Compassion: Cultivating Positive Emotions

By SURESH JINDAL

Cultivating Positive Emotions

All major traditions in the world agree that negative emotions cause both physical and mental suffering. To be happy and free of suffering we need to cultivate positive attributes like compassion, generosity and loving-kindness. Buddhism acknowledges that outer circumstances are often beyond our control.

It focusses on training the mind to be adaptable and less vulnerable. Only then can the mind get stabilised enough to be able to 'see' the ultimate nature of all phenomena. Buddhism postulates that phenomena exist in dependence of their causes and conditions; they do not exist inherently and independently. Our tendency to reify objects, that is, to de-contextualise them from their dependent nature, "is an inborn delusion that provides for a host of mental afflictions". It makes us grasp and cling to them, in the illusory belief that objects are permanent and self-existent.

Nowhere is this grasping at the "impermanent as permanent" more evident than in our self-cherishing and self-grasping at 'I', 'me' and 'mine'. The 'I', the name and form of a person, reifies itself into a doer, a controller, and a permanent being. Rupa , the form, is the body, and nama , name, is the designation attached to the feelings, perceptions, mental compositions and consciousness of a person. Together they are the skanda s, the five aggregates, the base to which the name 'person' is given. Like this fabrication of itself, 'I' also deludes itself into believing that other objects and persons are also as permanent as it is. 'I' cherish, grasp and cling onto those objects that give 'me' pleasures, power, wealth and fame, and abhors those that 'I' perceive to be thwarting or frustrating these worldly dharma s.

Attachment causes immense suffering because we are ignorant of the ultimate nature of things, parmartha . In the Tibetan Mahayana Shantideva wrote: "Where would I possibly find enough leather/ With which to cover the surface of the earth?/ Yet (wearing) leather just in the soles of my shoes/ Is equivalent to covering the earth with it. Likewise, it is not possible for me/ To restrain the external course of things;/ But should I restrain this mind of mine/ What would be the need to restrain all else?"

The mind apprehends an object and engages with it through the states of consciousness of the sense organs. Then the aggregates of feeling, perception and volition it nominates are labelled as good or evil. In his doctrine of Dependent Origination ( pratityasamutpada ) Buddha taught: "While none exist as independent things, we do exist in interrelationships with each other. Thus, we do not exist in alienation from other sentient beings and our environment; rather, we exist in profound inter-dependence...".

Once we experience and feel this inter-dependence of all living beings, we will cease to hurt, humiliate, exploit and kill another. We will want to free all sentient beings from suffering. This is karuna , compassion, which in turn gives rise to the responsibility to create happiness and its causes for all. This is maitri or loving-kindness. Negative emotions or klesha s arise from the three poisons of ignorance, attachment and hatred. A mind habituated to these negativities gets deluded. But the 18th century Tibetan Yogi Chekawa observed: "This mind that is full of faults/ Has one great quality,/ That it does whatever it is taught". The Six Perfections or paramita of generosity, ethics, patience, effort, meditation and wisdom are Buddhist antidotes to negativity.