While the enemy—your own anger—is unsubdued,
Though you conquer external foes, they will only increase.
Therefore with the militia of love and compassion
Subdue your own mind—
This is the practice of bodhisattvas.
—Gyalsey Togme Sangpo in
The Thirty-seven Practices of Bodhisattvas
In the preceding chapters, we examined various situations in which our anger tends to arise and the antidotes to bring our mind to a more balanced state. In this chapter, we will explore particularly potent medicine to counter and prevent anger: love and compassion. Love is the wish for beings to have happiness and its causes; compassion is the wish for them to be free from suffering and its causes. Anger, on the other hand, wishes to inflict harm. Thus love and compassion are diametrically opposed to anger. For this reason, love and compassion are effective in both counteracting and preventing anger.
In The Precious Garland, the Indian sage Nagarjuna spoke of several advantages of being loving and compassionate. Among these are that others will not harm us, but will be friendly and protect us; our mind will be happy and free of stress, and thus our body will be healthier as well; and attaining our aims will be facilitated. Also, we will die peacefully, and after death we will have a good rebirth and progress along the path to enlightenment.
However, we cannot simply wish our love and compassion into existence. As with any other positive mental habit, we must cultivate these over time. Since causes definitely bring their results, if we continuously train our minds in love and compassion, eventually these emotions will arise spontaneously and effortlessly within us.
The Buddha spoke of two main methods to cultivate love, compassion, and altruism. They are called the seven cause and effect instructions, and equalizing and exchanging self and others. These have been described in depth in many books. One of my teachers, Geshe Jampa Tegchok, explained these especially lucidly in his book Transforming the Heart: Thee Buddhist Way to Joy and Courage. Here, I will explain some simple activities we can do to develop love and compassion.
Before we can wish sentient beings well, we have to see them as lovable, and to do that, we remember their kindness towards us. Here kindness does not mean that others necessarily had the conscious intention to benefit us, but simply that we have benefited from their actions. In this meditation, we begin by recalling the help, support, and encouragement we have received from family and friends. Thinking of specific people and particular acts of kindness is very effective. However, in recalling these, we do not let attachment arise for our dear ones, but simply feel a sense of gratitude, whereby we do not take others for granted but appreciate what they have done and continue to do for us.
Then, we consider the benefit we have received from parents, relatives, and teachers. They have cared for us as best they could. When we were young, they protected us from danger and gave us an education. They taught us to speak, read, and write, as well as how to get along with others. All of our talents, abilities, and skills are due to the people who taught and trained us. Without their interest and encouragement, we would never have gained knowledge or developed our unique talents.
In addition, we consider the kindness of strangers. They have grown our food, made our clothes, and constructed our homes and workplaces. They have worked in mines and factories to build the cars, computers, and appliances that we use. Although we do not know these people personally, without them we could not remain alive, nor could we enjoy all the things we currently use. When we become familiar with this step in the meditation, we cease to be annoyed with construction work on the highways but instead consider the kindness of the people who improve the roads for us. We are automatically more polite and cheerful to airline employees, civil servants, salespeople, and those in bureaucratic positions. Our new appreciation of employees at the gas station, supermarket, and bank is reflected in how we interact with them, and this enriches their lives as well as ours.
Finally, we consider the benefit we have received from people with whom we don’t get along and from those who have harmed us. Although superficially they seem to harm and not help us, in fact, we learn a great deal from them. They point out our weaknesses so that we can remedy them. They challenge us to go beyond what is comfortable and secure for our self-centered ego and to grow in ways that we otherwise never would have. In addition, these people give us the chance to develop patience, tolerance, and compassion, qualities that are essential for evolving spiritually. We can feel grateful to them for this.
Having considered the benefit we receive from each of the above groups, we then let our mind rest in the feeling of gratitude. Rather than feeling that the world and those in it are uncaring, we realize that we have been the recipient of incalculable benefit throughout our lives. Feeling this, our mind is happy, and the wish to be kind in return naturally arises within us.
Remembering that love is the wish for sentient beings to have happiness and its causes, we begin by reflecting on the meaning of happiness. Two types of happiness exist, temporal and supreme. Temporal happiness is experienced while we are still in cyclic existence. It includes having food, clothing, shelter, medicine, friends, pleasures from objects of the senses, good reputation, and so forth. Supreme happiness comes from internal transformation, cleansing our mind of defilements, such as ignorance and self-centeredness, and enhancing its good qualities, such as compassion and wisdom. This is the happiness we experience when we have stable spiritual realizations. It is the bliss of liberation and enlightenment. Thus, when we go through each category of people in the meditation, we wish them both temporal happiness and its causes—positive actions—and supreme happiness and its causes.
We begin by wishing ourselves to be well and happy, not in a selfish way, but in a way that respects and cares for ourselves as one of many sentient beings. Then, we gradually spread this well-wishing to friends and family. We think, feel, and imagine, “May my friends and all those who have been kind to me have happiness and its causes. May they be free from suffering, confusion, and fear. May they have calm, peaceful, and fulfilled hearts.” To conclude, we rest our mind in this feeling.
Next, we generate the same feeling for people we don’t know—all those whose work in society contributes to our happiness.
When this is stable, we wish all those who have harmed us, those whom we fear or feel threatened by, and those of whom we disapprove to have happiness and its causes. At first our mind may be resistant to this due to longtime habits of resentment and hostility. But if we remember that these people have acted in ways to which we object because they have been in pain or confused, then we see that wishing them to be happy is wishing for the causes of their harmful behavior to be alleviated. This does not mean that we wish an alcoholic to have an ample supply of liquor. Rather we wish him to have a peaceful mind and self-confidence, so that he no longer sees alcohol as a way to deal with his pain.
Finally, we spread this loving feeling to all sentient beings, including animals and insects. Having done this, we rest our mind one-pointedly in the feeling of love, so that it becomes ingrained and familiar to us.
Compassion is the wish for sentient beings to be free from suffering and its causes. His Holiness the Dalai Lama constantly speaks of the advantages and necessity of a kind heart and compassion. In fact, he counsels, “If you can cherish others more than yourself, good. But if you want to be selfish, at least be wisely selfish, and that means to take care of others.” Here he is emphasizing our interdependence as sentient beings and our need to support each other for the well-being of all. If we care simply for ourselves and disregard others, our well-being will be threatened, because it depends on others. If we live surrounded by others who are deprived or unhappy, we will be affected by witnessing the pain of their circumstances. In addition, our own comfortable circumstances may be disrupted as they, in their struggle for happiness, resort to activities that we find distasteful, harmful, or threatening. This is true within families, groups and nations, and on the international level. If we could arrange for those who are unhappy to find happiness by more productive means, they would surely do so. Therefore, for the sake of even our own happiness, we must help others.
Several years ago, the citizens in Seattle were voting on a school bond. Some people who did not have school-aged children said, “Why should our property taxes be used to educate others’ children?” Some of these same people, however, were happy for their taxes to be used to build more prisons in the state. I found this logic baffling. If children have a good education and enjoyable activities in which to engage during and after school, they are more likely to become good citizens and not resort to crime. Well-balanced children, no matter whose children they are, influence society positively. Similarly, children deprived of education and love, no matter whose children they are, are more likely to harm others. Since we all live in the same environment, it serves our own selfish interests, as well as the interests of others, to see that poverty, lack of education, and job discrimination are eliminated.
Westerners often misunderstand compassion. Some people think that it lays the groundwork for others to take advantage of us. They reason that if we are kind and forgiving, others will treat us unfairly. However, the wish for others to be free of suffering is not a foolhardy, idealistic notion. It is an attitude that opens and calms our mind so that our decisions are based on wisdom. Compassion does not mean doing everything everyone else wants. Rather, compassion supported by wisdom is assertive and precise.
Some believe that to be truly compassionate, we must suffer ourselves. Therefore, they are reluctant to be compassionate. However, from the Buddhist viewpoint, compassion can come only from a happy mind. If we feel we must sacrifice ourselves and fear the misery of doing so, our mind cannot become genuinely generous. Therefore, we must have love and compassion also for ourselves and care for ourselves, not out of selfishness, but because we, too, are sentient beings who want happiness and freedom from suffering. Deeply caring for ourselves includes counteracting mental attitudes that make us miserable, including self-neglect and self-negation. As we do this, our ability to be generous and compassionate will increase.
In recent years, I have traveled to Israel to teach meditation and share Buddhist perspectives. During those trips, I also visited the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the site of the future Palestine. While I was writing this book in Seattle in the autumn of 2000, horrible violence erupted in the Middle East. The meditation groups in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem phoned me on a conference call to request a “telephone-teaching.” “How can we prevent our minds from hardening in reaction to this violence? How can we be compassionate towards those who blow up buses filled with innocent children? How do we protect ourselves from the negative energy of those around us, be they Israelis or Palestinians?” they asked. These are hard questions and remind us that the discussion of compassion is not theoretical and idealistic, but deeply practical. It is relevant to our lives.
Israelis are not strangers to suffering. The parents of many of those who called me were Holocaust survivors or refugees from other countries. I asked them to look at the Palestinians as they look at their own people. “Think of what the Palestinians feel. Imagine you were born and raised in a refugee camp. Around you, you saw wealthier and more powerful people. You heard your family’s stories of being displaced from your home, and you feel your family’s pain as they struggle to make a living amidst high unemployment and job discrimination.” Then I asked, “Do you get a sense of how they see the world? Although rage on anyone’s part brings harm, can you understand how they may feel this? If you, too, succumb to rage, how will that affect you?”
I spoke about the meaning and the necessity of compassion, “You can be compassionate and simultaneously condemn harmful behavior. Israelis and Palestinians are mixed geographically and interdependent economically and politically. The Palestinians aren’t leaving the area and neither are the Israelis. So the two peoples will have to find a way to live together, because the alternative for your children is too horrible to contemplate. For this to happen, you must have the courage to cultivate compassion over a long time, no matter what happens.”
When meditating to develop compassion, we wish ourselves and all others to be free from physical, mental, and emotional suffering, as well as its causes—disturbing attitudes, negative emotions, and karma. As with the meditation on love, we begin by focusing on ourselves and thinking, “May I be free from physical, mental, and emotional suffering. May fear, anger, and aggression not afflict me. May I be free from craving and dissatisfaction, and may stupidity, confusion, and ignorance plague me no more. May I be free from apathy, jealousy, and pride.” We feel this wish deeply and imagine ourselves being free from these.
As in the above meditations, we gradually expand this feeling first to friends and family, then to strangers, then to those whom we distrust or who have harmed us, and finally to all sentient beings. At the conclusion, we let our mind abide single-pointedly in this feeling of compassion and be saturated by it.
The Indian sage Dharmaraksita advised in The Wheel of Sharp Weapons:
As all that is wrong can be traced to one source,
Our concern for ourselves whom we cherish the most,
We must meditate now on the kindness of others.
Accepting the suffering that they never wished for,
We must dedicate fully our virtues to all.
Thus taking upon ourselves all deluded non-virtuous actions
That others have done in the past, present, and future,
With mind, speech, and body,
May disturbing emotions of others as well as our own
Be the favored conditions to gain our enlightenment,
Just as peacocks eat poison to thrive.
These verses describe the taking and giving meditation, a method to transform our suffering and disturbing emotions into the path to enlightenment. Just as peacocks, by eating the poison of certain plants, thrive and produce their beautiful fans, so we can use others’ suffering and our own disturbing emotions to produce love, compassion, and wisdom, and consequently enlightenment.
Thus, we do the taking and giving meditation to enhance and strengthen our love and compassion. Normally we wish to have all pleasure, success, and good opportunities ourselves and shun any disadvantages, pain, or suffering. As explained in previous chapters, this self-centered attitude keeps us bound in dissatisfaction, makes us insensitive to others, and ignores the harmful influence our negative actions have on them. In this meditation, we recall that the self-centered attitude is our real enemy. We then generate strong compassion that wishes to take on others’ suffering and strong love that wishes to give them our happiness. Although we cannot actually take others’ illness from them and give them our good health, for example, just developing the wish to be able to do so and imagining doing so purifies our mind and increases our ability to directly help others in the future.
Geshe Tegchok’s book gives elaborate instructions on the taking and giving meditation. In brief, we begin by imagining in front of us one or more people who are suffering and generate compassion for them. When this compassion is strong, we imagine their suffering and its causes flowing out from them in the form of pollution and black smoke, which we then inhale. However, we do not sit there with this inside us, but instead transform it into a thunderbolt, which then smashes and completely obliterates the lump at our heart of our own self-centeredness, ignorance, anger, and attachment. We rest in the open space at our heart and experience the peaceful absence of wrong conceptions and self-centeredness.
Within this space, we cultivate love for those same people and imagine white light radiating from our heart to them. We imagine transforming our body, possessions, and positive potential into everything they need for temporal and supreme happiness. We then increase all these and send them out to the people envisioned before us. We imagine them being satisfied and happy and even attaining the ultimate joy of enlightenment. To conclude, we rejoice that we were able effect this. Although this is done on the level of imagination, it can have a powerful effect on ourselves and others.
The taking and giving meditation is an excellent antidote to deal with specific problems. We can imagine others with the same difficulty from which we are suffering and think, “As long as I am experiencing misery due to this problem, may it suffice for all others who are similarly suffering.” In other words, we think, “By my enduring this, which I must do in any case, may others be free from pain.” We envision before us people we know or about whom we have read who are experiencing the particular difficulty. We take this problem from them and use it to destroy the negative emotions inside us. As we give our body, possessions, and positive potential to others, we imagine that their minds become loving and peaceful.
After her parents’ sudden death. Jessica felt grief mixed with anger and a sense of injustice. Using the taking and giving meditation to help her process these emotions, she imagined all the people who had experienced sudden loss in front of her. Developing compassion for the various confused emotions they felt, she thought, “May my sorrow and anger suffice for their suffering” and visualized taking on their disturbing emotions in the form of pollution. As she inhaled the pollution, it turned into a thunderbolt which destroyed the lump of grief and fury at her heart. She let her mind relax in that empty space, free from conceptions about who she was or what had happened. Then from her heart, white light radiated to all those people. She imagined transforming her body, possessions, and positive potential into the objects and companions they needed, then multiplying these, and sending them out to the people. When they received them, their sufferings were pacified, they turned their minds to the Dharma, and through practice, they attained enlightenment. Then, Jessica rested her mind in joy that this had occurred. When she got up from her meditation session, her own mind was calm, and the previous sense of overwhelming loss had subsided.
Similarly, in conjunction with therapy, Dorothy used the taking and giving meditation as an antidote to her resentment caused by the breakup of her marriage. Bruce did it to calm his rage at racial prejudice directed against him, and Margaret used it to counteract bitterness due to misogyny she had encountered. Martin did this meditation to cope with his pain caused by cancer. In all these cases, by putting their own happiness and suffering into perspective and developing genuine love and compassion for others, these individuals were able to transform their negative experiences, and render their minds peaceful. They discovered that the internal happiness gained through developing a kind heart is supreme to all other types of happiness.
Tibetan Buddhism is rich with visualization practices that pacify anger and develop love and compassion. Some of these may be adapted for use by those of any faith as well as the non-religious. For example, in one meditation we imagine feeling impartial love and compassion for each and every living being. We then visualize this love and compassion appearing as a ball of light in the space in front of us. Light flows into us from this radiant sphere, purifying all our anger, hurt, and bitterness. This brilliant light fills our body completely, permeating our entire nervous system and making both our body and mind calm and blissful. We concentrate on feeling free from all disturbing emotions. After a while, we imagine light again flowing from the radiant sphere into us, this time filling us with patience, love, compassion, and all the good qualities we wish to develop. We focus on feeling that we have generated these positive qualities and can express them easily and appropriately in our daily interactions with others. At the conclusion of the meditation, we imagine the radiant sphere, which is the essence of all good qualities, coming to the top of our head and dissolving into us. It comes to rest at our heart center, in the center of our chest, and we feel that our heart/mind has become inseparable from this love and compassion.
In another meditation, we recite the mantra of Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of Compassion, who is also known as Chenresig in Tibetan, Kuan Yin in Chinese, and Kannon in Japanese. The mantra om mani padme hum—Tibetans pronounce it om mani pey may hum—roughly means “the jewel in the lotus.” “Jewel” refers to the compassionate aspect of the path to enlightenment, while “lotus” refers to the wisdom aspect. Just as a bird needs two wings to fly, we need to develop both of these qualities in order to become a fully enlightened being.
Reciting the mantra repeatedly, either quickly or slowly, out loud or silently, helps us to focus our attention in a positive way. This is especially effective when our mind is ruminating with unproductive thoughts or disturbing emotions. Simply centering our mind on the soothing syllables said by an enlightened being alleviates our anger and misery. Some people like to recite the mantra and at the same time, imagine being filled with loving light, as in the visualization described above.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama often says, “My religion is kindness.” In saying this, he emphasizes that kindness is the essence of all religions and instructs us to make kindness the center of our life. We can do this in many ways. First, in the morning when we awake, we can generate a kind motivation: “Today as much as possible I will not harm anyone, and as much as possible I will help others.” Then, throughout the day, we should be mindful of this motivation and act from it.
We do not need to be a great being such as Mother Theresa in order to help others. Rather, we should help whomever we meet however we can in whatever situation we are. This can include being cheerful at breakfast with our family each morning, smiling at a colleague who is gloomy, greeting the clerk at the supermarket, and being courteous to those who help us when we call airlines, government offices, and large companies. Instead of seeing others as beings whose duty it is to please us, we should be friendly and recognize that a small act of kindness can make a big difference in their day.
In addition, according to our resources, we can give to charities that benefit the sick, hungry, and poor, and those challenged in various ways. Similarly, we can do volunteer work at community service jobs, such as tutoring children, leading nature hikes, finding homes for stray animals, and doing hospice work for the dying. In essence, by sharing our kind heart with everyone whom we encounter, we will use our lives to solve more problems than we create.