American Buddhist Perspectives
Those who know Buddhism fairly well know the teaching of the four divine abodes, brahma-viharas:
- metta: loving-kindness
- karuna: compassion
- mudita: sympathetic-joy
- upekkha: equanimity
The four brahma-viharas represent the most beautiful and hopeful aspects of our human nature. They are mindfulness practices that protect the mind from falling into habitual patterns of reactivity which belie our best intentions. (from here)
During our retreat each of these was discussed briefly. However, what was covered more deeply was the fact that each of these has what is called a near enemy. That is, close to the emotion of each lies another emotion that has a familiar feeling but is in fact negative and spiritually destructive. Those are:
- loving-kindness –> greed
- compassion –> grief
- sympathetic-joy –> comparison
- equanimity –> indifference
And of course each has a far or direct enemy, a polar opposite which works directly against the development of the positive mental states:
- loving-kindness –> anger or ill-will
- compassion –> cruelty
- sympathetic-joy –> aversion
- equanimity –> attachment and aversion (or greed and hatred)
Floyd, a teacher on the retreat described the brahma-viharas as akin to dancing on a razor’s edge, with the near enemy on one side and the far enemy on the other. This teaching hit home for me yesterday and today as I received news that my good friend Tony has successfully defended his PhD in philosophy at Boston University. What joy! Recently I shared in the same joy of my friend Margaret’s PhD from Bristol University as well. In both cases, I know I did think for a minute, “hey, what about me and my PhD.” But in both cases it was a fleeting thought, and my mind quickly returned to sharing their joy.
The mistake of comparison could also have come up if I had compared Tony with his former self, or with others in the field, both of which might have seemed supportive, but would have been a step away from the simple joy of the accomplishment itself. On the retreat a story was told of a man whose straight-A daughter came home with a B+ in calculus. His response was to ask her, gently, “what went wrong?” The room filled with gasps. While the man thought he was acting out of love, he was in fact digging into the grade’s comparative lack, thus devaluing his daughter’s effort and perhaps her own self-worth. Every other parent in the room knew his grave error. But to him it was just his way to show love and he could not understand why, as years passed, his relations with his daughter became ever more distant. A more appropriate response might have been, “well, you can’t be perfect all of the time,” or “hey, you still got six A’s, and that’s pretty great.”
So that is mudita, perhaps an easier one for me (at least with good friends…). Well, maybe also strangers difficult people too, as I was immediately joyful when I heard that the ship filled with weapons and ammunition had been turned away from Zimbabwe in the midst of political turmoil, or, more recently, that Turkey will attempt to weaken the separatist/terrorist Kurdish group, the PKK, not by bombs or guns or war, but by building schools and creating jobs ” to ease the poverty that feeds violent Kurdish separatism” (how great is that!?).
We’ll have to think more about those other three.
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