Missing Mudita
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I was looking for the missing brahmavihara.
While walking around the beautiful grounds of the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre, Massachusetts, where I was spending three days in a self-directed silent retreat, I happened upon many outdoor benches. All are simple; most are unadorned. But a few of them—three to be exact— have one of the brahmaviharas, the “super virtues,” carved into them.
I first found upekkha: equanimity.
Then I happened upon karuna: compassion.
I went looking and found metta: lovingkindness.
And I kept looking, for I knew there are four brahmaviharas, also known as the four abodes, or four boundless states. But the missing bench was nowhere to be found. As I was getting ready to leave IMS, with my three days of focus and centering about to end, I asked a woman in the office where I might find the fourth. She didn’t know. She thought it might have been damaged in one of the ice storms and turned into kindling. Oh. A chance to meditate on the impermanence of things, but not so much a chance to explore these super virtues.
I never did find mudita. At least not on a bench at IMS.
No worries. I am used to looking for it, something I must do regularly, for it is not well taught in our competitive and individualistic society. Temperamentally, it is not my natural state. In some circumstances, the exact opposite of mudita arises within me: jealousy;self-interested, competitive impulses; even the rather unspiritual state of schadenfreude—pleasure in the misfortunes of others. It takes intention and effort, sometimes a mighty effort, to cultivate this quality of mudita within myself, and to renew an authentic commitment to it.
Just what is mudita? Sympathetic joy. Sharing in the joy of others—their accomplishments, their good fortune, their well-being, their existence. Sharing not just in the joy of those close to us, but in that of others. All others. Even the guy who just cut you off in traffic and made it through the light, while you are waiting at the longest. red. traffic. light. ever. It is moving away from any sense that the happiness of others might in some way threaten or impinge upon one’s own happiness or success. That, my friends, is not what they taught me in high school.
It wasn’t even something I had mastered by the time I arrived in seminary. I mean, I knew that one is supposed to be happy for others. I wasn’t raised in the wild. I had manners. Yet, I found I was sometimes…often…more than I care to admit feeling competitive towards and threatened by my peers. As if I were sure that someone else’s achievement or victory would diminish my own. I mean, weren’t we all competing, more or less, for the same finite jobs? I was definitely missing mudita as a spiritual guide!
But coming into real relationship with my peers and colleagues—both in person and virtually—knowing their stories, their gifts and their challenges, accepting their feedback (both the gentle and the painful) has multiplied my capacity for mudita. It comes now with more ease, like a seed that was planted and later takes root and grows. As Nyanaponika Thera writes:
The seed of mudita can grow into a strong plant which will blossom forth and find fruition in many other virtues, as a kind of beneficial “chain reaction”: magnanimity, tolerance, generosity (of both heart and purse), friendliness, and compassion. When unselfish joy grows, many noxious weeds in the human heart will die a natural death (or will, at least, shrink): jealousy and envy, ill will in various degrees and manifestations, cold-heartedness, miserliness (also in one’s concern for others), and so forth. Unselfish joy can, indeed, act as a powerful agent in releasing dormant forces of the Good in the human heart.
With practice, it has sometimes come as my first reaction. (Though, I confess, not always. But I can laugh at myself when I see jealousy or competition rising within me.) It seems to me that the practice of mudita is a way to live the affirmation of the interdependent web of all existence, to live into the truth (not the belief, not the thought) that there is No Separation. Because if your happiness is a source of my happiness, your success is a source of my joy, then we are bound to one another in deep ways.
What is it the great Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn has said about our purpose here? “We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.”
Mudita affirms and grows our natural bent towards mutual aid and co-operative action. It is the very renunciation of competition, of aggression, of jealousy and envy—all of which are also natural and exist within us, yet are best skillfully left to their own impermanence, rather than unskillfully practicing them until they become ruts in our brains and tendencies in our habits.
With my Unitarian Universalist eyes, I see mudita as a relational, covenantal version of humility. I am not the center of the universe—not simply because I am in relationship with you, but also because I experience joy centered not on my fortunes, but rather on yours.
Originally from Oregon, Karen raised her two adopted children (now young adults) in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts.There she took part in grassroots poetry groups, as well as building community support for queer families and adoptive families and all the myriad beautiful constellations of families.She came to Unitarian Universalism in her late twenties and maintains a meditation practice (often in need of practice!), and seek spiritual groundedness, within Insight Meditation, a Western form of Buddhism.
Karen has a blog (awakeandwitness.net) and sometimes publishes on Medium, also in conjunction with Quest for Meaning.
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- Missing Mudita - July 1, 2016
