Global Dialogues

1.

Today, many of us feel helpless and unable to intervene meaningfully in the larger political processes that drive our societies. These processes are propelled by intensely negative forces: a populist commitment to stoking resentment and aggression, to annihilating difference and mocking vulnerability; the pursuit of a narcissistic ethno-nationalism; a hatred of the Other that is articulated through vilification, persecution and, in the extreme case, expulsion. Those who do not conform to the dogmas of the tyrannical systems that dominate political processes across the planet are being marginalized, driven into enclosures, imprisoned, or exiled. It is easy, perhaps too easy, to sum up this situation as the outcome of a general move towards right-wing extremism. The harsher truth is that such a possibility was always implicit in the now evacuated and discredited space of centrist, liberal political discourse and practice.

The centrist, liberal understanding of democratic politics is premised on the model of agonism, a term made famous by Chantal Mouffe. In this model, the representatives of competing claims and interests engage in contestation, through debate, over the allocation of value and influence. While such agonistic debate should, ideally, unfold in a reasonable and collegial spirit, it cannot in actuality be distinguished from antagonistic conflict. Couple the populist manipulation of the drive to hate with a paradigm of politics premised on antagonism, and there can be no just, equitable, or compassionate outcome.

It seems ever more urgent, then, to craft ways in which we can build assemblies and communities based on the recognition of common vulnerability and shared purpose, while acknowledging and protecting the diversity of forms of being. In this context, it would be vital to renounce our long-held Enlightenment-era obsession with the citadel of the individual self, and to regard ourselves as dividual selves, responsive to our fellow sentient beings across species, to the challenges of crisis and catastrophe, our selfhood distributed across and entangled with the selfhood of others, and not sovereign and inviolate in its isolation. Might “love” be too strong a word for the recognition of such a web of interrelationship with others, embracing both the vibrancy and the risk of entanglement?

2.

As I dwell on these questions, I find myself turning back to the Buddhist conception of the four brahma-vihāras, or “sublime abodes.” Here, we find one of the most evocative images of an individual reaching out to embrace, and be embraced by, other beings in a shared condition of fulfillment. The brahma-vihāras enshrine the Buddha’s awareness that individual suffering is intimately bound up with the suffering of all sentient beings, and therefore, that individual enlightenment cannot be dissociated from collective redemption. For the Buddha was no melancholy elegist of suffering. Having delivered the bad news first—that the individual, in ordinary life, is a slave to the thirst of the appetites and the poison of thwarted desires—he passed on swiftly to the techniques of self-transformation by which happiness could be attained.

The Buddha begins by noting that suffering, dukkha, arises from tanhā, the selfish desire that causes us to crave for sensual gratification, possession and control. And since the world does not always cater to our whims, we are seized by frustration and inadequacy; we abandon ourselves to rage, hatred and lust, plunge deeper into the mire of delusion. But the self that can acquiesce in its own degeneration can also reconstruct itself by effort. To the Buddha, this principle translated itself as the disciplining of the mind and senses through the ārya-ashtāngikā-mārga, the Noble Eightfold Path that is the core of the Buddha’s dharma-teaching: perfection of understanding and purpose; of speech and conduct; of occupation and effort; of attention and meditation.

Inspired by this teaching, aspirants along the Buddha’s path take up residence in the four states of consciousness celebrated as the brahma-vihāras. These are maitri, karunā, muditā, and upekshā: loving-kindness, compassion, joy and equanimity. Elaborating on these states in his commentary, the Visuddhi-magga (The Path of Purification), the scholar Buddhaghosha points out that they are a practical means by which individuals may step out of their narrow individuality to realize the interrelatedness of life. Absorbed in meditation, “the disciples let their minds pervade the four quarters of the world with thoughts of loving-kindness. And so, recognizing themselves in all, they suffuse the whole world with love beyond measure.”

From this attitude of maitri—loving-kindness towards all, non-possessive love—is born karunā: compassion. It takes the active form of empathy with those who suffer, who have lost hope, who are sunk in anguish. As a condition of understanding, karunā melts down all the barriers of separateness. It leads, also, to muditā, a sharing in others’ happiness, a joy in others’ joy, the renunciation of envy and malice. Finally, having shared in the emotions of others, Buddhist meditators enter upon a condition of serene detachment, upekshā. They respond to the world neither with attachment nor with aversion; they stand quiet witness to the flow of events, watching with equanimity as every action brings into being its own series of consequences, and passes into the kaleidoscopic pattern of life.

In effect, the practice of the brahma-vihāras traces the bodhi-chitta-utpāda (literally, “the production of the illuminated consciousness”): the opening of a transcendental possibility of being, a “higher nature,” within the realm of ordinary human experience. This implies a gradual transformation of the individual through the overcoming of the “lower nature” from which we habitually operate: the hard-wired genetic stratum of consciousness that registers our bondage to reflexes and instincts inherited from our primate past or acquired while surviving in human society.

The cultivation of the “sublime abodes” constitutes, therefore, a deliberate going against the grain of our usual behavior, a shift from the conception of selfish survival to the conception of fulfillment based on altruism and interconnectedness.

3.

The practice of the brahma-vihāras is intended to liberate the self from the chains of obsession that bind it to the objects of its longing or hatred. The cornerstone of the practice is found in the Buddha’s teaching in the fifteenth chapter of the Dhammapada, the “Verses on Joy” (in Eknath Easwaran’s translation): “Let us live in joy, never hating those who hate us. Let us live in freedom, without hatred even among those who hate.” For the Buddha, joy consists not in returning hate with hate, but in refusing to be tainted by such a negative emotion: this refusal gives us freedom from the burden of harmful feeling.

In the Buddha’s sophisticated psychology, joy emerges, not from the pursuit of goals, but from the serenity of having freed oneself from such a pursuit. For the Buddha, the truly joyous person is not the hunter, but the witness. And the attitude of the Buddhist witness is to formulate a relationship with the world—with beings, objects, events—that does not violate the Other. The Buddha’s teaching of non-violence and self-restraint is articulated clearly in the Dhammapada (XVII, 221): “Give up anger, give up pride, and free yourself from worldly bondage. No sorrow can befall those who never try to possess people and things as their own.” Through this exercise of critical reason, we see that the Other ought not to be subjugated or objectified; we learn to resist the conquistador attitude.

The Buddha’s dharma translates, in interpersonal relationships, as attentiveness to the unease of the other; a sharing in the other’s anguish; a willingness to engage in dialogue and concede one’s errors and to measure distance with understanding. The point, in dealing with others, is to respect differences without permitting them to sour the quality of human relationship. We learn, moreover, to acknowledge the involvement of our future with that of all beings, the interweaving of our past with that of others. We see that we cannot assault the social and natural Other without assaulting ourselves; that we impair ourselves and our prospects when we set out to ruin our fellow beings and our ecology. Nor must this be a masochistic sacrifice of self for others: we realize, equally, that we can damage and throw others off balance by trying to destroy ourselves. Such is the complex realization that the Vietnamese Zen master and peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh, celebrates as “inter-being.”

4.

While we have the choice to live in delusion and act destructively towards ourselves and others, the Buddha and his inheritors—teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, U Ba Khin, and Ayya Khema—recommend another course. They remind us that our agitated lives are conducted by reference to habit and circumstance, custom normalized as temperament; we do not act independently, but merely react to stimuli. They suggest that we can liberate ourselves from these reflexes.

This brings us to the larger political implications of the individual practice of the brahma-vihāras. By its very definition, the dynamic of the “sublime abodes” connects two projects together: on the one hand, the individual practice of cultivating creative, skillful, and constructive states of mind; and on the other, the responsibility of translating this individual practice into a collective practice in the larger community. The bridging of the two projects is automatically a political act. For the flowering of the bodhi-chitta is an emancipatory impulse that liberates human agency and channelizes it beyond the private space of meditation, into a public theatre of engagement. The bodhi-chitta thus becomes an energy that dissolves all limiting structures: the hierarchies in which political relationships are constructed and the circuits through which social identities are organized and cultural values allocated.

Crucially, the flowering of the bodhi-chitta acts against the asymmetries implicit in these collective arrangements: asymmetries of opportunity and entitlement; of privilege and recognition; imbalances in the distribution of resources and the control of terrain, such that some classes, races, regions, and species dominate others. The practice of the brahma-vihāras, in these circumstances, cannot be confined to sympathy, pity, or condescending charity. It can be meaningful only when practiced in active mode—as an empathy with those in anguish, as a renewal of altruistic action, and a releasing of the self’s capacities for love, consideration, compassion, and hope towards all beings.

Far from being a silver bullet, this is a challenge that must be negotiated constantly. How does one cultivate constructive states of mind and the higher nature, while working in situations fraught with possibilities of resentment and frustration, laden with a sense of historical wrong and the rage of the dispossessed? In managing such paradoxes, the practice of the brahma-vihāras becomes a praxis, an affirmation of solidarity; it provides a basis for the possibility of building coalitions across differences and sustaining transformative resistance.

Ranjit Hoskote is a poet and critic who addresses cultural pluralism from the local to the global.