Friday — Compassion & Empathetic Joy
As I mentioned Wednesday night, the second and third brahmavihāras—compassion and empathetic joy—are expressions of goodwill. Compassion is what goodwill feels when encountering suffering; empathetic joy is what goodwill feels when encountering those who are happy.
We tend to think of these attitudes as being very easy: Of course we feel sorry for people or animals who are suffering. Of course we feel happy when we see other people being happy. But these attitudes are easy only some of the time. In fact, like goodwill, our human level of compassion and empathetic joy tends to be partial. It’s easy to feel these attitudes around innocent people who we feel are suffering unjustly or around people we think deserve to be happy.
But for compassion and empathetic joy to become true brahmavihāras, you have to be able to feel them in all situations. When someone who has harmed you or your loved ones, and is now being punished for his or her wrongdoing, you still have to feel compassion for that person, even if you feel the punishment is precisely what that person deserves. When people who are enjoying good fortune abuse that good fortune—say, using their power to create war and mayhem in the world—you can’t wish for them to lose their good fortune. A more skillful attitude would be to wish that they would see the error of their ways and then use their good fortune for greater good.
It’s cases like these that test the discernment and truth of your determination on goodwill: You say you want all beings to be happy, but are you willing to extend the same wish to people like these? Can you see why it’s the wise thing to do? And that it’s good for you? When Argentina beats Brazil in soccer, can you be happy for them? When Argentina loses to Guyana, can you feel compassion for them?
The best way to strengthen your discernment and truth in developing these two brahmavihāras is to think about the Buddha’s teachings on kamma and rebirth. These teachings provide a context that makes it easier to feel compassion and empathetic joy in difficult situations. They do this by helping you to see why these attitudes are appropriate and actually good for you. In this way, these two brahmavihāras not only test your discernment, truth, generosity, and calm, but they also make these qualities stronger.
First, kamma: When someone is suffering, you have to reflect on the reasons why people suffer.
Here we have to correct a common misunderstanding about kamma. The Buddha didn’t say that our present suffering comes entirely from our past actions. In fact, he actually said that to believe that what you experience now depends solely on past actions is an extreme form of wrong view. He took this point so seriously that—even though he wasn’t the sort of person to look for fights—when he heard that other people were teaching this view, he sought them out to argue with them. If you teach that everything depends on past kamma, he said, it leaves your students unprotected and bewildered, for it leaves them with no way of escaping from suffering in the present.
One case involved some Jain ascetics: They claimed that by engaging in extreme asceticism, they were burning off the pains caused by their past bad kamma. So he asked them: “Have you noticed that when you don’t engage in asceticism, you don’t feel those intense pains?”
They answered, “Yes.”
“So how can you say that the pain comes from past action? It comes from what you’re doing right now.”
The Buddha’s actual teaching on kamma is that the pleasures and pains you experience come from a combination of two things: your past actions and your present actions. In fact, your present actions are the more important of the two. Past actions provide the raw material from which your present actions shape what you actually experience right now as pleasure or pain.
So when people are suffering in the present moment, the causes come down to two: unskillful actions in the past, or unskillful actions in the present. They either did something harmful in the past, or they’re doing something harmful now—either to others, in mistreating them, or to themselves, in how they engage in the three types of fabrication in the present: bodily, verbal, and mental.
If a person is suffering from the results of past bad actions, and you would like to help the person in an external way, what you’re hoping is that your help represents the point at which the person’s past good actions are beginning to bear fruit, and the past bad actions are beginning to end their influence. This is perfectly praiseworthy, and if you can succeed in helping to improve the external situation, it’s all to the good. But there are times when the person’s past bad kamma is still strong. That’s when you have to focus on the person’s present kamma, and in particular, on the way the person fabricates his or her own experience.
As you may remember, the three fabrications are these: Bodily fabrication is the in-and-out breath. Verbal fabrication is how you talk to yourself. In technical terms, this is called directed thought and evaluation: You direct your thoughts to a topic and then you make comments and ask questions about it. Mental fabrication is perception and feeling: the mental labels you apply to things, and the feeling tones you focus on.
These forms of fabrication take the raw material provided by your past kamma and shape it into what you actually experience in the present moment. It’s as if you’re a cook. Your past kamma is the raw food and other ingredients in your kitchen. Your present kamma consists of your skills as a cook. If you’re a bad cook, you can spoil even good ingredients. If you’re a good cook, you can take even garbage and turn it into good food.
So when someone is suffering, the four noble truths teach us that it’s not so much from external circumstances. It’s because of that person’s lack of skill. This is what the Buddha meant when he said that the causes of suffering can be traced to avijjā, or ignorance. The ignorance here is not just a matter of not being informed of certain facts about reality. It’s ignorance of how to skillfully act in thought, word, and deed.
When we say that people suffer because of their actions, past and present, it means that there’s no one in the human world who’s really innocent. Even if someone has behaved perfectly in this lifetime, there may be some bad seeds in his or her kamma field from past lifetimes that are now sprouting. Now, this doesn’t mean that that person deserves to suffer. And it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t feel compassion for that person. If your compassion is so picky that it can go only to innocent people, you won’t find anyone to give it to. Accept the fact that the human realm is one where we all have a mixture of past bad kamma and past good kamma. We’re all in this together, so we should all have compassion for one another.
And remember that the Buddha never talked about people deserving to suffer. He offered his teachings on how to stop suffering to all beings, no matter what their past kamma was.
He also pointed out that by changing the way you fabricate the present moment, making your attitudes more skillful, you can greatly weaken the results of past bad kamma. When your mind is well trained, it’s as if it’s rich and expansive. An untrained mind is narrow and poor. An analogy he gave was this: The results of past bad kamma are like the fine for stealing a goat. If a rich man steals a goat but then gets fined, he can easily pay the fine without feeling any hardship. If a poor man steals a goat, and he has nothing with which he can pay the fine, he gets thrown in jail.
The ways to make the mind rich are these: You train it in virtue, discernment, and the brahmavihāras. You also train the mind so that it’s not easily overcome by pleasure or pain. This last ability comes from practice in concentration. You train yourself to master the skills of breathing so that when there are pains in the body, you can use the breath either to dissolve the pains or to give you a place to stay in the body that’s not overcome by pain. When pleasure arises in the meditation, you allow it to spread through the body, but you don’t let your focus leave the breath to go wallowing in the pleasure, for that would destroy your concentration. When you can master these skills, you can deal with the results of past bad kamma without suffering from them.
So when you see someone who’s suffering, you don’t just tell yourself that they deserve to keep on suffering. Even if you can’t change their external circumstances, you should try to think of what ways they can make their thinking more skillful. In other words, your thought should be: “May this person learn to act in ways that don’t cause more suffering.” That’s the wise expression of compassion.
Otherwise, if you just leave people to their suffering, they’re not just sitting there, on the receiving end of suffering. They’re engaged in intentions and the processes of fabrication all the time. If they get overwhelmed by their suffering, they can easily start thinking and acting in ways that will cause more suffering. Either they thrash around and make their own suffering worse, or else they get irritable and strike out at the very people who are trying to help them. That’s the kind of thing you want to see stop.
So look to see how you might actually help that person learn to fabricate his or her experience in a skillful way. This is why the gift of Dhamma—explaining how to stop suffering—is the highest of gifts. It’s also why this gift is the best way to show compassion. You’re not trying to make people depend on you for their happiness. You’re training them in how to be independent in creating their own well-being. Remember the phrase in the brahmavihāra chant: “May they look after themselves with ease.” You’re teaching them the cooking skills they’ll need for the rest of their lives.
If people who are suffering can listen and comprehend what you’re saying, try to find the best advice for their particular suffering. If you can get them to meditate, so much the better. If not, try to get them to accept the fact that suffering is part of life—think of all the other people who are also suffering right now, and feel goodwill and compassion for them. This helps the person to realize that he or she is not being singled out by the universe to suffer, and that suffering is a universal part of the human condition. This helps the person to expand his or her thoughts, and this can lift the state of that person’s mind.
If the person is in really bad shape and can’t be taught, then try to create a peaceful atmosphere around the person as best you can, and speak in ways that are soothing and help to allay any anxiety the person might have.
As for empathetic joy, the teaching on kamma also applies. People are happy because of their actions, past and present. Either they did skillful things in the past, or they’re fabricating their experience in a skillful way right now, or both.
Now, there are a lot of people who managed to do something good in the past, and are now reaping the rewards of those good actions, but they get complacent, conceited, and careless, thinking that they’re better than other people or that the rules of good behavior don’t apply to them. Maybe they’ve seen that they can break the precepts, for instance, without suffering any immediate consequence. If they’re very good-looking, maybe they’ve learned that they can get away with things that ordinary-looking people can’t. From our point of view, that’s because their past good actions are still bearing fruit. But when they’re ignorant of right view, they don’t see that. The Pali Canon is full of examples like this, not only on the human realm, but also in the realms of the devas. And I’m sure that you can think of lots of examples from your own life.
So, just as compassion focuses on the wish that people who are suffering will learn how to behave in skillful ways, when you practice empathetic joy, you spread a similar wish to people who are enjoying good fortune: “May these people learn to act in ways that will create even more happiness.” In other words, may they learn to find joy in skillful actions, such as practicing generosity, being virtuous, and developing thoughts of goodwill for all.
So, both in the case of compassion and in the case of empathetic joy, the emphasis is on hoping that the people to whom you extend these attitudes will create good kamma in the present—kamma that reduces suffering and extends happiness.
It’s in this way that we can see how important it is to remember that pleasure and pain in the present moment are not just the products of past kamma. The actual fact of the matter is that present kamma is more important than past kamma in determining whether a person will experience pleasure or pain in any given situation.
A proper understanding of kamma is necessary because it helps to correct some erroneous ideas that people often have around compassion and empathetic joy. One is the erroneous idea that if people are suffering they deserve to suffer, so you might as well be equanimous and leave them alone. If you ever catch yourself thinking in those terms, remind yourself: When you look at people, you can’t see all the karmic seeds from their past actions. They may be experiencing the results of past bad actions, but you don’t know when those seeds will stop sprouting. Also, you have no idea what other seeds, what wonderful latent potentials, will sprout in their place.
There’s a saying in some Buddhist circles that if you want to see a person’s past actions, you look at his present condition; if you want to see his future condition, you look at his present actions. This principle, however, is based on a basic misperception: that we each have a single karmic account, and what we see in the present moment is the current running balance in each person’s account. Actually, no one’s karmic history is a single account. It’s composed of the many different seeds planted in many places through the many different actions we’ve done in the past, with each seed maturing at its own rate. Some of these seeds have already sprouted and disappeared; some are sprouting now; some will sprout in the future. This means that a person’s present condition reflects only a small portion of his or her past actions. As for the other seeds, you can’t see them at all.
This reflection helps you when developing compassion, because it reminds you that you never know when the possibility to help somebody can have an effect. The seeds of the other person’s past bad actions may be flowering right now but they could die at any moment. You may happen to be the person who’s there to help when that person is ready to receive help.
The same pattern applies to empathetic joy. Suppose that your neighbor is wealthier than you are. You may resist feeling empathetic joy for him because you think, “He’s already well-off, while I’m still struggling. Why should I wish him to be even happier than he is?” If you find yourself thinking in those terms, remind yourself that you don’t know what your karmic seeds are; you don’t know what his karmic seeds are. Maybe his good karmic seeds are about to die. Do you want them to die any faster? Does his happiness diminish yours? What kind of attitude is that?
When you really understand kamma, you realize that your own thoughts in the present moment are also a kind of kamma, so you want your attitudes in the present to be as skillful as possible. This includes the kamma you’re creating right now in reaction to other people’s pleasure and pain. If you’re hard-hearted toward somebody’s suffering, someday you may face the same sort of suffering. Would you want people to be hard-hearted toward you? Or if you’re resentful of somebody else’s happiness, someday when you become happy there’s going to be somebody resentful of yours. Is that what you want?
So be mindful to create the kind of kamma that gives the results you’d like to see. As I said, in the case of compassion, this means thinking, “May these people”—and this includes you—“learn to act in ways that don’t cause more suffering.” In the case of empathetic joy, the proper attitude is, “May these people”—and this includes you as well—“learn to act in ways that will create more happiness.”
Now, there are lots of rich, powerful, or beautiful people for whom that wish seems unrealistic, but you never know: Someday they may see the emptiness of simply enjoying their pleasures. Maybe they’ll see the dangers that come with wealth, power, and beauty. Wealthy and powerful people can never really trust people who try to befriend them. Beautiful people attract the attentions of people they wouldn’t want to attract.
So maybe people who are currently heedless about their good fortune will come to their senses and start looking for something with more meaning for their lives. Of course, this also means that we should come to our senses about good fortune and happiness, too.
With this thought, we come to look a little more deeply at the lessons to be learned from compassion and empathetic joy: further lessons related to kamma and rebirth. This is where we go beyond the brahmavihāras and begin to develop genuine wisdom and discernment related to the path to the end of suffering. As the Buddha said, the brahmavihāras on their own don’t lead to dispassion, so they’re not a complete practice. The discernment they require is simply the discernment on the level of mundane right view: the level of right view that leads to good rebirths. At best, they can take you to the Brahmā worlds, but no further.
But when you start reflecting on the nature of mundane happiness, and begin to see how empty and dangerous it is, your brahmavihāra practice provides a foundation for developing transcendent right view: the level of right view that leads to the safety of total freedom from suffering.
There’s a pair of suttas where the Buddha has you reflect that when you see someone who is suffering greatly, you should remind yourself that, over the long course of saṁsāra, you’ve been in that position, too. Conversely, when you see someone who is rich and powerful, you should remind yourself that you’ve been there as well.
These suttas teach many lessons. One is that if you see someone who’s suffering, you shouldn’t feel proud that you’re better off than they are. You’ve been in that position, too. When you can think in this way, you can keep your compassion from becoming condescending.
Similarly, when you see someone who’s rich, beautiful, and powerful, you shouldn’t resent, envy, or begrudge that person’s good fortune. You’ve been there, too. This way, you can learn to feel genuine empathy even for people whose station in life is much higher than yours. They’re human beings, too, just like you, and you shouldn’t let their good fortune blind you to the dangerous position they’re in. Just as you lost your power and wealth in the past, they’re going to lose theirs. Like you, they need to keep on developing the causes for further happiness
But these suttas also warn you against the dangers of staying on in saṁsāra. Even though, through the practice of generosity, virtue, and goodwill, you can return in a future lifetime to a position of power and influence, look at what happens to most people who have that good fortune: They abuse it. This is the nature of happiness in the world. It tends to contain the seeds of its own destruction. Even devas can be reborn in poor families who live on the side of the road. When you see people who are wealthy and complacent, you have to remind yourself: You’re not immune to that. If you became wealthy again, you could easily become complacent again, and create a lot of bad kamma through your complacency.
It’s as if saṁsāra were a sick joke: You work hard at the causes of goodness, but then when you get the results of goodness, they destroy your goodness.
When you think in these ways, it makes you more inclined to want to gain release from saṁsāra entirely.
And that’s precisely the lesson you should draw when you’re really discerning in your practice of compassion and empathetic joy.
So far, we’ve been talking about empathetic joy for people who are enjoying worldly happiness. But it’s also important to develop empathetic joy for people who are experiencing happiness in the Dhamma.
Think of the story of Aṅgulimāla. He was a bandit chief who had killed many, many people. But the Buddha saw that he had some good potential buried deep inside him. So he used his psychic powers to impress Aṅgulimāla. Aṅgulimāla threw down his weapons and ordained as a monk. The king decided not to punish Aṅgulimāla, and to let him stay on as a monk. Later, Aṅgulimāla became an arahant.
When we hear this story, it encourages us: If a criminal could become awakened, then maybe we can, too. But there were many people at the time who were not encouraged, and instead were upset: They may have been relatives of the people who Aṅgulimāla had killed. It didn’t seem right to them that he was getting away with murder. So when he went on his alms round, they would throw stones and other things at him: breaking open his head, breaking his alms bowl, tearing his robe. The Buddha reminded Aṅgulimāla to bear with the pain. It was a lot less than the pain he would have suffered in hell if he hadn’t become awakened.
This story teaches us several things. One is: Never be envious of people whose meditation is going better than yours. When, during the Q & A, someone talks about getting the mind into deep states of rapture and stillness, don’t resent them. Be happy for them. After all, when you finally get to experience rapture and stillness in your meditation, don’t you want other people to be happy for you?
A second point: Don’t let your ideas of justice and rightness get in the way of your compassion and empathetic joy. Don’t be like the people who threw things at Aṅgulimāla after he became an arahant and so heaped up bad kamma for themselves.
Our Western ideas of justice depend on the idea that we can know the beginning point of any story, and from there we can determine—if wrong has been done—who was the first to do it, or whose response was excessive. But given the long, long nature of saṁsāra, we can never know the beginning point of any story. And remember, the Buddha’s teachings are not intended to see that justice is done. They’re intended to put an end to suffering. So when you see people who are suffering, extend compassion to them, without thinking about whether they deserve to suffer or not. When you see people who are experiencing good fortune, extend empathetic joy to them, without thinking about whether they deserve to be happy or not.
Then reflect on your own suffering and happiness: Don’t think about whether you deserve to be happy. The way to put an end to suffering is open to all. Do what you can to create the causes, not only for happiness in this life, but also for a happiness that’s solid and sure: the happiness of awakening. That’s when you have real compassion and empathetic joy for yourself. And that’s not a selfish thing.
