The Tyranny of Fluffiness - Thinking About Wise Speech

I've been thinking about wise, I prefer skillful, speech over the last few weeks. I see the benefit and even the necessity to speak with compassion and awareness, but I've often seen how much damage and suffering can arise not from wise speech, but from fluffy speech. By that I mean speech that only vaguely deals with what the speaker really wants to say. It is speech so soft and fluffy as to be, at least sometimes, useless and at worst damaging.

As I've reflected on this, it can be a real issue with "educated" and "progressive" people. The have both a large vocabulary and a sense of what is "correct." This causes suffering for the people who are trying so hard to be kind and for those they communicate with as they try to understand what they are hearing and what they feel about what they may be experiencing under the words.

"Taking care" of other people under the label of wise or skillful speech, is a type of co-dependency that assumes people are too weak for clarity. It also allows the speaker to be unconscious of their lack of clarity, while being "compassionate."

I've had an opportunity to see the difficulty that arises when speech is unclear. Some of that lack of clarity arose from genuine confusion, some arose from an effort to maintain relationship, but all of it served confusion. One of the many benefits of this path is the goal to be clear. Fluffy speech is not kind, it is confusing.

I am willing to restate or even apologize for inelegant words, but I have faith in my heart, a growing faith in the skillfulness of my words as I grow in my Buddhist practice, and faith in the beings I interact with. I offer my best effort to be both kind and clear to all sentient beings.

Metta

A Step

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path. Buddha

Having studied and participated in sangha for several years I can appreciate the deep wisdom of Buddha's words. This brown ex-prince from India calls me to embrace the hard truths and deep beauty of my life. At the same time, by acknowledging the what is, which in my case is racism, sexism, ageism, and classism, to name a few, I am not captured by these labels. That freedom from tragic histories and current catastrophes has given me freedom.

So much of what I've seen about Buddhism is written by well schooled, well traveled white people. This is not a diatribe against the history and privilege that make their schooling and travels possible, but simply an acknowledgment that my experience of "Western" Buddhism comes from people whose lineages and lives are very different from mine and of course impact their understanding and practice of Buddhism. This being the case, I wanted to start this blog to give voice to those of us traveling the eightfold path without shoes. Those of us who worry about bus and train transportation money to sangha gatherings, who are unable to afford to buy the many wonderful books. Even more than economic differences and what that means to my practice, I want to give voice for my different cultural references and to look at the assumptions that underlie so much of what I've been exposed to. Further, I want to imagine, craft, and bring forth an alternate sangha structure for people like me.

Thankfully, I am an active part of an amazing POC (people of color) sangha that rocks and rolls in ways familiar that resonates with me. Yet, even there, the majority are much younger and are much more schooled than I am. So, if you ramble by and are similarly walking this path "without shoes" I'd love you to share your comments.