All of us, to varying degrees, have experienced profoundly altruistic love for someone dear to us, or intense compassion for someone suffering. Some of us are naturally more altruistic than others, sometimes to the point of heroism. Others are more focused on themselves, and find it hard to regard the benefit of others as an essential aim, and even harder to make it a higher priority than their own personal interest.
Generally, even if altruistic thoughts pass through our minds, they are fluctuating and soon replaced by other thoughts. If we truly want to integrate altruism and compassion into our mindstream, we have to cultivate these qualities over long periods of time, anchor them in our minds, maintain them, and reinforce them until they become a lasting part of our mental landscape.
Meditating is familiarizing ourselves with a new way of being and also cultivating qualities that otherwise remain latent if one makes no effort to develop them. Meditation is a practice that allows us to cultivate these qualities in the same way as other forms of training such as learning to read, to play a musical instrument, or to acquire any other ability for which we have aptitude.1 Finally, it brings about a transformation of the way we regard others and the world around us.2 If, for example, we perceive the world as a hostile, alien place like an enemy always ready to take advantage of us, our relationship with others will be marked by fear and mistrust. If we regard others as essential like us in their desire to be happy and not suffer, we will approach our daily lives with greater compassion.
The everyday circumstances of life are not always favorable for meditation. That is why it is necessary, in the beginning, to begin to meditate in a quiet place, and to arrange things so that the time we reserve for meditation, even if it is short, is not interrupted by other occupations.
When we begin to meditate, as for any other activity we undertake, it is essential to check our motivation. It is this motivation—altruistic or selfish, vast or limited—that gives a good or bad direction to our meditation and to all our actions.
In order to cultivate altruistic love and compassion, the mind should be ready, clear, and focused. To that end, we can improve our power of concentration by using a simple support that is always available: the in-and-out of our own breath.
Breathe calmly and naturally. Concentrate all your attention on the movements of the breath. Observe the sensation created by the passage of air through the nostrils when you breathe in and out. Maintain this concentration breath after breath, without tension, but also without relaxing to the point of falling into somnolence.
When you notice that you have been distracted, simply go back to observing the breath. Don’t try to block the arising of thoughts; simply avoid feeding them; let them pass through the field of your awareness the way a bird passes through the sky without leaving a trace.
All training involves effort, and all change encounters resistance. Therefore, we have to learn to overcome obstacles to meditation, including mental agitation and its opposites, laxity and lethargy, as well as lack of perseverance.
It is better to meditate regularly for multiple short periods of time than to engage from time to time in long sessions. We can, for example, devote twenty minutes a day to meditation, and profit from pauses in our daily activities to revive, even if only for a few minutes, the experience we acquired during formal practice.
To meditate on altruistic love, you should start by realizing that deep down you want to avoid suffering, and you wish for happiness. This step is especially important for those who have a negative image of themselves and have suffered a lot, and who think they are not meant to be happy. Give rise to a welcoming, tolerant, kind attitude toward yourself; decide that from now on you wish the best for yourself.
Once you have recognized this aspiration, you then have to realize that it is shared by all beings. Acknowledge our interdependence. The shirt you wear, the glass you drink from, the house you live in—all these are possible only thanks to the activity of countless others. The simplest object in your everyday life is filled with the presence of others. Reflect on the origin of the white sheet of paper on which you write. Imagine the lumberjack who cut down the tree, the paper factory worker, the truck driver, the shopkeeper; like any of us, they all have a life, with joys and sufferings, parents and friends. They all share our humanity; none of them wants to suffer. This awareness should make us feel closer to all these beings, to feel empathy for them, to be concerned about their fate and to wish them well.
It is easier to begin training in altruistic love by thinking about someone dear to you. Imagine a smiling child coming up to us and looking at us happily, trustingly, full of innocence. You pat the child’s head, look at it tenderly, and take it in your arms, as you feel unconditional love and kindness. Let yourself be completely filled with this love, which wants nothing but the happiness of this child. Remain for a few moments in full awareness of this love, without any other thoughts.
Then extend these loving thoughts to people you know less well and to strangers. They too want to be happy, even if they are sometimes clumsy in their attempts to escape suffering. Go further; include in this loving kindness those who have harmed you, even those who are harming humanity in general. That does not mean that you want them to succeed in their malevolent undertakings; you simply form the wish that they give up their hatred, greed, cruelty or indifference, and that they become kind and concerned for the well-being of others. Look at them the way a doctor looks at his most seriously ill patients. Finally, embrace all sentient beings in a feeling of limitless love.
Compassion is the form that altruistic love takes when it is confronted with the suffering of others. For this, you must feel concerned by others’ situations, realize their suffering, wish for them to be cured of suffering, and be ready ourselves to take action toward that aim.
To give rise to compassion, imagine that someone close to you, your mother for instance, is the victim of a car accident some night, and is lying wounded on the road, suffering terrible pain. Emergency services are late to arrive, and you don’t know what to do. You feel intensely the suffering of this cherished person, and you also feel powerless and full of anguish. Experience this suffering deep down, till it becomes unbearable.
At that point, give rise to a limitless feeling of love for that person. Take her gently in your arms. Imagine that streams of love emerge from you and pour onto her. Visualize that every atom of her suffering is now replaced by an atom of love. Wish from the bottom of your heart that she survives, gets better, and suffers no more.
Then, extend this warm, loving compassion to other beings who are close to you, then, little by little, to all beings, forming this wish from the bottom of your heart: “May all beings be freed from suffering and the causes of their suffering.”
There are beings in this world who possess immense qualities, others who benefit humanity greatly and are crowned with success, and others who, simply, are more talented than we, or happier, or more successful. We should fully and sincerely rejoice in their accomplishments and wish that their qualities never diminish, but on the contrary persist and increase. This ability to celebrate others’ good qualities is an antidote to envy and jealousy, feelings that reflect the inability to be happy at others’ happiness. It is also a remedy for discouragement and a gloomy, despairing view of the world.
While rejoicing in others’ merit is regarded as a cardinal virtue in Buddhism, it can also be found in the West, in David Hume, for instance, when he writes:
We frequently bestow praise on virtuous actions, performed in very distant ages and remote countries; where the utmost subtlety of imagination would not discover any appearance of self-interest, or find any connection of our present happiness and security with events so widely separated from us.3
Such appreciation and praise are basically disinterested; we expect nothing in return, take no pride in it, and have no fear of being blamed if we don’t rejoice; in short, our personal interests don’t enter into the equation.
Since it is directed toward others, this rejoicing constitutes fertile ground for altruism. Unreserved appreciation of others’ happiness also leads us to wish that this happiness persist and increase. Leibniz wrote: “To love is to find pleasure in the happiness of others. Thus the habit of loving someone is nothing other than the benevolence by which we want the good of others, not for the profit that we gain from it, but because it is agreeable to us in itself.”4 Its opposite, vexation at the thought of others’ good qualities, produces nothing but disadvantages; like jealousy, it makes me unhappy and contributes nothing to my well-being, not even a fraction of the happiness, possessions, or qualities of the person I envy.
Rejoicing can be accompanied by gratitude when it is directed to those who have been kind to us. Psychologists have observed the beneficial effects of gratitude. It reinforces prosocial behavior and emotional ties; it increases well-being and diminishes envy and malevolent attitudes.5 Buddhism encourages us to extend this gratitude to all beings, our parents first of all who have given us life, fed us, and protected us when we were incapable of taking care of ourselves, and to all those who have contributed to our education and surrounded us with affection and concern, especially the spiritual friends who have shown us the path to inner freedom.
Impartiality is an essential complement in the three previous meditations. The wish that all beings be freed from suffering and its causes must be universal; it should not depend on our personal preferences or on how others treat us. We should be like the doctor who rejoices when others are in good health and who is concerned with curing all his patients, however they behave.
When we meditate on altruistic love, meditation may stray in attachment to only people who are close to you. That would be the time to move on to meditating on impartiality and extend this love to everyone—friends, strangers, and enemies.
Then it is possible that impartiality could drift into indifference: instead of being concerned for all beings, you feel distant from all of them and stop being interested in their fate. That is the time to think of all the suffering people in the world and to cultivate sincere compassion.
By thinking constantly about the sufferings afflicting others, you may become overwhelmed by a feeling of powerlessness, helplessness, or even despair, and feel overcome by the immensity of the task. You should then shift to rejoicing about all those who manifest great qualities and accomplish admirable deeds for the benefit of others.
If this joy veers into naïve euphoria, you can then go back to meditating on altruistic love. And so on.
At the end of the session, return for a few instants to your vision of the world; contemplate again the interdependence of all things and try to cultivate a fairer, less egocentric perception of reality. Understand that all phenomena are impermanent, interdependent, and thus devoid of the autonomous existence we usually attribute to them. This realization will lead to more freedom in our way of perceiving the world.
Try to remain for a few minutes in full awareness of the present moment, in a state of natural simplicity, in which the mind is free from discursive thoughts.
Before resuming your everyday activities, conclude with aspirations to bridge meditation and daily life. To do so, sincerely dedicate the merit of having meditated to all sentient beings, thinking: “May the positive energy created not just by this meditation but by all my kind actions, words, and thoughts, past, present, and future, contribute to relieving the suffering of all beings, now and for all time to come.”
To develop compassion, Buddhism has recourse to a special visualization that consists of mentally exchanging, through the breath, our own happiness for the suffering of others, wishing that our suffering take the place of others’ suffering. We might think that we already have enough problems, and that it’s asking too much to add even more to our burden and take others’ suffering onto ourselves. But it’s quite the opposite that occurs. The experience shows that when we mentally take the suffering of others onto ourselves through compassion, our own suffering actually decreases. The reason for this is that altruistic love and compassion are the most powerful antidotes to our own torments. So it is a situation from which everyone benefits! On the other hand, contemplating our own sufferings, reinforced by the constant refrain of “me, me, me” that spontaneously resounds in us, saps our courage and only makes our vulnerability increase.
Begin by feeling profound love for a person who has been very kind to you. Then imagine that that person is suffering terribly. As you are filled with a feeling of sorrowful empathy faced with that suffering, give rise to a powerful feeling of love and compassion, and begin the practice of exchange, or “taking and sending” as it’s called in Buddhism.
As you breathe out, think about sending all your happiness, vitality, good fortune, health, and so on, to that person with your breath, in the form of a refreshing, luminous, calming nectar. Wish that the person receive these benefits without anything held back, and think that this nectar fulfills all their needs. If her life is in danger, imagine it is prolonged; if he is destitute, that he receives everything he needs; if she is sick, that she is cured; if he is sad, that he finds happiness.
As you breathe in, think that you take into yourself, in the form of a dark, thick smoke, all the physical and mental suffering of that person, and think that this exchange relieves the pain. Imagine that their suffering returns to you like mist carried by the wind. When you have absorbed, transformed, and eliminated their pain and difficulties, feel great joy, free of any kind of clinging. Repeat this practice many times until it becomes second nature. Then gradually extend the practice of exchange to other people you know, then to all beings.
According to a variation of this practice, when you breathe out, think that your heart is a brilliant sphere of light from which rays of white light carry your happiness to all beings, all over the world. When you breathe in, take their sufferings on yourself in the form of a dense, black cloud, which penetrates your heart and dissolves into white light without leaving a trace.
Or you can imagine that you multiply into an infinity of forms that reach far out into the universe, take onto themselves the sufferings of all beings they encounter, and offer them your happiness—that you become clothing for people who are cold, food for the hungry, or refuge for the homeless. You may conclude the practice session by reading or reciting these verses by Shantideva:
May I be a guard for those who have no protector,
A guide for those who journey on the road.
For those who wish to go across the water,
May I be a boat, a raft, a bridge.
May I be an island for those who yearn for landfall,
And a lamp for those who long for light;
For those who need a resting-place, a bed;
For all who need a servant, may I be their help.
May I be the wishing jewel, the vase of plenty,
A word of power and the supreme remedy,
May I be the tree of miracles,
And for every being the cow of abundance.
Like the earth and the pervading elements,
Enduring as the sky itself endures,
For boundless multitudes of living beings,
May I be their ground and sustenance.
Thus for every thing that lives,
As far as are the limits of the sky,
May I provide their livelihood and nourishment
Until they pass beyond the bonds of suffering.6
This practice allows us to connect our breath with the development of compassion. It can be used any time during our daily lives, especially when we are confronted with the suffering of others or even with our own suffering.
When we suffer, we should understand that although suffering in itself is always undesirable, that does not mean we cannot make beneficial use of it when it occurs. As the Dalai Lama explains, “Profound suffering can open our hearts and minds, and open us up to others.”7 Think: “Other people besides me are afflicted by suffering comparable to mine, and often even worse. How wonderful if they could become free of it!”
The various meditations described above can be practiced in two complementary ways: over the course of regular practice sessions, and while we carry out our everyday tasks. We can especially maintain a caring mindfulness while accomplishing simple tasks, such as walking down the street, looking at everyday events and people.
In particular, to allow altruism to be more present in our thoughts, we can, at any time, look around and inwardly wish for each and every person we see that they be safe and happy, that they be free of all suffering, and that they may flourish in their lives. In this way, gradually, altruistic love, compassion, mindfulness, and other qualities developed by meditation will be fully integrated into our way of life.