I think that almost all of us are surprised how our joy is enhanced when we make someone else happy. You know, you go to town, you’ve gone to do some shopping, and when you get back home you have a bunch of flowers for Rachel. She wasn’t expecting them, and the glow of her face and the joy that comes from having made another person joyful is something that you can’t actually compute.
“So,” the Archbishop said with a laugh, “our book says that it is in giving that we receive. So I would hope that people would recognize in themselves that it is when we are closed in on ourselves that we tend to be miserable. It is when we grow in a self-forgetfulness—in a remarkable way I mean we discover that we are filled with joy.
“I’ve sometimes joked and said God doesn’t know very much math, because when you give to others, it should be that you are subtracting from yourself. But in this incredible kind of way—I’ve certainly found that to be the case so many times—you gave and it then seems like in fact you are making space for more to be given to you.
“And there is a very physical example. The Dead Sea in the Middle East receives fresh water, but it has no outlet, so it doesn’t pass the water out. It receives beautiful water from the rivers, and the water goes dank. I mean, it just goes bad. And that’s why it is the Dead Sea. It receives and does not give. And we are made much that way, too. I mean, we receive and we must give. In the end generosity is the best way of becoming more, more, and more joyful.”
We had come to the eighth and final pillar of joy.
• • •
Generosity is often a natural outgrowth of compassion, though the line between the two can be hard to distinguish. As Jinpa pointed out, we don’t need to wait until the feelings of compassion arise before we choose to be generous. Generosity is often something that we learn to enjoy by doing. It is probably for this reason that charity is prescribed by almost every religious tradition. It is one of the five pillars of Islam, called zakat. In Judaism, it is called tzedakah, which literally means “justice.” In Hinduism and Buddhism, it is called dana. And in Christianity, it is charity.
Generosity is so important in all of the world’s religions because it no doubt expresses a fundamental aspect of our interdependence and our need for one another. Generosity was so important for our survival that the reward centers of our brain light up as strongly when we give as when we receive, sometimes even more so. As mentioned earlier, Richard Davidson and his colleagues have identified that generosity is one of the four fundamental brain circuits that map with long-term well-being. In the 2015 World Happiness Report, Davidson and Brianna Schuyler explained that one of the strongest predictors of well-being worldwide is the quality of our relationships. Generous, pro-social behavior seems to strengthen these relationships across cultures. Generosity is even associated with better health and longer life expectancy. Generosity seems to be so powerful that, according to researchers David McClelland and Carol Kirshnit, just thinking about it “significantly increases the protective antibody salivary immunoglobulin A, a protein used by the immune system.”
So it seems that money can buy happiness, if we spend it on other people. Researcher Elizabeth Dunn and her colleagues found that people experience greater happiness when they spend money on others than when they spend it on themselves. Dunn also found that older adults with hypertension have decreased blood pressure when they are assigned to spend money on others rather than themselves. As the Archbishop had explained, we receive when we give.
I had heard an amazing story that supported what the Archbishop was saying. When I met James Doty, he was the founder and director of the Center of Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford and the chairman of the Dalai Lama Foundation. Jim also worked as a full-time neurosurgeon. Years earlier, he had made a fortune as a medical technology entrepreneur and had pledged stock worth $30 million to charity. At the time his net worth was over $75 million. However, when the stock market crashed, he lost everything and discovered that he was bankrupt. All he had left was the stock that he had pledged to charity. His lawyers told him that he could get out of his charitable contributions and that everyone would understand that his circumstances had changed. “One of the persistent myths in our society,” Jim explained, “is that money will make you happy. Growing up poor, I thought that money would give me everything I did not have: control, power, love. When I finally had all the money I had ever dreamed of, I discovered that it had not made me happy. And when I lost it all, all of my false friends disappeared.” Jim decided to go through with his contribution. “At that moment I realized that the only way that money can bring happiness is to give it away.”
• • •
Generosity is not just about the money we give. It is also about how we give our time. In the happiness literature there is a great deal of research on the importance of having a sense of purpose. Purpose, fundamentally, is about how we are able to contribute and be generous to others, how we feel needed by and of value to others. A large meta-analysis by cardiologist Randy Cohen conducted at the Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Medical Center found that a high sense of purpose correlates with a 23 percent reduction in death from all causes. In another study conducted by neuropsychologist Patricia Boyle and her colleagues and reported in JAMA Psychiatry, people with a sense of purpose were half as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease after seven years. It’s no surprise, then, that being generous with our time seems to be equally profound for our health. A large meta-analysis by Morris Okun and his colleagues have found that volunteering reduces the risk of death by 24 percent.
Compassion and generosity are not just lofty virtues—they are at the center of our humanity, what makes our lives joyful and meaningful. “Yes, there are many, many, many ugly things,” the Archbishop explained. “But there are also some incredibly beautiful things in our world. The black townships in South Africa are squalor ridden and because of despair and disease, including HIV, children are orphaned. In one of the townships, I met a mother who had collected these abandoned children off the streets. She’s got nothing much in the way of resources. But the minute she began doing that, help began coming for her to carry out her work of compassion.
“We are fundamentally good. The aberration is not the good person; the aberration is the bad person. We are made for goodness. And when we get opportunities, we mostly respond with generosity. She has got nothing, but that didn’t stop her. And she had about a hundred street children she picked up in a three-room house. And before long people got to know about it who were able to say, ‘Okay, we will help. We will build a little dormitory for them.’ Others said, ‘We will give you food.’ And hey, presto, she had a home. And she’s becoming a legendary figure. But she wasn’t driven by wanting fame or anything of the kind. It was just that she saw these children and her maternal instinct said, ‘No, this won’t do.’ And so yes, I mean, one shouldn’t pretend that people don’t get overwhelmed by the sense of impotence, but do what you can where you can.”
At the Archbishop’s eightieth birthday, Rachel and I had gone with the Archbishop and his family to visit the orphanage and to celebrate with a giant cake. As some of the children sat on our laps on the floor in a room that was filled with dozens of other children, it was very hard not to want to adopt them all. The older children held the younger ones in their arms: They had all lashed their lives together in the shelter of the compassion and generosity of the mother who had taken them in. I remembered the Archbishop saying that when he would visit townships, people who had nothing, absolutely nothing, would still open their homes and their hearts to others. Generosity is so deeply rooted in us.
“And you are surprised,” the Archbishop continued, “when you go to a monastery or a convent, where people live a very, very simple life, and you just have to accept that they have a peace that we who are always grabbing find elusive. Unless, of course, we sit loosely in relation to all of our wealth and all of our status, then we can be generous because we have really been made a steward of these possessions and these positions. And we don’t hold on to them for dear life.
“So it’s not the wealth and the status. These are neutral. It’s our attitude. It’s what we do with them that is so important. We said it on the very first day: When you become so inward looking, so self-regarding, you are going to end up a shriveled human being.”
• • •
There are ways to give even beyond our time and our money. Jinpa explained that in Buddhist teachings there are three kinds of generosity: material giving, giving freedom from fear (which can involve protection, counseling, or solace), and spiritual giving, which can involve giving your wisdom, moral and ethical teachings, and helping people to be more self-sufficient and happier. This was of course what the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop were giving all week long.
“It’s there in front of our eyes,” the Archbishop said. “We have seen it. The people we admire are those who have been other-regarding. Who even in the midst of a lot of hard work and so on, when you want to speak with them, they have a way of making you feel that, at that precise moment, you are the most important thing they have to deal with.
“We don’t have to bring in religion. I mean it’s a secular thing. Companies that are caring of their workers are more successful. Now they could say, ‘Well, we pay them so much and that’s the end of our concern for them.’ Yes, well, okay. Do that. And your workers will be workers who say, ‘I work my shift from a certain time to a certain time, and I finish.’ But when they have experienced that you care about them as people—you know, you ask after them, you ask after their families or at least have someone in your company whose business is looking after their welfare, as people—it does increase productivity. I don’t know what other evidence we want that would tell us that the caring corporation, the caring person, almost always are the ones who do well. In fact do very, very well. And the opposite is true as well.”
“Very true, very true,” the Dalai Lama added. “It’s quite obvious. Many Japanese companies are very successful because of the relationship between the employee and employer. The employees have the feeling that ‘this is my company.’ So they work wholeheartedly. So with the employer that just cares about the profits, the employees will always be thinking about the lunch break or the teatime, never thinking about the company. If you build the real concept of working together, and the profit is shared together, then real harmony develops. This is what we really need now. Harmony among the seven billion human beings.” The Dalai Lama was weaving his hands together, as if he could will the harmony of the world’s population with his delicate fingers.
“I want to come back to what you were saying, Archbishop, about how you feel like our human nature’s been distorted. What is it about our modern life that distorts our innate sense of compassion and generosity?”
“We have been brought up to think that we have to obey the laws of the jungle. Eat or be eaten. We are ruthless in our competitiveness. So much so that now stomach ulcers are status symbols. They show just how very hard we work. We work hard not only to supply our needs and the needs of our families, but we are trying to outdo the other. We have downplayed the fact that actually our created nature is that we are made for a complementarity. We have become dehumanized and debased. As Martin Luther King Jr., said, ‘We must learn to live together as sisters and brothers, or we will perish together as fools.’
“I hope that books such as this one will awaken in us that sense of being human. And then we will realize just how obscene it is for us to spend the billions or trillions that we spend on what we call a budget of defense. When a very small fraction of those budgets would ensure that . . . I mean, children die daily, die because they do not have clean water. That should not be the case if we were aware of our interconnectedness. And there’s no way in which one nation is going to be able to prosper on its own. It can’t. That’s not how we were made. We were wired for this complementarity, this togetherness, this being family. And even if you think it is sentimental, it isn’t sentimental. It’s for real.
“When you produce a lot, and you don’t say, ‘by the way there are people over there who are hungry,’ and instead you destroy the surplus—and you think it’s going to be okay—it can’t be okay, because you have broken fundamental laws of the universe. And things will go horrendously wrong.
“You don’t have to have scriptural or religious teaching. It’s just the truth: You can’t survive on your own. If you say you are going to be totally selfish, in next to no time the person who is totally selfish goes under. You need other people in order to be human. That’s why when they want to punish you they put you in solitary confinement. Because you can’t flourish without other human beings. They give you things that you cannot give yourself, no matter how much money you have. And so we speak of Ubuntu. A person is a person through other persons. And there must have been some people who said, ‘Ah, what a primitive way of thinking.’ It’s the most fundamental law of our being. We flout that—we flout it at our peril.”
The Archbishop’s eyes were transfixed, and he was speaking with the passion and power of an Old Testament prophet who was trying to save the people from ruin. I knew that speaking truth to power, as he always did, was exhausting. However, he did not seem depleted. Perhaps he was feeling energized by his role as a global village elder, who was still desperately needed to bring a moral voice. Nonetheless, I wanted to be careful to protect his limited strength. “Archbishop, I want to be mindful of your energy. We have one last question related to this topic. How are you doing?”
“No, no, I’m fine.”
“For one more question?
“You can give us as many as you like.”
“This question comes from Micah in South Africa. She asks, ‘How can you be of service to people, nature, and causes in need without losing yourself completely to a crisis mentality? How can we help the world heal and still find joy in our own life?’”
“My younger brother, here, go first,” the Archbishop said.
“I think you know better.”
The Archbishop laughed. “This is the first time, please note, that he said I know better.”
“Is the question about Africa?” the Dalai Lama inquired.
“No, this is about the world.”
“Okay,” the Dalai Lama said, preparing to answer. “Now, I am always sharing with people that the problems we are facing today are very difficult to solve. An entire generation has been brought up with a certain mentality, with a certain way of life. So when we think about the future, how to build healthy humanity, we really have to think about how we create a new generation of citizens with a different kind of mind-set. Here education really is the key. Christianity has wonderful teachings, so does Buddhism, but these teachings and approaches are not sufficient.
“Now secular education is universal. So now we must include in formal education of our youth some teaching of compassion and basic ethics, not on the basis of religious belief but on the basis of scientific findings and our common sense and our universal experience. Just complaining about the present situation is not much help. It is very difficult to deal with our current world crises because of our basic mentality. As you mentioned, your father was usually a very good man, but when he was drunk he behaved badly. Today I think many human beings are drunk. They have too many negative emotions like greed, fear, and anger dominating their minds. So they act like drunk people.
“The only way out of this drunken stupor is to educate children about the value of compassion and the value of applying our mind. We need a long-term approach rooted in a vision to address our collective global challenges. This would require a fundamental shift in human consciousness, something only education is best suited to achieve. Time never waits. So I think it is very important that we start now. Then maybe the new generation will be in a position to solve these global problems in their lifetime. We, the elder generation, have created a lot of problems in the twentieth century. The generations of the twenty-first century will have to find the solutions for them.”
“I mean, people are fundamentally compassionate,” the Archbishop said, coming back to one of his core points.
The Dalai Lama jumped in. “Yes. That is the basis of our hope.”
“I am speaking,” the Archbishop shot back, playfully.
The Dalai Lama laughed.
“Even the most selfish person,” the Archbishop continued, “must have a modicum of compassion for his family. So we’re not speaking about something alien. We are saying that we have discovered that we are interdependent.”
“Actually, Archbishop,” I said, trying to bring our focus back to the topic, “this question is for people who feel that interdependence profoundly and are so compassionate that it makes them world-sick and heartsick. This person wants to know how she can find joy in her life while there are so many who are suffering.”
“Yes. Very good,” he said, looking down and reflecting on the question. “As an old man, I can say: Start where you are, and realize that you are not meant on your own to resolve all of these massive problems. Do what you can. It seems so obvious. And you will be surprised, actually, at how it can get to be catching.
“There are very many, many people—I mean, my heart leaps with joy at discovering the number of people—who care. How many people walked in New York City for the environment? I mean, it was incredible. Nobody was going to pay them anything. But there they were in droves. There are many, many people who care. And you will be surprised when you begin to say, Well, I would like to do something relating to the aged. You will be surprised at the number people who come forward and want to help. Why are there so many NGOs? I mean, it is people who say, We want to make a better world. We don’t have to be so negative.
“Hey, remember you are not alone, and you do not need to finish the work. It takes time, but we are learning, we are growing, we are becoming the people we want to be. It helps no one if you sacrifice your joy because others are suffering. We people who care must be attractive, must be filled with joy, so that others recognize that caring, that helping and being generous are not a burden, they are a joy. Give the world your love, your service, your healing, but you can also give it your joy. This, too, is a great gift.”
• • •
The Archbishop and the Dalai Lama were describing a special kind of generosity: the generosity of the spirit. The quality they both have, perhaps more than any other, is this generosity of the spirit. They are big-hearted, magnanimous, tolerant, broad-minded, patient, forgiving, and kind. Maybe this generosity of the spirit is the truest expression of spiritual development, of what the Archbishop had said it takes time to become.
The Archbishop had used a beautiful phrase to describe this way of being in the world: “becoming an oasis of peace, a pool of serenity that ripples out to all of those around us.” When we have a generous spirit, we are easy to be with and fun to be with. We radiate happiness, and our very company can bring joy to others. This no doubt goes hand in hand with the ability, as the Archbishop had pointed out repeatedly, to be less self-centered, less self-regarding, and more self-forgetful. Then we are less burdened by our self-agenda: We do not have anything to prove. We do not need to be seen in a particular way. We can have less pretension and more openness, more honesty. This naturally brings ease to those around us, too; as we have accepted ourselves, our vulnerabilities, and our humanity, we can accept the humanity of others. We can have compassion for our faults and have compassion for those of others. We can be generous and give our joy to others. In many ways, it is like the Buddhist practice of tonglen, which the Dalai Lama had used on the day he found out about the uprising and brutal crackdown in Tibet. We can take in the suffering of others and give them back our joy.
When we practice a generosity of spirit, we are in many ways practicing all the other pillars of joy. In generosity, there is a wider perspective, in which we see our connection to all others. There is a humility that recognizes our place in the world and acknowledges that at another time we could be the one in need, whether that need is material, emotional, or spiritual. There is a sense of humor and an ability to laugh at ourselves so that we do not take ourselves too seriously. There is an acceptance of life, in which we do not force life to be other than what it is. There is a forgiveness of others and a release of what might otherwise have been. There is a gratitude for all that we have been given. Finally, we see others with a deep compassion and a desire to help those who are in need. And from this comes a generosity that is “wise selfish,” a generosity that recognizes helping others as helping ourselves. As the Dalai Lama put it, “In fact, taking care of others, helping others, ultimately is the way to discover your own joy and to have a happy life.”
The time had come for a “small” surprise party at the Tibetan Children’s Village, where 1,750 children, 300 teachers and staff, and another 700 adult guests from the Tibetan community were eagerly waiting to celebrate the Dalai Lama’s eightieth birthday. Like everything we had just read about generosity, we who were there—and all who were watching the live stream around the world—would receive much more from witnessing this extraordinary event than we could ever have hoped to give to the Dalai Lama.