According to the Buddhist way, as in many other spiritual traditions, working for the benefit of others is not only the most desirable of activities, but also the best way to serve indirectly our own benefit. The pursuit of a selfish happiness is doomed to failure, whereas accomplishing the good of others constitutes one of the main factors for fulfillment and, ultimately, progress toward Enlightenment.
The ideal of Buddhism is bodhicitta: “the aspiration to attain Enlightenment for the benefit of all beings.” Moreover, this aspiration is the only way to attain happiness for oneself, as Shantideva, a seventh-century Indian Buddhist master, writes in his work, The Path Towards Awakening:
All the joy the world contains
Has come through wishing happiness for others.
All the misery the world contains
Has come through wanting pleasure for oneself.
Is there need for lengthy explanation?
Childish beings look out for themselves;
Buddhas labor for the good of others:
See the difference that divides them!1
This point of view is not foreign to Western thought. The philosopher Bishop Joseph Butler, one of the first to refute the theories of Thomas Hobbes on the universality of selfishness, wrote:
Thus, it appears, that private interest is so far from being likely to be promoted in proportion to the degree in which self-love engrosses us, and prevails over all other principles, that the contracted affection may be so prevalent, as to disappoint itself, and even contradict its own end, private good.2
In Émile: Or on Education, Jean-Jacques Rousseau distinguishes self-love—the fact of feeling contentment when our aspirations are satisfied—which is entirely compatible with benevolence for others, from selfish conceit, which causes us systematically to place our own interests above others’, and demands that the entire world take our desires into consideration.
Still, the accomplishment of the benefit of others does not involve sacrificing our own happiness—quite the contrary. To remedy others’ sufferings, we can choose to pay with our own person, give up some of our possessions or comfort. In fact, if we are moved by a sincere, determined altruistic motivation, we will experience this action as a success and not a failure, a gain and not a loss, joy and not mortification. Abnegation called “sacrificial” and, under that description, decried by partisans of egocentrism,3 is a sacrifice only for the egoist. For the altruist, it becomes a source of fulfillment. The quality of our life does not seem to be diminished, but rather increased. “Love is the only thing that doubles every time it’s given,” said Albert Schweitzer. So we can no longer talk of sacrifice since, subjectively, the accomplished action, far from having been felt as a suffering or a loss, has on the contrary brought us the satisfaction of having acted in a correct, desirable, and necessary way.
When we speak of the “cost” of an altruistic action, or of sacrifices made for others, it is often a matter of external sacrifices—our own physical comfort, our financial resources, our time, etc. But this external cost does not correspond to an internal cost. Even if we have devoted time and resources to the accomplishment of the good of others, if this act is experienced as an inner gain, the very notion of cost evaporates.
What’s more, if we recognize the value of the common wish of all sentient beings to avoid suffering, it will seem reasonable and desirable to us to accept certain difficulties in order to ensure great benefits for them. From this point of view, if an altruistic action indirectly does us good, so much the better; if it does us neither good nor bad, it doesn’t matter; and if it requires certain sacrifices that are meaningful, it is worth the trouble, since our sense of fulfillment becomes deeper.
Everything is a question of proportion and common sense: if the diminution of suffering is the main criterion, it would be foolish to sacrifice our lasting well-being so that the other can enjoy a minor advantage. It would be absurd to risk our lives to fish out a ring that someone else dropped in the water, or to spend a large amount of money to give a crate of vodka to a sick drunkard. On the other hand, it would be highly desirable to save the life of a person if she had fallen in the water with her ring on her finger, and to use our money to help the drunkard escape the alcoholism that is killing him.
A disinterested action is no less so when one is satisfied with carrying it out. One can draw satisfaction from an altruistic gesture without this satisfaction having motivated our action. Moreover, the individual who carries out an altruistic action for purely selfish reasons risks being disappointed when he does not obtain the expected effect. The reason is simple: only a benevolent action stemming from an equally benevolent motivation can give rise to true satisfaction. Altruism thus appears to involve a synergy between the accomplishment of both the good of others and one’s own. In order for this synergy to bear fruit, the altruistic act must be done primarily for the sake of another. Yet the mere knowledge that such an act is likely to yield one’s own fulfillment as well does not tarnish its altruistic nature, provided one does not crave that outcome.
When a farmer cultivates his field and plants wheat, it is with an aim to harvest enough wheat to feed his family. At the same time, the stalks of wheat provide him with straw. But no one would argue that the farmer devoted a year of labor to the sole aim of amassing straw.
John Dunne, professor in the religion department at Emory University in the United States, speaks jestingly of “Buddhist economics” to designate the way Buddhists perceive real profits and losses. Thus, if I emerge a winner from a financial conflict, I am richer externally, but I pay the inner price of the hostility that disturbs my mind, leaving a residue of resentment. So I have gotten poorer internally. On the other hand, if I carry out a disinterested act of generosity, I am poorer externally, but richer internally in terms of well-being. The material “cost” that can be recorded as an external “loss” turns out to be an internal “gain.” In fact, from the point of the view of “psychological economics,” everyone wins: the one who gives with generosity and the one who receives with gratitude.
According to the great Tibetan master Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, the true altruist is one who “never hopes for a reward. He responds to the needs of others out of his natural compassion. Cause and effect are unfailing, so his actions to benefit others are sure to bear fruit—but he never counts on it. He certainly never thinks that people are not showing enough gratitude, or that they ought to treat him better. But if someone who has done him harm later changes his behavior, that is something that will make him rejoice wholeheartedly and be totally satisfied.”4
This concept of an internal economics is related to the often misunderstood notion of “merit.” In Buddhism, merit is not an accumulation of “good points” for good behavior, but positive energy that allows us to do others the greatest good while being content oneself. In this sense, merit is like a farm of which one has taken great care and which provides an abundant harvest, capable of satisfying everyone.
Seeking selfish happiness seems doomed to failure for several reasons. First of all, from the point of view of personal experience, selfishness, born from an exaggerated sense of self-importance, turns out to be a constant source of torment. Egocentrism and excessive self-cherishing multiply our hopes and fears and makes us brood on what might affect us. Obsession with “me,” with the ego, leads us to magnify the impact on our well-being of the slightest event, and to look at the world in a distorted mirror. We project onto our surroundings judgments and values fabricated by our mental confusion. These constant projections make us not only miserable, but also vulnerable to external perturbations and to our own habitual thoughts, which lead to feelings of permanent malaise.
In the bubble of the ego, the slightest annoyance becomes overblown. The narrowness of our inner world means that by constantly bumping up against the walls of this bubble, our states of mind and emotions are magnified in a disproportionate and overwhelming way. The slightest cheerfulness becomes euphoria, success feeds vanity, affection freezes into attachment, failure plunges us into depression, displeasure irritates us and makes us aggressive. We lack the inner resources necessary to manage the highs and lows of existence in a healthy way. This world of the ego is like a little glass of water: a few pinches of salt are enough to make it undrinkable. On the other hand, one who has burst the bubble of the ego is like a great lake: a handful of salt does not change its flavor in the least. Essentially, selfishness makes everyone lose: it makes us unhappy and we, in turn, pass that unhappiness on to those around us.
The second reason stems from the fact that selfishness is at odds with reality. It rests on an erroneous postulate according to which individuals are isolated entities, independent of each other. The selfish person hopes to construct his personal happiness in the bubble of his ego. He says to himself basically, “It’s up to each of us to construct our own happiness. I’ll take care of mine, you take care of yours. I have nothing against your happiness, but it’s not my business.” The problem is that reality is quite otherwise: we are not autonomous entities and our happiness can only be constructed with the help of others. Even if we feel as if we are the center of the world, that world remains the world of other people.
So selfishness cannot be regarded as an effective way to love oneself, since it is the prime cause of our frustrations and unhappiness. It constitutes a particularly clumsy attempt to secure one’s own happiness. The psychologist Erich Fromm, in line with Buddhist thinking, sheds light on selfish behavior in this way: “The love of my own self is inseparably connected with the love of any other self. Selfishness and self-love, far from being identical, are actually opposites. The selfish person does not love himself too much but too little; in fact he hates himself.”5 The selfish person is someone who does nothing sensible to be happy. He hates himself because, without realizing it, he does everything possible to make himself unhappy, and this permanent failure provokes an internal frustration and rage that he turns against himself and against the outer world.
If egocentrism is a constant source of torment, it is quite otherwise for altruism and compassion. On the level of lived experience, altruistic love is accompanied by a profound feeling of fullness and, as we will see, it is also the state of mind that activates the most brain areas linked to positive emotions. One could say that altruistic love is the most positive of all the positive emotions.
What’s more, altruism is in harmony with the reality of what we are and what surrounds us, the fact that everything is basically interdependent. Common perception of our daily life can lead us to believe that things have an objective and independent reality, but, in fact, they exist only in dependence on other things.
Understanding this universal interdependence is the very source of the deepest altruism. By understanding how much our physical existence, our survival, our comfort, our health, and so on, all depend on others and on what the external world provides us—remedies, food, and the like—it grows easier to put ourselves in the place of others, to wish for their happiness, to respect their aspirations, and to feel closely concerned with the accomplishment of these aspirations.
The superiority of altruism over selfishness does not rest only on moral values, then, but also on common sense and on a clear perception of reality.
Just as warmth inevitably occurs when one lights a fire, true altruism goes naturally hand-in-hand with profound personal satisfaction. When we accomplish a benevolent action—by allowing, for example, someone to regain health or freedom, or else to escape death—don’t we feel as if we are in harmony with our deepest nature? Wouldn’t we wish to experience such a disposition of mind more often, a disposition which makes the illusory barriers invented by egocentrism between the “self” and the world disappear, even for an instant, and which makes us feel at one with nature, a feeling that reflects the essential interdependence of all beings?
On the other hand, when we get hold of ourselves after having been temporarily overwhelmed by a feeling of violent anger, don’t we often say to ourselves: “I was beside myself,” or: “I wasn’t really myself”? Harmful mental states always tend to distance us a little more from that feeling of harmony with oneself that the French philosopher Michel Terestchenko calls “fidelity to self.” He suggests we substitute a concept of altruism envisaged as “giving up, abolition, dispossession of self, a sacrificial disinterestedness that abandons itself to a radical alterity (god, moral law, or the other),” with the notion of a “benevolent relationship with the other that results from presence to self, fidelity to self, from the obligation, experienced deep within oneself, to make one’s actions agree with one’s convictions (philosophical, ethical, or religious) and at the same time with one’s feelings (empathy or compassion), and sometimes even, more simply, to act in agreement with one’s self-image, independently of any regard or judgment of the other, indifferent to any social desire for recognition.”6
The nature of the relationship between kindness and happiness becomes clear. Each engenders and reinforces the other; they stem from a feeling of harmony with ourselves. Plato said, “The happiest man is he who has no trace of malice in his soul.”7
Altruism, kindness, and happiness also make sense from the point of view of the evolution of the social animals we are. Love, affection, and concern for others are, in the long run, essential to our survival. The newborn baby would not survive more than a few hours without the tenderness of its mother; an invalid old man would quickly die without the care of those around him. We need to receive love in order to be able to know how to give it.