UnMind 31. Four Immeasurables Quartet 3: Empathy

SUBSCRIBE TO UNMIND:

RSS FEED | APPLE PODCASTS | GOOGLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY

Not bringing us down,
like gravity — empathy
is lifting us up.

The third of the Four Immeasurables of Buddhism, as defined online:

Metta (loving kindness)
Karuna (compassion)
Mudita (sympathetic joy or empathy)
Upekkha (equanimity)

Sympathetic joy, or empathy, I have long taken to indicate the kind of genuine delight that one can feel at the good fortune of others. Unfortunately, in the context of our prevailing dog-eat-dog, winner-take-all, loser-victim mentality — the emerging tribal take on social and economic standing in America — this fulsome embrace of the success of others has become a diminishingly rare commodity, if we are to believe the daily reporting. Your winning at the game of life means that I must be losing. As if there is a finite store of happiness, from which any one’s individual achievement, or gain, necessarily takes away from the total available to others.

However, if empathy has a more substantial base than its conventionally positive, but dualistic or relativistic meaning — reduced to like-mindedness, or even pity — it must also be operative in negative mode. In certain cases, when and where we are not at all sympathetic but stubbornly indifferent, we may even find ourselves opposed to others. In which case, empathy for oneself tends to trump — no pun — any possibility of empathy for others.

Shakyamuni Buddha was reputed to have been able to read minds. One of the ten honorifics accorded him during his lifetime translates as something like “controller of men,” which is roughly the meaning of Matsuoka Roshi’s first dharma name, “Soyu.” Empathy plays a central, determinative part in this ability to win friends and influence people. But our inborn, naturally altruistic empathy may need an occasional boost from the nurturing, tender loving care of meditation.

My supposition is that Siddhartha Gautama was already a highly sensitive youngster, becoming estranged from existence itself, owing to the pain and suffering he had witnessed in his life. Like Master Dogen, he witnessed the death of his own mother at an early age. But his realization in meditation during his mid-thirties must have engendered the emergence of an even deeper and broader sensibility for the suffering of others. He clearly was a natural empath, born of magnanimous and nurturing mind, innately endowed with compassionate traits. Which were only amplified in, and by, his intense meditation under that fig tree.

In the Surangama Sutra, attributed to Buddha, he suggests that it is possible, and even probable, that his followers will themselves develop such paranormal powers (Skt. siddhis) through their own meditation. One of which would be this ability to “know others’ minds.” In the “Fifty Warnings” attached to this sutra, cautionary tales against falling into certain states of delusion (Skt. mara), he offered specific spoiler alerts, flagging the likelihood of getting stuck at various stages of the process, ten in each of the Five Skandhas.

By misinterpreting fifty gobsmackingly vivid meditative experiences that Buddha describes in meticulous detail — occurring at remote passes on the parallel track of transcending ordinary perception of reality — your average monk or nun might come to believe, falsely, that they are now fully enlightened. When, truth be told, they still have a long way to go, before finally getting off the train at anuttara samyak sambodhi, the end of the line.

He also admonished them not to demonstrate any such abilities to others, as their audience might also get the wrong idea, that gaining such seemingly mystical or magical powers is what the practice of the Noble Eightfold Path is all about. Too soon. Wait — there’s more. Just keep on keepin’ on, no matter whatever fantastic or fabulous transformation seems to have taken place. You are not home free yet.

It is worth mentioning that at this time there were apparently any number of clever charlatans and would-be magicians plying their trades of trickery in the public marketplace, masquerading as genuine sages (Skt. sadhu) or seers. Buddha apparently did not want his followers to settle for a “me too” position in the contemporaneous war of ideas, competing for the attention of the hoi polloi.

This throughline of the teaching further suggests that in Buddha’s case, he had persevered, making it all the way down and through the rabbit hole, and all the way back. In other words, he did not fall for the various off-ramps that Mara (the spirit of delusion), offered up to sidetrack him, that long dark night under the Bodhi tree. Even the daughters of Mara, with their seductive wiles, were unable to distract the young prince from his single-minded focus on penetrating the primordial koan of suffering existence. According to the story, he had already been there, done that, with many a merry maid, under the direction of his doting father, whose game plan was to keep him in thrall to the sensory pleasures of the world, so that he would succeed to his inheritance, the leadership of the Shakya clan. But young Siddhartha was not buying it. He had other fish to fry, starting with himself.

Because Buddha was able to resist the temptations of fantasy and overcome the nightmares of fear, if we are to believe the story — doggedly persisting in the face of all resistance — he eventually emerged from the other side of the wormhole. In other words, he went full circle through the looking glass, returning to whence he had launched his excellent adventure, exploring the new frontier of mind-only. He came home again, the prodigal son, but home had been miraculously transformed into the entire universe. Yet nothing special, indicated by his touching the Earth.

But his enhanced empathy, for himself and his intimately personal causes and conditions, extended to include all beings. It had to be an even more painful embrace of universal suffering, than had been his initial, self-centered view of suffering that drove him to the cushion. Fortunately, his profound, newfound insight swayed him to try to help all others, the very beginning of the bodhisattva vow.

So compassion turns out to be just one of those things — as one of the Supremes famously said of pornography — difficult to define definitively. But you know it when you feel it. When you feel true compassion, however, it will not be compassion for others. It will be compassion for your sorry self. And it will not be coming from yourself.

Along with all the other findings, conclusions, and recommendations that formed the deliverables of Buddha’s contract with humanity, compassion fits all three. He found that it constitutes a description of reality, concluded that it is a fundamental law of sentient existence, and recommended a big dose as a prescription for negotiating the Path. At once a cause, as well as an effect, compassion is a natural attribute of the Way. It is only natural that we realize it, the sooner the better.