Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

by Karen Armstrong

At the end of his life, Gandhi claimed that he no longer hated anybody. He might hate the oppressive system of British colonialism, but he could not hate the people who implemented it. “Mine is not an exclusive love. I cannot love Moslems or Hindus and hate Englishmen. For if I love merely Hindus and Moslems because their ways are on the whole pleasing to me, I shall soon begin to hate them when their ways displease me, as they may well do any moment. A love that is based on the goodness of those whom you love is a mercenary affair.”12 Without any feelings of recrimination, Nelson Mandela walked out of the South African prison in which he had been confined for twenty-seven years, and when he came to power initiated a process of reconciliation rather than seeking revenge. The Dalai Lama was exiled from Tibet by the Chinese as a young man, and although he saw his monasteries destroyed and his monks massacred, he has persistently refused to condemn the Chinese. Martin Luther King Jr. believed that the highest point of Jesus’s life was the moment when he forgave his executioners, when instead of attempting to defeat evil with evil, he was able to prevail over it with good: “Only goodness can drive out evil and only love can overcome hate.”