I’m convinced there are no coincidences. Just as I was considering What Would A Buddha Do and Charles Sheldon’s Social Gospel, a book arrived in the mail. I had ordered this book a month before from the Princeton University Press and forgotten about it.
The book is “How to Truly Love: An Ancient Guide to a Life of Kindness.” This is a translation of the 5th century Indian Theravada scholar Buddhaghosa’s ninth chapter of his Path of Purification. Maria Heim offers an introduction followed by a Sanskrit and English bilingual explanation of the Four Sublime Attitudes – Lovingkindness, Compassion, Sympathetic Joy and Equanimity.
In her introduction, Heim points out that these attitudes are a vehicle that delivers genuine freedom:
Love, and related experiences like compassion and sympathy, not only benefit others–they also free our own minds from the constrictions and distortions of anger, hatred, envy, discontent, cruelty, and indifference that otherwise enslave us and make us miserable. Love, sympathy, and compassion can cast off these painful shackles and replace them with the freedom to flourish in solidarity with others.
How To Truly Love, Page xiii
The best way to imagine the Four Sublime Attitudes is to consider a mother with four children.
She feels lovingkindness toward the little one, wanting him to flourish; she feels compassion toward the sick child, wanting him to get well; she feels sympathetic joy toward the youth, rejoicing in his beauty and success; and she feels equanimity toward her grown-up son as he manages his own affairs (though she has, of course, never stopped loving him). The challenge is to take these very natural dispositions that we already feel toward our loved ones and extend them further and further out toward mere acquaintances, and then even hostile people, extending them eventually in every direction universally. The more we can do so, the more both we and those we encounter in the world are flooded with these happy and peaceful experiences.
How To Truly Love, Page xv-xvi
It is the expansion of these attitudes beyond immediate family to the entire world that is the challenge. In the context of Nichiren’s teachings, this is what’s meant by concentrating on the 3,000 Existences in a Single Thought Moment.
As we will see with all of the sublime attitudes, the attitude must be directed toward a specific someone, a living flesh-and-blood person toward whom you can get the emotion flowing. There is nothing abstract about this practice: it involves real emotions toward specific beings (“beings” is mentioned advisedly, as it is not just humans toward whom we will want to feel universal friendliness).
You’ll want to start where it is easy and the emotion comes naturally. We will see that Buddhaghosa does not think that you should start with enemies or even neutrals, because feeling lovingkindness toward them is just too hard at first. Instead, you should start by feeling lovingkindness toward yourself since it is very easy to long for your own happiness. The idea is to get kindness flowing, for a mind full of kindness can’t at the same time hold hate or anger. There may also be deeper psychological truth in his insisting, against possible detractors, on starting with loving yourself. He perceives that those who hate themselves can never truly love another. It may be that much hatred, cruelty, and apathy are, at bottom, the result of self-loathing.
How To Truly Love, Page 3-4
It is also very interesting how the concept of Emptiness – no self – is utilized here.
Persons are real up to a point, but on closer analysis they are only a collection of constantly changing momentary events. So the person I am angry with now is not the “same” person who initially caused me distress. Like me, they are changing all the time, and like me, they are conditioned by a complex set of processes that I can disaggregate and analyze. In fact, looking for the stable, unchanging essence of this person on which to target my anger (and anger always wants a target), I find that they dissolve into these changing parts. Toward whom, toward what, am I actually angry?
How To Truly Love, Page 10
Lovingkindness negates anger and compassion seeks to eliminate the suffering of others.
Compassion is wanting that someone suffering will be relieved of it. As with lovingkindness, one works gradually to feel compassion universally toward all beings. But to start, one begins with where it is easiest, and again with a concrete and specific person. Buddhaghosa thinks that even the most hard-hearted among us will be moved when we see a truly wretched person with hands and feet cut off and begging on the street, so we should start here to get the feeling flowing. But failing to find such a person (and we should hope such sights never occur!), we still need an actual being to focus on as the object of our compassion.
Here he takes a perhaps surprising turn: start with a guilty criminal being led to his death. Buddhaghosa thinks that reflecting on this person, who may seem to be happy as he eats the delicacies of his last meal, will be an easy object of compassion. No one will think he is actually happy as he faces his executioner; anyone considering the horror of his impending death will react with dismay. Unlike many Western conceptions of compassion, there is no sense that compassion should be directed only toward innocents, those who do not “deserve” their suffering.
How To Truly Love, Page 126-127
Sympathetic joy is simply sharing with the joys of others, even your enemies.
It is your genuine delight when good things happen to others, even to your enemies. Sympathetic joy is the removal of envy and discontent, both of which can be ubiquitous and often largely unrecognized features of our lives.
Western moral sense theorists also note that we often sympathize with happy others. We can readily shift from a sour mood when arriving at a joyful party or hearing a friend’s good news. Parents enjoy unalloyed happiness at their children’s success. What would life be like if we expanded these feelings, and shared the pleasure of all beings? Buddhaghosa recommends starting with the fun-loving pal whose easy cheerfulness is infectious. Once the feeling flows, we can extend it to others, with each new embrace of joy breaking down the walls of our own narrow self-regard, envy, and discontent.
How To Truly Love, Page 142-143
The final Sublime Attitude is equanimity. This should never be confused with apathy.
Equanimity is to be built on the foundation of the other three – only when one has flooded all beings equally with lovingkindness, compassion, and sympathetic joy should one step back from these warm feelings and aim for a less reactive and more peaceful attention to beings. Since the first three attitudes involve sizing up the experiences of other beings with strong feelings about them, they involve judgments. Such judgments of “resentment and approval” are, Buddhaghosa says, “too close.” In contrast, equanimity involves stepping back and cultivating a feeling of impartiality, equality, and neutrality toward others. It stays unruffled through the ups and downs of beings’ experience. And it reminds us of the Buddhist aspirations to achieve, perhaps above all, the freedom that comes from a truly peaceful mind.
How To Truly Love, Page 150-151
In Nichiren Buddhism, the ideal way to practice is demonstrated by Never-Despising Bodhisattva. Can we truly see the Buddha nature in all beings without manifesting Lovingkindness, Compassion, Sympathetic Joy and Equanimity? Without the Four Sublime Attitudes, are we truly bowing to the inherent Buddha nature in all beings?
Tomorrow: Becoming the Very Manifestation-Body