Keeping Your “Patience”

Abstract Buddhist philosophers had many insights about the nature and value of patience. Their insights, however, were about kṣānti or bzod-pa, which some translators decided to render as “patience” in English, though others have rendered it as “forbearance” or “tolerance.” Are contemporary philosophers thinking about patience and Buddhist philosophers thinking about kṣānti thinking about the same thing? Drawing on philosophical work from other cultures requires answering this kind of question, which in turn requires knowing not only the concepts and context of such work, but also reflecting on our own context and aims. This chapter explains the notion of kṣānti in a Buddhist context and highlights similarities and differences between it and patience. Like patience, it involves staying calm when things don’t go your way, but unlike patience it is not essentially temporal. More fundamentally, the importance of kṣānti in the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist tradition is rooted in overcoming a self-centered worldview. Understanding whether or not these Buddhist insights about kṣānti are also insights about patience means not only understanding the context and philosophical framework of Buddhist thought, but also reflecting on our own: What we think patience is, what we attempt to do with it, and the role it plays in our own philosophical frameworks.