More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
All faiths insist that compassion is the test of true spirituality and that it brings us into relation with the transcendence we call God, Brahman, Nirvana, or Dao. Each has formulated its own version of what is sometimes called the Golden Rule, “Do not treat others as you would not like them to treat you,” or in its positive form, “Always treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself.”
In fact, the causes of conflict are usually greed, envy, and ambition, but in an effort to sanitize them, these self-serving emotions have often been cloaked in religious rhetoric.
There has been much flagrant abuse of religion in recent years. Terrorists have used their faith to justify atrocities that violate its most sacred values. In the Roman Catholic Church, popes and bishops have ignored the suffering of countless women and children by turning a blind eye to the sexual abuse committed by their priests. Some religious leaders seem to behave like secular politicians, singing the praises of their own denomination and decrying their rivals with scant regard for charity. In their public pronouncements, they rarely speak of compassion but focus instead on such secondary
...more
The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves.
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.”2 This, he said, was the thread that ran right through the spiritual method he called the Way (dao) and pulled all its teachings together. “Our Master’s Way,” explained one of his pupils, “is nothing but this: doing-your-best-for-others (zhong) and consideration (shu).”
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.
Many people today, it seems, would rather be right than compassionate.
I am in agreement with His Holiness the Dalai Lama that “whether a person is a religious believer does not matter much. Far more important is that they be a good human being.”24 At their best, all religious, philosophical, and ethical traditions are based on the principle of compassion.
we can learn about the neurological makeup of the brain and the requirements of our tradition, but until and unless we actually modify our behavior and learn to think and act toward others in accordance with the Golden Rule, we will make no progress.
A myth has been well described as something that in some sense happened once—but that also happens all the time. It is about timeless, universal truth.
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
...more
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.
The basic message of the Qur’an is that it is wrong to build a private fortune but good to share your wealth fairly to create a just and decent society where poor, vulnerable people are treated with respect. “Not one of you can be a believer,” Muhammad said in an oft-quoted maxim (hadith), “unless he desires for his neighbor what he desires for himself.”
Joseph Campbell has shown that every single culture developed its own myth of the hero, an outstanding individual who transformed the life of his people at immense cost to himself. The story always takes the same basic form so must express a universal insight.1 In all these tales, the hero begins by looking around his society and finding that something is missing. Perhaps there is spiritual malaise; perhaps traditional ideas no longer speak to his contemporaries; perhaps they are facing some unusual danger. He can find no ready-made solution, so he decides to leave home, turn his back on
...more
His quest is heroic because it demands self-sacrifice: the hero will experience pain, rejection, isolation, danger, and even death. But he is willing to undertake this journey out of love for his people—a devotion that does not consist of wordy declarations but of practically expressed altruism. The purpose of this myth is to help us to unleash our own heroic potential, to show us what we must do if we want to create a better world and how best to meet the challenges of our time.
The late rabbi Albert Friedlander once impressed upon me the importance of the biblical commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself.”1 I had always concentrated on the first part of that injunction, but Albert taught me that if you cannot love yourself, you cannot love other people either.
Albert was one of the kindest people I have ever met; he was almost pathologically gentle and must have brought help and counsel to thousands. But he always said that he could have done no good at all unless he had learned, at that terrible moment of history, to love himself.
Colonialism did not end when the colonialists returned home. On both sides, old attitudes have often persisted; the inferiority engendered in some sectors of the former colonies has festered and may lie at the root of some of our current political problems.
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. So we need to acquire a healthier and more balanced knowledge of our strengths as well as our weaknesses.
Before we can make friends with others, we have to make a friend of our own self. 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.
But we should also realize that the rage, fear, hatred, and greed that make us behave badly derive from the brain we inherited from our reptilian ancestors. 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.”
We often attack other people for precisely those qualities that we most dislike in ourselves. This can lead us to project our less-than-admirable traits onto other people—a mechanism that has been responsible for much of the stereotypical thinking that has led to atrocity and persecution in the past.
In many ways, the Crusaders’ attitude toward the Islamic world, which was far more powerful and sophisticated than Western Europe at this time, resembled the response of a modern Third World country to a great power. Their distorted view of Muslims was a compensation for their own feelings of inferiority.
It is often tempting to envy those who lead apparently charmed lives. But even the most fortunate people will face death, sickness, and the possibility of a debilitating and humiliating old age. We know that nothing lasts; everything is impermanent, even our most intense moments of joy. That is why the Buddhists insist that existence is suffering (dukkha).
There is something wrong, incomplete, or unsatisfactory in almost any situation. If I get a wonderful job, the other candidates are disappointed. The beautiful shirt I have just bought may have been made in a sweatshop with appalling conditions for workers.
We are so often the cause of our own misery. We pursue things and people even though we know in our heart of hearts that they cannot make us happy. We imagine that all our problems will be solved if we get a particular job or achieve a certain success—only to find that the things we desired so intensely are not so wonderful after all.
The result of all this self-preoccupation is that we not only make ourselves suffer but we also cause pain to other people.
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. He then directed this “immeasurable” love to the ends of the earth.
Later he would tell his monks to do the same: When your mind is filled with love, send it in one direction, then a second, a third, and a fourth, then above, then below. Identify with everything without hatred, resentment, anger or enmity. This mind of love is very wide. It grows immeasurably and eventually is able to embrace the whole world.8 Over time, the Buddha found that by constantly activating these positive psychological states he became free of the constrictions of hostility and fear, and that his own mind expanded with the immeasurable power of love.
But before you are ready to “embrace the whole world,” you must focus on yourself. Begin by drawing on the warmth of friendship (maitri) that you know exists potentially in your mind and direct it to yourself. Notice how ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
As the Dalai Lama made plain, the reorientation away from self is essentially “a call to turn toward the wider community of beings with whom we are connected, and for conduct which recognizes others’ interests alongside our own.”10 Compassion, he said, was impossible without self-restraint, because “we cannot be loving and compassionate unless at the same time we curb our own harmful impulses and desires.”
If we remain trapped in this greedy, needy selfishness, we will continue to be unhappy and frustrated. But as we acquire a more realistic assessment of ourselves, we learn that the envy, anger, fear, and hatred (which often spring from thwarted egotism) have little to do with us; rather, they are ancient emotions that we inherited from our earliest ancestors. “This is not what I really am,” said the Buddha; “this is not my self.” Gradually we will begin to feel more detached from these negative emotions and refuse to identify with them. We will also slowly become aware that our feelings about
...more
As long as we close our minds to the pain that presses in upon us on all sides, we remain imprisoned in delusion, because this artificial existence bears no relation to reality. It is also futile, because suffering is inescapable and will always break through our carefully constructed defenses.
That is why nearly all the religious traditions put suffering at the top of their agenda. We would rather push it away and pretend that the ubiquitous grief of the world has nothing to do with us, but if we do that we will remain confined in an inferior version of ourselves.
The Western Christian doctrine of atonement—one not held by the Greek Orthodox—is sometimes difficult to understand: it is hard to imagine how a compassionate God would demand such suffering as the price of our salvation. But the French philosopher Peter Abelard (c. 1079–1142) suggested an alternative: when we look at the crucifix, our hearts break in sympathy and fellow feeling—and it is this interior movement of compassion and instinctive empathy that saves us.
Reason was an ambiguous tool, because, as we have seen throughout history, it can be used to find a logically sound rationale for actions that violate our humanity.
I tell this story to show that one small act of kindness can turn a life around.
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.”
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. Certainty about such matters, therefore, is misplaced, and strident dogmatism that dismisses the views of others inappropriate. If we say that we know exactly what “God” is, we could well be talking about an idol, a deity we have created in our own image.
First, think about those experiences that touch you deeply and lift you momentarily beyond yourself so that you seem to inhabit your humanity more fully than usual. It may be listening to a particular piece of music, reading certain poems, looking at a beautiful view, or sitting quietly with someone you love. Spend a little time each day enjoying this ekstasis and notice how difficult it is to speak of your experience or to say exactly what it is that moves you. Try to explain to somebody precisely how it has this effect on you, what it is telling you, and listen to the inadequacy of your
...more
When you listen to talk shows and phone-ins or to politicians arguing with one another, do you think these people really know what they are talking about? Are they able to see both sides of an argument? Are they identifying themselves too closely with their own opinions, in the way Zhuangzi suggested, so that self-interest is clouding their judgment? Are they more interested in scoring points than seeking the truth? Does anybody ever say “I don’t know”? What would Socrates have made of these discussions?
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.
To take just one example: every fundamentalist movement that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation; and each one began with what was perceived to be an assault by the liberal or secular establishment.
History shows that to attack any fundamentalist movement, whether militarily, politically, or in the media, is counterproductive because the assault merely convinces its adherents that their enemies really are bent on their destruction. If we analyze fundamentalist discourse as carefully as we interpret a poem or an important political speech, ferreting out the underlying emotions and intentions of the poet or speaker, this fear and humiliation become immediately apparent. Instead of ridiculing fundamentalist mythology, we should reflect seriously on the fact that it often expresses anxieties
...more
But nonviolence did not mean compliance with injustice: his opponents could have his dead body, Gandhi would insist, but not his obedience.
The Prophet Muhammad’s greatest political achievement was to find a way of helping the Arabs to transcend the aggressive jahiliyyah that was tearing Arabia apart. In the Qur’an, God tells humanity, “Behold, we have created you all out of a male and a female and have formed you into tribes and nations so that you may get to know one another.”1 Pluralism and diversity are God’s will; the evolution of human beings into national and tribal groups was meant to encourage them to appreciate and understand the essential unity and equality of the entire human family. But national or tribal chauvinism
...more
The Dalai Lama has pointed out that when countries, continents, and even villages were economically and socially independent and contacts between them few, the destruction of an enemy could have been advantageous for “us”: But we are now so interdependent that the concept of war has become outdated.… One-sided victory is no longer relevant. We must strive for reconciliation and always remember the interests of others. We cannot destroy our neighbours or ignore their interests! This would ultimately lead to our own suffering.2
