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We therefore call upon all men and women to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion; to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate; to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures; to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity; to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies.
So “compassion” means “to endure [something] with another person,” to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes, to feel her pain as though it were our own, and to enter generously into his point of view. That is why compassion is aptly summed up in the Golden Rule, which asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else. Compassion can be defined, therefore, as an attitude of principled, consistent altruism.
The first person to formulate the Golden Rule, as far as we know, was the Chinese sage Confucius (551–479 BCE),* who when asked which of his teachings his disciples could practice “all day and every day” replied: “Perhaps the saying about shu (‘consideration’). Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you.”
The Buddha (c. 470–390 BCE) would have agreed.6 He claimed to have discovered a realm of sacred peace within himself that he called nirvana (“blowing out”), because the passions, desires, and selfishness that had hitherto held him in thrall had been extinguished like a flame.
One of its central disciplines was a meditation on four elements of the “immeasurable” love that exists within everyone and everything: maitri (“loving kindness”), the desire to bring happiness to all sentient beings; karuna (“compassion”), the resolve to liberate all creatures from their pain; mudita (“sympathetic joy”), which takes delight in the happiness of others; and finally upeksha (“even-mindedness”), an equanimity that enables us to love all beings equally and impartially.
But in many ways compassion is alien to our modern way of life. The capitalist economy is intensely competitive and individualistic, and goes out of its way to encourage us to put ourselves first. When he developed his theory of the evolution of species, Charles Darwin (1809–82) revealed a nature that, as Tennyson had already suggested, was “red in tooth and claw”; the biologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) believed that, instead of being imbued with Buddhist “love” or the “softness” of ren, all creatures were perpetually engaged in a brutal struggle in which only the fittest survived. Because
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Wholly intent on personal survival, these creatures were motivated by mechanisms that neuroscientists have called the “Four Fs”: feeding, fighting, fleeing, and—for want of a more basic word—reproduction.
Our neocortex has made us meaning-seeking creatures, acutely aware of the perplexity and tragedy of our predicament, and if we do not discover some ultimate significance in our lives, we fall easily into despair. In art as in religion, we find a means of letting go and encouraging the “softness” and “pliability” that draw us toward the other; art and religion both propel us into a new place within ourselves, where we find a degree of serenity.
The vision that inspired the cave paintings so long ago may have been similar to the spirituality of modern indigenous hunting communities.11 These tribesmen are disturbed by the fact that their lives depend on the slaughter of the animals they regard as friends and patrons, and they assuage their anxiety in rituals that evoke respect for and empathy with their prey.
From about 900 to 200 BCE, during what the German philosopher Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age,” there occurred a religious revolution that proved pivotal to the spiritual development of humanity. In four distinct regions, sages, prophets, and mystics began to develop traditions that have continued to nourish men and women: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism on the Indian subcontinent; Confucianism and Daoism in China; monotheism in the Middle East; and philosophical rationalism in Greece.5 This was the period of the Upanishads, the Buddha, Confucius, Laozi, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Ezra, Socrates, and
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The Buddha’s crucial insight was that to live morally was to live for others. It was not enough simply to enjoy a religious experience. After enlightenment, he said, a person must return to the marketplace and there practice compassion to all, doing anything he or she could to alleviate the misery of other people.
In Mahayana Buddhism, the hero is the bodhisattva, who is on the brink of enlightenment but instead of disappearing into the bliss of Nirvana, decides to return to the suffering world: “We will become a shelter for the world, the world’s place of rest, the final relief of the world, islands of the world, lights of the world, and the guides of the world’s salvation”23
For Hillel, all these were simply a “commentary” on the Golden Rule. Other monotheists would come to the same conclusion. It is not that other devotions and beliefs are unimportant; the point is that there is something wrong with any spirituality that does not inspire selfless concern for others. Hillel was also making a statement about exegesis, the interpretation of scripture. He concludes with a miqra, a “call to action”: “Go study!”
shalom was more than a mere absence of conflict; it can also be translated as “wholeness, completion.” Shalom was to be pursued as a positive harmonious principle in which opposites could be reconciled.
As the Confucians have taught us, the family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. Family life involves self-sacrifice, because daily we have to put ourselves to one side in order to accommodate the needs of other family members; nearly every day there is something to forgive. Instead of seeing this as an irritant, we should see these tensions as opportunities for growth and transformation.
Can you think of a twenty-first-century equivalent to the li that would make each member of the family feel supremely valued? How can you make your family a school for compassion, where children learn the value of treating all others with respect? What would life be like if all family members made a serious attempt to treat one another “all day and every day” as they would wish to be treated themselves?
The Golden Rule requires self-knowledge; it asks that we use our own feelings as a guide to our behavior with others. If we treat ourselves harshly, this is the way we are likely to treat other people.
Without denying your faults, remember all the people you have helped, the kind things you have done that nobody noticed, and your successes at home and at work. A sense of humor is also important: we should be able to smile wryly but gently at our failings, in the same way as we tease a friend.
It is useless to castigate ourselves bitterly for feeling jealousy, anger, and contempt, as that will only lead to self-hatred. Instead, we should quietly but firmly refuse to identify with them, saying with the Buddha: “This is not mine; this is not what I really am; this is not my self.”
In Buddhism, compassion (karuna) is defined as a determination to liberate others from their grief, something that is impossible if we do not admit to our own unhappiness and misery.
That is why the Buddhists insist that existence is suffering (dukkha). A better translation would be “existence is awry.” There is something wrong, incomplete, or unsatisfactory in almost any situation.
Making ourselves aware of these small discomforts and the reality of our own dukkha is an essential step toward enlightenment and compassion.
The purpose of meditation is not to make contact with a god or a supernatural being; rather, it is a discipline that helps us to take greater control of our minds and channel our destructive impulses creatively.
You will recall that while he was working toward enlightenment, the Buddha devised a meditation that made him conscious of the positive emotions of friendship (maitri), compassion (karuna), joy (mudita), and “even-mindedness” (upeksha) that lay dormant in his mind.
The purpose of mindfulness, one of the practices that brought the Buddha to enlightenment, is to help us to detach ourselves from the ego by observing the way our minds work.
Mindfulness should give us greater familiarity with the Four Fs that are the cause of so much pain. We will become aware of how suddenly these impulses arise in response to stimuli that make us irrationally angry, hostile, greedy, rampantly acquisitive, lustful, or frightened, and how quickly they overturn the more peaceful, positive emotions. But instead of being overly distressed by this, we should recall that it is what nature intended and that these strong instinctual passions are simply working through us.
We tend to assume that other people are the cause of our pain; with mindfulness, over time, we learn how often the real cause of our suffering is the anger that resides within us.
better. Mindfulness should not make us anxious. Instead of being afraid of what will happen tomorrow, or wishing it was this time last week, we can learn to live more fully in the present. Instead of allowing a past memory to cloud our present mood, we can learn to savor simple pleasures—a sunset, an apple, or a joke.
But it will be a slow, incremental, and imperceptible process. First, make a resolution to act once every day in accordance with the positive version of the Golden Rule: “Treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself.” This need not be a grand, dramatic gesture; it can be a “little, nameless, unremembered” act that may seem insignificant to you.
Second, resolve each day to fulfill the negative version of the Golden Rule: “Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you.” Try to catch yourself before you make that brilliantly wounding remark, asking yourself how you would like to be on the receiving end of such sarcasm—and refrain.
Third, make an effort once a day to change your thought patterns: if you find yourself indulging in a bout of anger or self-pity, try to channel all that negative energy into a more kindly direction. If you are in a rut of resentment, make an effort to think of something for which you know you should be grateful, even if you do not feel it at the time. If you are hurt by an unpleasant remark, remember that your own anger often issues from pain and that the person who spoke to you so unkindly may also be suffering.
A religious historian must not “substitute his own or his readers’ conventions for the original,” the author explained; rather, he should “broaden his perspective so that it can make place for the other.” He must not cease interrogating his material until “he has driven his understanding to the point where he has an immediate human grasp of what a given position meant” and, with this empathetic understanding of the context, “could feel himself doing the same.”1
Religion is at its best when it helps us to ask questions and holds us in a state of wonder—and arguably at its worst when it tries to answer them authoritatively and dogmatically. We can never understand the transcendence we call God, Nirvana, Brahman, or Dao; precisely because it is transcendent, it lies beyond the reach of the senses, and is therefore incapable of definitive proof.
Socrates believed that wisdom was not about accumulating information and reaching hard-and-fast conclusions. To his dying day, he insisted that the only reason he could be considered wise was because he knew that he knew nothing at all. When he was attacked by a leading Athenian politician, he told himself:
I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think that I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think about what I do not know.3
The aim of this step is threefold: (1) to recognize and appreciate the unknown and unknowable, (2) to become sensitive to overconfident assertions of certainty in ourselves and other people, and (3) to make ourselves aware of the numinous mystery of each human being we encounter during the day.
Third, spend some time trying to define exactly what distinguishes you from everybody else. Delve beneath your everyday consciousness: Do you find your true self—what the Upanishads called the atman? Or does this self constantly elude you?
As the Daoists pointed out, we often identify with our ideas so strongly that we feel personally assaulted if these are criticized or corrected. Perhaps it would be better to take a leaf out of the Buddha’s book and start from where people actually are rather than where we think they ought to be. In such public debates, instead of trying to bludgeon other people into accepting our own point of view, we may need to find a way of posing Socratic questions that lead to personal insight rather than simply repeating the facts as we see them yet again.
We should make a point of asking ourselves whether we want to win the argument or seek the truth, whether we are ready to change our views if the evidence is sufficiently compelling, and whether we are making “place for the other” in our minds in the Socratic manner. Above all, we need to listen.
When we are braced defensively to withstand a threat, we cannot think intelligently or creatively. If we allow ourselves to feel anger or disdain, this will affect our spiritual and intellectual health, because ingratitude and hatred shrink our horizons. Zhuangzi would say that it is unrealistic to try to freeze our cultural, national, or religious traditions in their current mode.
The meditation on the Immeasurables is designed precisely to bring down the barriers we erect against the other so that our horizons can expand.
First, choose a foreign country that you find attractive. It may be one that you enjoy visiting and know quite well, or if you have not had much opportunity to travel, choose a country that has intrigued you. Instead of another nation, you might prefer to look at a religious or cultural tradition other than your own.
Once or twice a month make a point of reading an article or a novel or watching a movie about the stranger you have chosen, so that it becomes a vivid and regular presence in your life. Ask yourself what this foreign national or religious tradition can teach you. Are there things that they do better than we do? Have they influenced us in the past? What do you think that we could teach them?
You might find it helpful to consult a website, such as Search for Common Ground (www.sfcg.org), which gives regular updates on different countries, or subscribe to a periodical dealing with foreign affairs. The object of the exercise is “to make room for the other” in your mind.
Let all beings be happy! Weak or strong, of high, middle or low estate, small or great, visible or invisible, near or far away, alive or still to be born—May they all be perfectly happy! Let nobody lie to anybody or despise any single being anywhere. May nobody wish harm to any single creature out of anger or hatred! Let us cherish all creatures, as a mother her only child! May our loving thoughts fill the whole world, above, below, across—without limit; our love will know no obstacles—a boundless goodwill toward the whole world, unrestricted, free of hatred or enmity. Whether we are standing
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The Daodejing is usually read today as a devotional text, but it was in fact a manual of statecraft, written for the ruler of one of the small principalities that was about to be destroyed by the large state of Qin. The text offers the vulnerable prince, who is haunted by the terror of imminent annihilation, a survival strategy. In political life, Laozi argues, people always prefer to engage in furious activity and a massive show of strength, but force and coercion are self-destructive. Everything that goes up must come down: that is a law of life, so to strengthen your enemy by yielding to
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When Jesus tells us to love our enemies, he is commenting on the commandment in Leviticus “You must love your neighbor as yourself.”18 Leviticus is a legal text, and any talk of emotion would be as out of place as it would be in a Supreme Court ruling.
