By Dhondup Tsering
It all started with the westward migration of Tibetans in droves during the 1990s. Flushed with cash and exposure, the Tibetan community in exile became more desperate than ever to become successful in a world overwhelmed with materialism. Fulfilling personal desires became more important than things that cannot be seen, like kindness and humility. People having such spiritual qualities were looked down upon and derided as weak and not in touch with the ‘real world’ as they see it.
As this malaise spread in the Tibetan community, even educated parents were commonly heard advising their children or the children of their relatives and acquaintances to act with more ham pa in their daily life. This they explained was the key to success!
This situation became so critical that on a certain important public occasion in Dharamsala, H.H. the Dalai Lama admonished such parents from giving wrong directions and influence to the young. This self-centeredness and materialism, H.H. the Dalai Lama said, was contrary to Buddhism and the Tibetan people’s long and revered tradition of humility and filial piety.
There was a time, not so long ago, when Tibetans looked upon the word ham pa as denoting something bad. All of a sudden, Tibetans in exile started equating ham pa with the English word confidence. They thought they were trying to make their children more confident so that they could face the world with belief in their own ability. Yet they got it all wrong because the ‘equivalent’ word ham pa was opposed to genuine confidence.
Confidence is the quality of being certain of one’s abilities or of having trust in people, plans, or the future. Ham pa in Tibetan has basically two meanings. One is being covetous and the other is rang tshod ma zin pa, which means overstepping the boundary of one’s ability and knowledge. Both have strong negative connotations.
To delve into the matter further, the first meaning of ham pa is covetousness. It means to desire something materialistic and to stop at nothing to obtain it. This is as far apart from genuine confidence as the west is from the east. Ham pa also means overstepping the limits of one’s ability and knowledge’. Here the person is ignorant about his physical and mental boundaries and frequently ventures beyond what he is capable of. In the process, he or she has to constantly engage in negative acts, such as lying and exaggerating.
If we say ham pa ma shad to someone in Tibetan, we are telling the person not to lie or exaggerate. If we say someone possess a lot of ham pa, that person is most certainly loud, untrustworthy, a glib liar, and secretly disliked by most people. Despite such a negative approach, he may appear socially successful with a chain of ex-girl friends, complete with an attitude kids today would die for.
Confidence on the other hand has a positive connotation. A confident person believes in his or her ability and he or she believes in the ability, honesty, and loyalty of other people as well. In either case, the heart of real confidence is belief in one’s own ability and belief in the positive qualities in other people. If a person is confident about a subject he or she has studied for the past ten years, it simply means that that person believes in the knowledge and experience gained during that time. There is nothing wrong with this strong belief. In fact, this is good for the development of individual themselves as well as the human community as a whole.
Confidence can bring about success in all fields. It is confidence of the individual that makes a great leader and it is confidence in people that makes a great country. Personally I feel confidence can be translated into Tibetan as gdeng tshod and yid ches. The first deals with the sense of belief of the individual in his or her own ability and the later deals with trust and belief in the goodness or worthiness of others.
Ham pa, on the other hand, manifests when someone causes pain and inconvenience to others through self-centeredness, the lack of concern for anything but himself or herself. People displaying ham pa become the source of public contempt and derision; yet they remain surprisingly ignorant about their own faults. This might sound strange, but it reflects the human inability to ignore actions by others, even when this very person might have done something socially unacceptable such as cheating, stealing, or lying. This person continues to go about his business or work, never knowing about his fault except in a very serious situation. Sometimes when people are driven to desperation, then they react and expose the person with ham pa for what he or she is. Until such a situation, which rarely happens, it is as if everything was normal.
Most people find ham pa mixed indistinguishably with frankness and outspokenness. This could not be more wrong, for they are completely different. Being frank and outspoken means improvement and progressive change, while ham pa denotes selfishness in the extreme. A person with ham pa is extremely selfish; he or she does not think of anyone but himself. Towards this end, he or she will do whatever is necessary, such as back-stabbing friends. These people don’t believe in letting other’s speak and may have the habit of insulting people openly.
Dealing with such people can be extremely difficult. Often they seem comfortable with their ham pa, convinced that it is necessary to achieve success. The only way to make the person realize his shortcoming is either to blurt out the truth to his face. or let one’s displeasure known through silence and social ostracism. The best approach is to never ignore ham pa. By not letting a person get away with seemingly trivial cases of ham pa from the start; and expressing one’s disapproval for such boorish behavior, could discourage if not altogether stop people from indulging in acts of ham pa in future.
