Archive for January 2024
Equanimity
Equanimity is characterized as promoting the aspect of neutrality towards beings. Its function is to see equality in beings. It is manifested as the quieting of resentment and approval.[1]
1968, Winter, Canada
In March of 1967 I left the United States and became a resident of Canada. My reason for making the move was to avoid military service during the war in Vietnam, a war that I saw as pointlessly destructive. During my first year in Canada I was cultivating anger and resentment toward the country of my birth. The winter months of early 1968 were especially difficult. I was living alone in a small apartment in the basement of a modest house in Lethbridge, Alberta, a town in which I had few acquaintances and even fewer friends—one friend to be exact. I did a lot of writing that winter on a green Hermes typewriter. I wrote a novel, a one-act play, a few short stories, and some poetry. Writing was an emotional outlet, and it gave me something to do while I was smoking unfiltered Player cigarettes, but what I wrote was unreadable. Even I didn’t like reading what I had written. It was too angry, too didactic, too preachy, too dogmatic even for my unrefined tastes. Who wants to read the bellicose raving of a bitter and inexperienced twenty-two-year-old draft-dodger?
Fortunately for me, there was a decent bookstore in Lethbridge, and when I wasn’t banging out substandard literature on my Hermes, I went to the bookstore to purchase novels by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. On one of those visits to the bookstore, I happened to see a thin volume called Buddhist Meditation, published in 1956. Reading Conze’s Buddhism: Its Essence and Development in the previous year had piqued my interest in Buddhism. So I bought Buddhist Meditation, read it, and even began to try some of the contemplative exercises described in it. One set of exercises in particular that caught my attention was the four brahma-vihāras, often known in English as abiding with the divine or the divine abidings. That set of exercises consists in cultivating loving kindness (mettā), compassion (karuṇā), sympathetic joy (muditā), and equanimity (upekkhā), which are antidotes to respectively hatred, cruelty, envy, and resentment. This post is about the fourth of those abidings: equanimity.
I was amazed to learn that there were actually tools available for reducing the painful mental states of anger and resentment, that loving kindness and equanimity are skills that one can develop by putting those tools to regular use.
Brahma-vihāra: abiding with the divine
In traditional accounts it is said that the Buddha once came upon a mendicant whose religious practice was done for the purpose of seeing the god Brahmā face to face. The Buddha asked the mendicant how his devotional practice was working for him. Had he seen Brahmā face to face? The mendicant said he had not yet succeeded. On being questioned further, the mendicant admitted that he had never known anyone who had succeeded in seeing Brahmā face to face. The Buddha then asked what qualities a devotee expected to find in Brahmā. The mendicant replied that he expected Brahmā to have unconditional love toward all beings, to be actively responsive to those experiencing hardships, to be full of joy when beings have good fortune, and to pass no negative judgment on beings. The Buddha then said that he could not help the mendicant see Brahmā face to face, but he could teach him how to have unconditional love (mettā), compassionate responsiveness (karuṇā), sympathetic joy (muditā), and equanimity (upekkhā). Having those qualities would be tantamount to abiding with or even in Brahmā (brahmavihāra).
Many centuries after the Buddha lived and taught, the Theravādin monk Buddhaghose wrote a comprehensive manual of Buddhist practice called Visuddhimaggo, which has been translated into English under the titles The Path of Purification and the Path of Purity. The first section of that manual is dedicated to the development of good habits (sīla), the second section to mental concentration (samādhi), and the third to cultivating wisdom (paññā). In the second section a wide range of contemplative exercises are outlined in detail, one of them being the set of four exercises known collectively as abiding with the divine (brahma-vihāra). Buddhaghosa’s instructions on contemplative exercises were in fact the basis of much of Conze’s Buddhist Meditation.
What is equanimity, and how does it relate to the other divine abidings?
The quotation at the beginning of this blog post is Buddhaghosa’s concise description of uppekkhā.
Equanimity (upekkhā) has the defining characteristic (lakkhaṇa) of generating (pavatti) the mode (ākāra) of impartiality (majjhatta) toward sentient beings (sattesu); it has the essential property (rasa) of seeing (dassana) the similarity (samabhāva) in sentient beings; its manifestation (paccupaṭṭhānā) is the quelling (vūpasama) of aversion (paṭigha) and favoritism (anumaya).
The flagship of the divine abidings is the cultivation of friendship or loving kindness (mettā-bhāvanā). That exercise consists in learning to regard all beings as one regards oneself by acknowledging that all beings desire for themselves happiness and well-being. The other three divine abidings are particular expressions of friendship. Compassion is acting in response to a friend’s misfortune, that is, doing whatever one can to help reverse the misfortune. Sympathetic joy is the delight one feels when a friend experiences good fortune. Equanimity consists in accepting all one’s friends as they are rather than resisting them or being annoyed by them. It also consists in not playing favorites among one’s friends but rather loving them all equally. Buddhaghosa says that equanimity (or even-mindedness as Pe Maung Tin translated upekkhā) is the most refined expression of friendship
What are the obvious opposites of and the subtle obstacles to equanimity?
Buddhaghosa uses the expression “far enemy” to characterize a mentality that is obviously the opposite of the mode of friendship under consideration. For example, hatred, envy, and cruelty are the respective far enemies of loving kindness, compassion, and sympathetic joy. He uses the term “near enemy” to characterize a mentality close enough that an unwise person might mistake it for the mode of friendship that one is aiming for. Lust is the near enemy of loving kindness, since both lust and loving kindness are based on seeing the desirable qualities in another. Grief at not having one’s own personal aims fulfilled is the near enemy of compassion, since both such grief and compassion are occasioned by recognizing a misfortune. Worldly joy based on attachment to one’s own good fortune is the near enemy of sympathetic joy, since it shares with sympathetic joy an appreciation of prosperity.
As for equanimity, its near enemy is indifference, or simply being oblivious of another person’s conditions and thus not caring at all for another sentient being. What indifference and equanimity have in common is an absence of condemnation of another’s shortcomings. Equanimity involves ignoring another’s faults, while indifference involves being ignorant of them.
Equanimity’s far enemy is resentment or disapproval of others due to their perceived shortcomings. True equanimity consists in being aware of another’s qualities without passing negative judgment of the person but rather seeing that personal qualities are conditioned, often by conditions beyond a person’s control.
Why equanimity?
It seems to me that blaming others has been on the ascendency in the past decade, as have shaming others for their real or imagined flaws, passing negative moral judgment on others for their perceived imperfections, and assuming the worst of those whose words and deeds are deemed unacceptable. The sort of equanimity described by Buddhaghosa may not entirely eradicate those trends—I would be the first to admit that those tendencies have not been eradicated it myself—but the cultivation of equanimity is likely to have the effect of reducing those tendencies in oneself.
I have a feeling that in some quarters equanimity may be perceived as a weakness or as a kind of permissiveness that accelerates moral degeneracy. I would ask those who feel that way to ask themselves what problems, real or imagined, have ever been solved by resenting, blaming, shaming, and accusing others. Those who are struggling in various ways are more likely to ocercome their obstacles by being shown kindness and a helping hand than by being condemned or shunned or villified.
There is much more to say on this topic, but rather than saying more I have more important work to do. I have a mentality that could use more cultivation of loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.
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Sattesu majjhattākārappavatti-lakkhaṇā upekkhā, sattesu
samabhāvadassanarasā; paṭighānumayavūpasamapaccupaṭṭhānā… Visuddhimaggo, Pali Text Society editon, p. 318. The translation is that of Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli, The Path of Purification, p.344. An alternative translation is offered by Pe Maung Tin (The Path of Purity, p. 366): “Even-mindedness has the characteristic of evolving the mode of centrality as regards beings; its function is seeing the equality of beings; its manifestation is suppressing aversion and sycophancy.” I provide yet another translation in what follows. ↩
A call for secular spirituality
What does it mean to be secular?
The word “secular” derives from the calsssical Latin saeculum, which means the period of one human generation. The adjectival form of the word, saecularis, means pertaining to a generation, especially to the current generation. In medieval Latin the word saecularis came to refer to those concerns of the current era, which meant those concerns of life in this world, as opposed to the heavenly realm or the afterlife in general. During the time of the European Enlightenment, there was in some circles a celebration of political secularism, that is, government not dominated by the religious establishment. When the United States of America was being formed, several of the most influential founding fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and others strongly influenced by Enlightenment thinkers, favored a form of government that was free of the influence of religious dogmas of all kinds. Government was to be guided by moral principles, so long as that morality was secular and humanistic in nature. Their thinking was reflected in The First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which reads:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Congress is prohibited by that amendment from making any religion the established religion of the United States, and it is also prohibited from outlawing any religion or prohibiting people from practicing the religion of their choice. The United States, in other words, was meant to be a secular nation. There is, however, more to secularism than that. It is to those further dimensions of secularism that we now turn.
The generations now living and those to come
The need for secularism in the original sense of a focus on concerns facing our times has never been more urgent. The human race is collectively undermining the ability of its planet to sustain not only human life but the life of countless other species that live on the land and in rivers, ponds, lakes, lagoons, and oceans. This is a time in which human beings, the species doing the most to degrade biological habitats, must take stock of the consequences of habits they have cultivated during the past few centuries. Many, if not most, of those habits must be changed dramatically, and many must be abandoned altogether. Knowing which of those habits must be changed or abandoned requires the guidance of unbiased evidence-based thinking. Many of the traditional religions around the world are of little use in coming to terms with what must be done; some traditonal religions are actually obstacles to the kind of thinking that is required to solve the problems the human race has created for itself and for other species of plant and animal life. In recent human history there has never been a time in which there was a greater urgency to be secular. Being secular in that sense may be aided by having a poetic spirit.
What does it mean to be spiritual?
As with the word “secular,” it may be instructive to look at how the word was used in classical languages. The Latin word spiritus is derived from the verb spirare (to breathe, to blow). Spiritus, therefore, means breath. Spiritus was the word the Latin-speaking world used to translate the Greek πνευμα, which also means breath, or the vital principle that dwells within the soul (ψυχή, anima) and therefore distinguishes animate from inanimate beings. In the works of some of the Stoics, πνευμα (pneuma) was seen as the organizing principle of both the human ψυχή (psyché) and of the entire cosmos. It is in the latter sense that I like to use the word “spirit”; it is that which indwells and organizes everything in the universe and therefore that which unites the human being with all other beings, both animate and inanimate. It is that which Quakers call that of God in everyone (and I would add in everything), or what Hindus call ātman, or what Buddhists call Buddha-nature.[1]
Secular spirituality
The call to be secular in the sense of tending to the most urgent concerns of the present and future generations can of course be answered without any reference to being spiritual. One can study physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering and apply that knowledge to living sustainably on our planet. There are plenty of people who do that, and we all benefit from their commitment. What is gained by thinking in terms of spiritual secularism or secular spirituality is, for those who need it, a sense of personal engagement based on the realization that what is good for other living beings (and also for such inanimate beings as marshlands, rivers, prairies, and other ecosystems) is also ultimately good for oneself.[2] Caring for the well-being of the planet is a way of caring for one’s one physical health, one’s psychological health, and one’s character. Conversely, caring for one’s one physical health, one’s psychological health, and one’s character—in other words, living spiritually—entails caring for other human beings, for all animals, for all plants, and for the soil, the landbound waterways, and the oceans.
No one can tell another exactly how to be spiritually secular, but the more people learn for themselves how to be spiritually secular, the better off we, and those who have yet to come into this world after us, will be.
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I am not sure that there actually exists any single thing that indwells and organizes everything in the universe, but I do find it helpful to think and act as if there is such a thing. In other words, I think of the words “spirit” and “spiritual” not as metaphysical terms but as invitations to put one’s poetic imagination to good use. ↩
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There is a saying in Buddhism that everything that is parārtha (good for others) is also svārtha (good for oneself), and everything that is svārtha is also parārtha. The good news is that one never has to make a choice between serving otrhers and serving oneself, since the two services amount to the same thing. This idea is by no means unique to Buddhism. ↩
Out of a living silence 