sense that it has become such a ‘naturalized’ part of what is thought to be a human’s experience. People often can become afraid that without that tendency to compare one’s achievements to others, there would simply be no benchmark or point where one would feel impelled to contribute socially. With this view comes a lack of confidence that human beings can find motivation just in the mind itself, in the way of being and treating all experiences as part of ourselves.