Many Americans who have adopted Buddhist practices view them as more self-help than religion. But, as philosopher Emily McRae writes, for many Buddhist thinkers, spiritual and moral ideas are inextricable from practices designed to transform patterns of thinking.
Citing work done by other modern philosophers regarding techniques for moral improvements found in ancient Greek traditions, McRae proposes a similar approach to Tibetan Buddhist philosophers writing in the lojong, or “mind-training,” genre over the past millennium. For them, the ultimate purpose of this work is liberation from the cycles of death and rebirth. And one inescapable part of that journey is a focus on compassion.
In the Tibetan tradition, compassion is a natural impulse, so the point is not so much becoming compassionate as removing impediments to it. These include desire or attachment, anger, ignorance, pride, and doubt, as well as intellectual misunderstandings.
McRae writes that one approach the Buddhist writers suggest to address these “afflictive states” is reflecting on their causes. For example, the fourteenth-century philosopher Tsongkhapa writes that being angry at someone who hits you with a stick makes no more sense than anger at the stick itself: “Just as the person impels the stick and so forth to do the harm, so hostility impels the person.”
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In other words, the Buddhist perspective calls for understanding individuals as impermanent constructs created by forces outside their control, making anger toward them illogical. McRae notes that it might seem contradictory to suggest that the victim of the attack take control over their understanding of the situation while granting no similar agency to the attacker. But this can be understood as reflecting the fundamental Buddhist distinction between conventional reality, in which there is a self who can choose how to view the aggressor’s behavior, and ultimate reality, in which the concept of an individual is empty.
“For beginners, it might be argued, such contemplations are an important first step for realizing emptiness even though the concepts implicit in them will, ultimately, be discarded,” McRae writes.
Tibetan Buddhist thinkers also offer suggestions outside of rational contemplation. One of these is “applying antidotes,” for example cultivating sympathetic joy as a method for transforming envy. Another is harnessing the power of the afflictive state, either by quietly observing its effects on our feelings and behaviors or by recognizing our kinship with other people who have experienced the same thing.
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“One cannot engage in this therapy without self-awareness, a nuanced and honest understanding of the contests of one’s mind, and an experimental approach to relating to feelings that are otherwise experienced as overwhelming,” McRae writes.
The final approach McRae discusses is allowing afflictive states to “self-liberate.” This depends on the Buddhist understanding of mental states as naturally impermanent, with a tendency to dissipate unless we actively maintain them. Buddhist teachers often recommend relaxing and cultivating an open state of mind that allows thoughts and feelings to come and go.
McRae suggests that these techniques offer ways of cultivating moral improvement not typically found in Western traditions.
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