Altruism is like rings in the water when you toss a pebble. At first the circles are very small, then they get larger, and finally they embrace the entire surface of the ocean.
—ALEXANDRE JOLLIEN1
For most of us, it is natural to feel benevolently inclined toward someone dear to us, or to anyone who is well-intentioned toward us. It seems a priori more difficult to extend that benevolence to many individuals, especially to those who treat us badly. But we have the ability, through reasoning and through mental training, to include them in the sphere of altruism by realizing that kindness and compassion are not simply “rewards” given for good behavior, but that their essential aim is to promote the happiness of beings and to remedy their suffering. I will discuss the methods suggested by Buddhism to this end. In doing this, my aim is not to urge the reader to adopt this spiritual way, but to emphasize the universal value of certain points emerging from the philosophy and practice of Buddhism. These qualities are part of what the Dalai Lama calls the promotion of human values or secular ethics, an ethics that is not opposed, in principle, to religions, yet depends on none of them.2
Altruism and compassion have the aim of spreading themselves as widely as possible. We must simply understand that our own well-being and the world’s cannot rest on indifference to the happiness of the other or on a refusal to care about the sufferings around us.
Buddhism defines altruistic love as “the wish that all beings find happiness and the causes of happiness.” By “happiness,” Buddhism means not just a temporary state of well-being or a pleasant sensation, but rather a way of being based on an array of qualities that include altruism, inner freedom, and inner strength, as well as an accurate view of reality.3 By “causes of happiness,” Buddhism is referring not merely to the immediate triggers of happiness, but to its profound roots, namely the pursuit of wisdom and a more accurate understanding of reality.
This altruistic wish is accompanied by a steady readiness and availability to others allied with the determination to do everything in our power to help each individual being to attain authentic happiness. On this point, Buddhism joins Aristotle, who wrote: “We may describe friendly feeling toward any one as wishing for him what you believe to be good things, not for your own sake but for his, and being inclined, so far as you can, to bring these things about.”4
It is not a question here of a simple dogmatic assertion that “suffering is evil”; it is taking into consideration the desire of every sentient being to escape suffering. A purely normative attitude, the aim of which would be to bring an end to suffering as an abstract entity, might involve a risk that one might be less attentive to the beings themselves and to their specific sufferings. That is why the Dalai Lama gives this advice: “We must use a real individual as the focus of our meditation, and then enhance our compassion and loving-kindness toward that person so that we can really experience compassion and loving-kindness toward others. We work on one person at a time. Otherwise, we might end up meditating on compassion for all in a very general sense, with no specific focus or power to our meditation.”5 What’s more, history has shown us that when one defines good and evil in a dogmatic way, all kinds of distortions become possible, from the Inquisition to totalitarian dictatorships. As my father, Jean-François Revel, often said: “Totalitarian regimes proclaim: ‘We know how to make you happy. You just have to follow our rules. However, if you disobey, we will regretfully have to eliminate you.’ ”6
Altruistic love is characterized by unconditional kindness toward all beings and is apt to be expressed at any time in favor of every being in particular. It permeates the mind and is expressed appropriately, according to the circumstances, to answer the needs of all.
Compassion is the form that altruistic love takes when it is confronted with others’ sufferings. Buddhism defines it as “the wish that all beings be freed from suffering and the causes of suffering” or, as the Buddhist teacher Bhante Henepola Gunaratana poetically writes: “Compassion is a melting of the heart at the thought of another’s suffering.”7 This aspiration should be followed by putting every method possible into action to remedy his torments.
Here again, the “causes of suffering” include not only the immediate and visible causes of suffering, but also the deep-seated causes of suffering, chief of which is ignorance. Ignorance here is understood as a mistaken understanding of reality leading us to have disturbing mental states like hatred and compulsive desire and to act under their influence. This kind of ignorance leads us to perpetuate the cycle of suffering and to turn our backs to lasting well-being.
Loving-kindness and compassion are the two faces of altruism. It is their object that distinguishes them: loving-kindness wants all beings to experience happiness, while compassion focuses on eradicating their suffering. Both should last as long as there are beings and as long as they are suffering.
We define empathy here as the ability to enter into affective resonance with the other’s feelings and to become cognitively aware of his situation. Empathy alerts us in particular to the nature and intensity of the sufferings experienced by the other. One could say that it catalyzes the transformation of altruistic love into compassion.
Altruism should be enlightened by lucidity and wisdom. It is not a question of inconsiderately gaining access to all the desires and whims of others. True love consists in combining unlimited benevolence with flawless discernment. Love thus defined should involve taking into account the full picture of each situation and asking oneself: “What will be the short- and long-term benefits and drawbacks of what I am about to do? Will my action affect a smaller or larger number of individuals?” Transcending all partiality, altruistic love should lucidly consider the best way to carry out the good of others. Impartiality demands that you not favor someone simply because you feel more sympathy for him than for some other person who is also in need, if not more so. How can we reconcile this unconditional and impartial love with the fact that we naturally have preferential relationships with certain people and that we are programmed genetically to show particular care for our kin and our friends? We may take the image of the sun. It shines over all people equally, with the same brightness and the same warmth in every direction. Yet, there are people who, for various reasons, are closer to it and receive more heat, but that privileged situation does not entail exclusion. It seems therefore possible to develop the kind of goodness that embraces all living beings while caring the best we can for those who fall within the sphere of our responsibilities.
To altruistic love and compassion, Buddhism adds joy when perceiving the happiness and good qualities of others as well as impartiality.
Rejoicing consists in feeling from the bottom of your heart a sincere joy at the accomplishments and qualities of others, toward those who work for the good of others, whose beneficial projects are crowned with success, those who have realized their aspirations at the cost of persistent efforts, and also those who possess multiple talents. This joy, appreciation, and celebration are accompanied by the wish that their happiness and qualities never diminish, but persist and increase. This ability to be pleased about the qualities of others also serves as an antidote to competitiveness, envy, and jealousy, all of which reflect an inability to rejoice in the happiness of others. Rejoicing also constitutes a remedy to a somber, despairing view of the world and humanity.
Impartiality is an essential component of altruism—the desire that beings find happiness and be free from suffering should not depend either on our personal attachments or on the way others treat us or behave toward us. Impartiality adopts the attitude of a kind, dedicated physician who rejoices when others are in good health and concerns himself with curing all sick people, whoever they are.
Altruism can be influenced by sentimentality and lead to attitudes of partiality. If, during a trip to a poor country, I meet a group of children and one of them seems nicer to me than the others, granting him any special treatment stems from a benevolent intention, but also testifies to a lack of fairness and perspicacity. It is possible that the other children present are more in need of my aid.
Similarly, if one is concerned about the fate of certain animals simply because they are “cute,” and if one remains indifferent to the suffering of those that are considered “ugly,” this is just a pretense of altruism, induced by prejudices and emotional preferences. Hence the importance of the notion of impartiality. According to Buddhism, altruism should be extended to all sentient beings, whatever their appearance, behavior, and degree of closeness to us.
Like the sun that shines equally over both the “good” and the “bad,” over a magnificent landscape as well as over a pile of trash, impartiality extends to all beings without distinction. When compassion thus conceived is directed at a person who is causing great harm to others, it does not consist of tolerating, or encouraging by inaction, his hatred and his harmful actions, but in regarding that person as gravely ill or stricken with madness, and wishing that he be freed from the ignorance and hostility that are in him. This does not mean that one will consider anyone who does not share one’s moral principles or deeply disagrees with them, as being ill. It refers to people whose views lead them to seriously harm others. In other words, it is not a matter of contemplating harmful actions with equanimity, even indifference, but of understanding that it is possible to eradicate their causes the way one can eliminate the causes of an illness.
The universal, impartial nature of extended altruism certainly does not create a diluted, abstract feeling, disconnected from beings and from reality. It does not prevent us from lucidly evaluating context and circumstances. Instead of being diluted by the multitude and diversity of beings, extended altruism is reinforced by their number and by the variety of their particular needs. It is applied pragmatically to every being who presents himself or herself in the field of our attention.
What’s more, it does not require that we achieve immediate success. No one can expect all beings to stop suffering overnight, as if by a miracle. The immensity of the task should be matched by the magnitude of one’s courage. Shantideva, a seventh-century Indian Buddhist master, says:
As long as space endures,
And as long as sentient beings exist,
May I, too, remain
To dispel the misery of the world.
One of the important aspects of altruistic love is courage. A true altruist is ready to move unhesitatingly and fearlessly toward others. Feelings of insecurity and fear are major obstacles to altruism. If we are affected by the slightest vexation, rebuff, criticism, or insult, we find ourselves weakened by it and think above all of protecting ourselves. The feeling of insecurity leads us to close in on ourselves and to keep our distance from others. To become more altruistic, we have to develop an inner strength that makes us confident in our inner resources that let us face the constantly changing circumstances of existence. Fortified with this confidence, we are ready to open ourselves up to others and to display altruism. That is why Buddhism talks about “courageous compassion.” Gandhi too said: “Love fears nothing and no one. It cuts through fear at its very root.”
The more concerned one is by the fate of someone experiencing difficulties, the more the motivation to relieve his suffering is reinforced. But it is important to identify clearly and correctly the needs of the other and to understand what is truly necessary in order to be able to provide for his various degrees of well-being.8 According to Buddhism, the ultimate need of every living being is to be free of suffering in all its forms, including those that are not immediately visible and that stem from ignorance.
Recognizing the fact that this need is shared by all beings lets us extend altruism to both friends and enemies, to those close to us as well as to strangers, to human beings as well as to all other sentient beings. In the case of an enemy, for example, the need one takes into account is certainly not the accomplishment of his malevolent aims, but the necessity of uprooting the causes that engendered these aims.
The Dalai Lama distinguishes two types of altruistic love: the first manifests spontaneously because of the biological dispositions that we have inherited from evolution. It reflects our instinct to take care of our children, those close to us, and more generally whoever treats us with kindness.
This natural altruism is innate and requires no training. Its most powerful form is parental love. Still, it remains limited and partial, for it usually depends on our links of parentage or the way we perceive others, favorably or unfavorably, as well as the way they treat us.
Solicitude toward a child, an elderly person, or a sick person is often born from our perception of their vulnerability and their need for protection. We indeed have the ability to be moved by the fate of children other than our own and people other than those close to us, but natural altruism is not easily extended to strangers, and even less so to our enemies. It is also fickle since it can disappear when a friend or a parent who until then had been well-disposed toward us changes their attitude and suddenly treats us with indifference, or even hostility.
Extended altruism, however, is impartial. In most people, it is not spontaneous and must be cultivated. “The social instinct, together with sympathy, is, like any other instinct, greatly strengthened by habit,”9 wrote Darwin. Whatever our point of departure, we all have the possibility of cultivating altruism and transcending the limits that restrict it to the circle of those close to us.
Instinctive altruism, acquired in the course of our evolution, especially the mother’s for her child, can serve as a basis for more extended altruism, even if that was not its initial function. This idea has been defended by a number of psychologists, like William McDougall, Daniel Batson, and Paul Ekman, and supported by some philosophers, including Elliott Sober and the evolutionary specialist David Sloan Wilson.10
This extension has two main stages: on one hand, one perceives the needs of a larger number of beings, especially those we had regarded till then as strangers or enemies. On the other hand, one learns to value a vaster totality of sentient beings, beyond the circle of those close to us, our social, ethnic, religious, or national groups, and even extends beyond the human species.11
It is interesting to note that Darwin not only envisaged this expansion, but also deemed it necessary, writing of “sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.”12
This approach begins with the following realization: If I look deep inside myself, I want not to suffer. I do not wake up in the morning thinking: “May I suffer all day and, if possible, all my life.” When I have recognized this aspiration not to suffer within myself, what happens if I mentally project myself into the awareness of another being? Like me, he is perhaps under the sway of all kinds of torments and great mental confusion, but, like me, wouldn’t he too prefer, if possible, not to suffer? He shares my desire to escape suffering, and this wish is worthy of respect.
Unfortunately there are people who, lacking the conditions that would have allowed them to do well, turn to harming themselves willfully, self-mutilation, or acts of despair, going as far as suicide.13 Lack of love, of meaning, of confidence in oneself, and the absence of a clear direction in their lives weigh so heavily that it sometimes leads them to self-destruction. These extreme actions are a cry of despair, a call for help, a way of self-expression for those who do not know how to find happiness, or who have been prevented from doing so by the brutality of external conditions.
Being moved by others’ suffering, feeling suffering oneself because they are suffering, being happy when they are happy and sad when they are afflicted—all these stem from emotional resonance.
On the other hand, discerning the immediate or long-lasting, superficial or profound, causes of others’ suffering and giving rise to the determination to alleviate them stem from wisdom and “cognitive” compassion. The latter is linked to the comprehension of the causes of suffering at various levels. For that reason, its dimension is vaster and its effects more extensive. These two aspects of altruism, affective and cognitive, are complementary and do not comprise two separate, airtight mental attitudes. In some people, at first altruism takes the form of an emotional experience that can subsequently transform into cognitive altruism when the person begins to analyze the causes of suffering. Altruism, however, remains limited if it is confined solely to its emotional component.
In fact, according to Buddhism, the fundamental cause of suffering is ignorance, the mental confusion that deforms reality and gives rise to an array of mental obscurations such as hatred, compulsive desire, jealousy, and pride. If we are solely interested in the secondary causes of suffering, that is in its visible manifestations, we will never be able to alleviate them completely. If a ship gets damaged, it is not enough to summon all hands to pump water out of the hold. It is absolutely necessary to plug the gap through which the water is rushing.
In order to extend altruism, it is therefore necessary to become aware of the various degrees of suffering. When the Buddha spoke of “identifying suffering,” he was not referring to the obvious sufferings of which we are so often witnesses or victims: illnesses, wars, famines, injustice, or the loss of someone dear to us. These sufferings, the ones that touch us directly (our relatives, ourselves) and indirectly (via the media or experiences we have lived through) and the sufferings stemming from socioeconomic injustice, discrimination, and war, are obvious to everyone. It is the latent causes of suffering that the Buddha wanted to bring to light, causes that might not manifest immediately in the form of difficult experiences, but that still constitute a constant source of suffering.
In fact, many of our sufferings are rooted in hatred, greed, selfishness, pride, jealousy, and other mental states that Buddhism groups under the term “mental poisons” because they literally poison our and others’ existences. According to the Buddha, the origin of these mental obscurations is ignorance. This ignorance does not stem from a simple lack of information, such as not knowing the names of all the trees in a forest, but from a distorted vision of reality and from a misunderstanding of the first causes of suffering. As the contemporary Tibetan master Chögyam Trungpa explains: “When we talk of ignorance, it has nothing to do with stupidity. In a way, ignorance is very intelligent, but it is an intelligence that works exclusively in one direction. That is, we react exclusively to our own projections instead of simply seeing what is there.”14
This fundamental ignorance is linked to a lack of comprehension of reality, that is, the true nature of things, free of the mental fabrications we superimpose upon it. These fabrications hollow out a gap between the way things appear to us and the way they are: we take as permanent what is ephemeral and as happiness what is usually a source of suffering—thirst for wealth, power, fame, and fleeting pleasures.
We perceive the external world as a totality of autonomous entities to which we attribute characteristics that seem to us to belong to them by their nature. Things appear to us as intrinsically “pleasant” or “unpleasant” and we rigidly divide people into “good” or “bad,” “friends” or “enemies,” as if these were characteristics inherent to people. The “self,” or the ego that perceives them, seems to us equally as real and concrete. This mistake gives rise to powerful reflexes of attachment and aversion and, as long as our mind remains obscured by this lack of discernment, it will fall under the sway of hatred, attachment, greed, jealousy, or pride, and suffering will always be ready to appear.
If we refer to Daniel Batson’s definition of altruism as a mental state linked to the perception of a particular need in the other, the ultimate need defined by Buddhism consists of dissipating the mistaken view of reality. It is in no way a question of imposing a particular dogmatic view of what is, but of providing the knowledge and the tools necessary to be able, through rigorous investigation, to bridge the gap that separates our perception of things from their true nature. This attitude consists, for example, of not taking as permanent what is by nature changeable, of not perceiving independent entities in what are only interdependent relationships, and in not imagining a unitary, autonomous, and constant “self” in what is nothing but an endlessly changing stream of experiences dependent on countless causes and conditions.
This attitude does not satisfy solely an intellectual curiosity; its aim is essentially therapeutic. Understanding interdependence notably allows us to destroy the illusory wall that our minds have raised between self and other. This makes obvious the mistaken foundations of pride, jealousy, and malevolence. Since all beings are interdependent, their happiness and their suffering concern us intimately. To want to build our happiness on others’ suffering is not only immoral, but unrealistic. Universal love and compassion are the direct consequences of a correct understanding of this interdependence.
So it is not necessary to feel emotionally the state of mind of others in order to nurture an altruistic attitude. On the other hand, it is indispensable to be aware of their desire to escape suffering, to learn to value it, and to be deeply concerned to carry out their profound aspirations. The more altruistic love and compassion are cognitive, the more amplitude they give to altruism, and the less they are affected by emotional obscurations like the empathic distress aroused by seeing others’ suffering. Instead of giving rise to benevolence, this perception of pain might lead one to retreat into oneself, or else might favor the development of a sentimentality that risks making altruism deviate into favoritism.
The practice of altruistic love and compassion does not have the aim of rewarding good conduct, and its absence is not a penalty for punishing bad behavior. Altruism and compassion are not based on moral judgments, even if they certainly do not exclude those judgments. As French philosopher André Comte-Sponville writes, “We only need morality if we lack love.” Compassion in particular has the aim of eliminating all individual sufferings, whatever they may be, wherever they are, and whatever the causes might be. Considered in this way, altruism and compassion can be impartial and limitless.
“One grows out of pity when it’s useless,”18 wrote Albert Camus. Powerless and distant pity becomes compassion, that is, an intense desire to free others from suffering, when one becomes aware of the possibility of eliminating this suffering and when one recognizes the ways to accomplish this aim. These various stages correspond to the Four Noble Truths stated by the Buddha during his first teaching, at the Deer Park in Sarnath, near Varanasi. The first Noble Truth is the truth of suffering which must be recognized for what it is, in all its forms, visible and subtle. The second is the truth of the causes of suffering, ignorance, which leads to anger, greed and many other mental obscurations. Since these mental poisons have causes that can be eliminated, the cessation of suffering—the third Noble Truth—is thus possible. The fourth Noble Truth is that of the path that transforms this possibility into a reality. This path is the process that puts into play all the methods allowing us to eliminate the fundamental causes of suffering.
Since ignorance is finally nothing more than an error, a distortion of reality, it is always possible to dissipate it. Mistaking a piece of rope for a snake in the twilight can give rise to fear, but as soon as you shed light on the rope and recognize its true nature, this fear has no reason to exist. Ignorance, then, is an adventitious phenomenon that does not affect the ultimate nature of things: it simply hides it from our comprehension. That is why knowledge is liberating. As we can read in the Ornament of Sutras: “Liberation is the exhaustion of delusion.”
If suffering were a fate linked to the human condition, worrying endlessly about it would only add uselessly to our torment. As the Dalai Lama said playfully: “If there is no remedy for suffering, think about it as little as possible, go to the beach and have a nice beer.” On the other hand, if the causes of our sufferings can be eliminated, it would be regrettable to ignore that possibility. As the Seventh Dalai Lama wrote in the eighteenth century:
If there is a way to free ourselves from suffering
We must use every moment to find it.
Only a fool wants to go on suffering.
Isn’t it sad to knowingly imbibe poison?19
Realization of the possibility of freeing oneself from suffering gives compassion an entirely different dimension that differentiates it from impotent pity. In a teaching given in Paris in 2003, the Dalai Lama gave the following example:
Imagine that from the cockpit of a small private plane flying at low altitude, you see a survivor from a shipwreck swimming in the middle of the Pacific Ocean: it is impossible for you to help him and there is no one nearby whom you could alert. If you think: “How sad!”, your pity is characterized by a feeling of powerlessness.
If, then, you see a small island that the survivor cannot see because of fog, but that he could reach if he swam in the right direction, your pity would transform into compassion: aware of the possibility of the unfortunate person surviving, you wish from the bottom of your heart that he will see this nearby island, and you will try by any means possible to point it out to him.
Authentic altruism rests, then, on understanding the various causes of suffering and on the conviction that everyone has the necessary potential to free oneself from it. Since it relies more on discernment than on the emotions, it does not necessarily show itself in a wise person by the intense emotions that usually accompany the expression of affective empathy. Further, it has the characteristic of being free from egocentric attachments based on concepts of subject and object regarded as autonomous entities. Finally, such altruism applies impartially to all beings.
Because of this, on the path of Buddhism, altruistic love and compassion lead to the unwavering determination to attain Enlightenment (the understanding of ultimate reality associated with freedom from ignorance and the mental afflictions) for the good of others. This courageous resolution, called bodhicitta, has two aims: Enlightenment and the good of others. One frees oneself of delusion in order to become capable of freeing others from the causes of suffering.
This view of things also leads to envisaging the possibility of cultivating altruism. We do have the ability to grow acquainted with new ways of thinking and with qualities already present in us in an embryonic state; we can only develop them through training. Contemplating the benefits of altruism encourages us to take this path. What’s more, understanding better the mechanisms of such a training allows us to realize more completely the potential for change that we have within ourselves.