Unselfish Joy: A Neglected Virtue  

by Natasha Jackson
(From Metta, The Journal of the Buddhist Federation of Australia, Vol. 12, No. 2.)

Mudita — unselfish or sympathetic joy — is one of the most neglected topics within the whole range of the Buddha Dhamma, probably because of its subtlety and of the wealth of nuances latent within it. Besides getting honorable mention within the context of The Four Divine Abidings (brahma-vihara), few commentators have had much more to say about it apart from explaining that it means "sympathetic joy at the good fortune or success of others." Only one notable writer, Conze (in Buddhist Thought in India), has had the insight to suggest that mudita, i.e. sympathy, is a pre-requisite of metta (loving-kindness) and of karuna (compassion). He thus names appreciation as one of the components of mudita. How right he is! For one cannot appreciate another person without seeing some good in him. If one does not appreciate the other person in the slightest degree, one would be hard put to experience joy at any stroke of good fortune or success that may befall him. To stimulate feelings of pleasure when, in fact, one feels none, would be the grossest of hypocrisy. Thus, mudita tacitly implies looking for the good in others and learning to recognize and admire what good there is.

Likewise, if one has a misanthropic view of mankind, regarding people as essentially evil and not worth being concerned about, one cannot, on the face of it, make much headway with any of The Four Divine Abidings. To have a sympathetic attitude towards human beings does not betoken an idealization of man, but rather a realistic appraisal: that, though often in error and grievously at fault, man has, nevertheless, the potential to rise above his darkness and ignorance into the light of knowledge and even to undreamed of heights of Nirvana. Unless one has that measure of faith and confidence in mankind which the Buddha himself had, the practice of metta and karuna is impossible. Thus, the broadest and most simple aspect of mudita as sympathy towards mankind, is also the most basic and important.

To regard mudita as being relevant only on certain relatively rare occasions when our friends and acquaintances come into a bonanza of some kind, is to fragment it and render it trivial, thereby missing the essential matrix. It should not be regarded as a matter of turning on a tap from which mudita will gush forth. There should be, in a certain sense, a quiet stream of sympathy and understanding flowing within the individual all the time. Though, to be sure, it does also mean developing the capacity to participate in another person's finest hour and doing so spontaneously and sincerely. It is indeed a depressing fact that people are much more ready to sympathize with the misfortunes of others than to rejoice with them, a psychological quirk in people which wrung from Montaigne the ironic statement:

There is something altogether not too displeasing in the misfortunes of our friends.

Turning back to the essential matrix of mudita as sympathy towards mankind, faith in its potential for good and acceptance of its worthwhileness, this is precisely what is lacking in the world today. There is abroad a kind of cosmic gloom and, among some large sections of people, a feeling of defeatism. Probably the scene is largely colored by the shadow of the hydrogen bomb and the various other horrible weapons of destruction which we know the nations are so busy in manufacturing. All in all, too much has happened in too short a time. More scientific and technological discoveries have been telescoped into the last fifty (or is it thirty?) years than in the previous five hundred, and the total result is, at the moment, of dubious benefit to humanity as a whole, though of inestimable worth to the new millionaires who have managed to muscle in on the expanding economy. Electric and nuclear power, the spectacular forging ahead of communication, transport and industry have brought in their wake such negative by-products as over-population, more and more urbanization into colossal, concentrated centers, such as Tokyo, New York, and London (and even Sydney and Melbourne), which, in turn, has given rise to other unfortunate results, both physical, and psychological: pollution from industrial waste, destruction of natural resources; individual de-socialization, alienation, stress, as evidenced by the delinquency figures, the drift to drugs, character disorders, feelings of the meaninglessness of life, rise in crime, wanton destructiveness (a sure symptom of frustration and an unlived life), despair, suicide. We know that such ills have always existed in society, and that probably they always will to some degree, but the frightening thing about the present situation is that they are insidiously increasing, in spite of the fact that many people, and especially the youth, have never had it so good. As it is, man feels more insecure than ever, more uncertain and lost. Viewing these symptoms, many people throughout the world have drawn the conclusion that man has arrived at the period of moral decline and disintegration and that humanity has become so depraved as to be hopelessly beyond redemption or recall. Such a view has always been characteristic of old age. We can, with a certain degree of amusement read the lines:

To whom do I speak today?
Brothers are evil,
Friends today are not of love.
To whom do I speak today?
Hearts are thievish,
Every man seizes his neighbor's goods.
To whom do I speak today?
The gentle man perishes,
The bold-faced goes everywhere...
To whom do I speak today?
When a man should arouse wrath by his evil conduct,
He stirs all men to mirth, although his iniquity is wicked...
The above admonition was composed in ancient Egypt during the Middle Kingdom, thousands of years ago, but the words are those which every generation hears.

There is a proneness in periods of crisis and transition, to conjure up in the mind a fantasy of a previous golden age, when people were of sterling worth and life was lived in accordance with the noble virtues. But, we may well ask, when was there such an age, and where? If people who harbor such quaint notions were to read history, they would realize that such a belief is just about as valid as that there ever was a time "when flowers bloomed for ever and sweethearts were always true," in the words of the old song. Ancient history and the Middle Ages are definitely OUT as far as morality is concerned. Without going so far back, merely a couple of hundred years, Smollett wrote this of eighteenth century England:

Commerce and manufacture flourished to such a degree of increase as has never been known in this island; but this advantage was attended with an irresistible tide of luxury and excess which flowed through all degrees of people, breaking down all the bounds of civil policy, and opening a way for licentiousness and immorality. The highways were infested with rapine and assassination; the cities teemed with the brutal votaries of lewdness, intemperance, and profligacy.

In the nineteenth century (relatively recently), Wordsworth wrote:

The wealthiest man among us is the best:
No grandeur now in nature or in book
Delight us. Rapine, avarice, expense,
This is idolatry; and these we adore.
Plain living and high thinking are no more;
The homely beauty of the good old cause
Is gone, our fearful innocence,
And pure religion breathing household laws.
And James Hemming, a modern writer in his book Individual Morality:

Nineteenth-century London was frequently shaken by the destructive antics of informally organized hooligan gangs of young aristocrats. Those young roughs, having idled away their days, spent their nights beating people up, smashing up coffee stalls, alarming women and such like — the Bucks, the Corinthians, and all their imitators and hangers-on. Such bands were following, somewhat less cruelly, in the tradition of the nefarious Mohocks, who terrorized eighteenth-century London.

Sexual propriety? Quoting again from Hemming:

Brothels in the nineteenth century were big business, and, laws to forbid living on the immoral earnings of women, after several rebuffs in Parliament, did not reach the statute books till 1885.

But this was in England, the most progressive country in Europe. There is no evidence for believing that conditions were better on the Continent.

Understandably, twenty-five years after World War II, we are still appalled by the memory of the Nazi gas-chambers and the genocide which was their aim. This is by no means an isolated instance of genocide. History bears witness to similar incidents of destructive hate, culminating in mass murder. The Albigenses were wiped out to a man, and in 1572, at the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve, thousands of Huguenots were slaughtered, Pope Gregory XIII commanding bonfires to be lit and a medal to be struck in celebration! The idea that the mass destruction of one's ideological enemies is justified was already old in the days of the Old Testament. Saul was commanded:

Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

All of the foregoing is not intended as apologetics justifying violence, bloodbaths, or individual or collective acts of immorality but merely to dispel the myth that there was ever a previous idyllic phase, when man could have said with some semblance of truth:

God's in His Heaven
And all's right with the world.
So, let us lay to rest forever the belief that in the past men were truer, kinder, more upright, and generally more worthy than they are today. Let us give that piece of romantic fiction the respectable funeral that it deserves. Our ancestors and predecessors were no better than we are, and we are certainly not worse than they were. In many respects we have improved considerably on the ways of our forbears. Actually, there has been a great deal of progress, considering that slavery hung on in England until 1772, in America till 1863, and serfdom in Russia till 1861. And, in spite of the injustices and lack of moral scruples that still exist, there is more awareness, kindliness, and sensitivity in many human societies than there has ever been before. Today when a national disaster of great magnitude occurs in a country, quite often the rest of the world rallies around and helps — perhaps not to the extent that it should, but nonetheless, to some extent. Such a broadening expansion of the human conscience would have been deemed a Utopian ideal in former times and impossible.

When acts of genocide were perpetrated in the past, people just accepted it: that was that, and there was nothing to be done about it. In our time, the whole world was revolted by the Nazi gas-chambers, eventually rose against the loathsome disease of Fascism and smashed it even thought it took the combined might of the allied force five years of bitter conflict to do so.

However, in the past, without exception, whatever was inflicted upon a people, they mostly took. Today they don't — they protest, they demonstrate, they kick up a fuss. They have become articulate because they have realized that the greatest evil of all is not poverty, racialism, or war but powerlessness. Naturally, such an unexpected show of interest in public affairs is embarrassing to governments accustomed to an inert and docile population and there is some wistful talk by diehards of "the silent majority," but the present indications are that "the silent majority" is likely to become a silent minority in the face of such urgent problems as over-population, and destruction of natural resources, which, if left unchecked, will make the earth uninhabitable within a foreseeable future. However, against this general tendency is the lamentable fact that nothing was done about the rape of Tibet, and even now there are no large-scale or forceful protests being made about the genocide that is being practiced in that country by the Chinese.

So, far from feeling dejected and dispirited about mankind, we should be hopeful and buoyant. There would be infinitely more cause for alarm and despair if people were as easy to manipulate as sheep or merely apathetic. The arguing and the restlessness throughout the world is about the principles on which we should run our lives, a struggle for values other than the profit motive, for ways and means to make possible greater co-operation between individuals and nations, and for moral maturity in coping with man's new powers and responsibilities. People discuss, argue, petition, protest, demonstrate because of their sympathy, compassion, and love for mankind. It is very difficult to differentiate between the three or to recognize precisely the line of demarcation where one ends and the other begins, because they are illimitable. There are, of course, others who see in these conflicts only hatred but this view is hardly tenable because it is much easier and much more comfortable to remain uninvolved, drifting with the current, nor swimming against it.

The Ven. Nyanaponika has summed up the interdependence of the Four Divine Abidings in the following quotation:

Love imparts to equanimity its selflessness, its boundless nature and even its fervor...

Compassion guards equanimity from falling into cold indifference and keeps it from indolent or selfish isolation. Until equanimity has reached perfection, compassion urges it to enter again and again into the battlefields of the world.

Sympathetic joy gives to equanimity the mild serenity that softens its stern appearance. It is the divine smile on the face of the Enlightened One.

From The Four Sublime States in The Wheel No. 6.