Why cultivate compassion for awful people?
Hint: it isn't about them
A well-known story in Tibetan Buddhist circles is about Palden Gyatso, a Tibetan Buddhist monk who endured 33 years of jail and torture at the hands of the Chinese authorities after they invaded Tibet. Finally released in 1992, he fled to India where he met the Dalai Lama. During their time together, His Holiness asked him about the horrors he had faced in jail. The monk told the Dalai Lama that the greatest danger throughout had been the risk that he would lose compassion for his jailers.
It’s quite the most extraordinary insight! And a humbling one. But it has taken me some years to see beyond the dazzling saintliness of Palden Gyatso to understand his deeper meaning.
Palden Gyatso didn’t fear losing compassion for his jailers because that would break his bodhisattva vows or make him a bad monk or some other such thing. He knew that if he lost compassion there was only one way he could go: he would be consumed by anger. Eaten up with resentment at the colossal injustice of his situation. His time in jail would be made insufferably worse.
Photo: Palden Gyatso demonstrates the restraining devices he endured in jail
Feeling compassion for awful people isn’t about them
So, cultivating compassion for awful people isn’t necessarily about them. Depending who they are – terrorists, criminals, psychopaths, politicians - they may not even be aware of us. Even if they are people we know – colleagues, neighbours, family members - they probably don’t spend much time, if any, mulling over our thoughts and feelings.
Cultivating compassion actually has more to do with recognising that without compassion, all we will feel for awful people are hatred, anger, resentment, jealousy and every flavour of bitterness. It’s about recognising how extraordinarily toxic these emotions are to us.
Just as oil cannot co-exist with water, if we are constantly feeding our own personal hatred generator, we can say goodbye to equanimity, mental calm, inner peace, relaxed open-heartedness, benevolence and those qualities of mind that underpin a state of wellbeing. We are sabotaging our happiness, undermining our own capacity to flourish.
It's crazy when you think about it: there are people out there we’ve never met and who have never met us. And we allow them to occupy such a disproportionate and abhorrent presence in our mind, we cultivate so many compelling mental tropes and destructive emotions about them that we make ourselves thoroughly miserable. We sabotage our own fundamental wellbeing because of complete strangers.
Worse. The more we feed a particular pattern of thinking, the more ingrained that pattern becomes so that it continues even after its original cause no longer exists. We get into the habit of feeling anxious, outraged, depressed, fearful.
There’s no shortage of mind/body science revealing that prolonged mental stress translates to just about every kind of physical damage we don’t wish to have, from hypertension and chronic inflammation to skin rashes, a breakdown of our immune systems and digestion problems. In the long term, we physically do ourselves damage.
Palden Gyatso got all that. Despite his abject circumstances, he wasn’t going to let his jailers into his head. He wouldn’t allow their brutal treatment define him. Cultivating compassion, however difficult, enabled him to emerge after 33 years behind bars, not as a broken wreck but as a towering example of the power of compassion.
But how can we feel compassion towards people who are so irredeemably awful? Especially if everyone in our circle, and those who we respect, affirms their inhumanity? Even if we want to, how can we cultivate sympathy, or a way to look past their loathsomeness?
As so often, the Dharma responds to these questions with tools in two categories - the conventional and the ultimate.
What is it like to be them, right now?
‘Hurt people hurt people’ is a shorthand in the mental health profession for the fact that those who abuse were often abused themselves. Those who wield tyrannical power were often the victims of just such power earlier in their lives.
When I was a newcomer to Buddhism, asked to cultivate compassion for someone I regarded as ‘difficult,’ President Robert Mugabe instantly came to mind. The man who led my home country of Zimbabwe from a well-run breadbasket of Africa to a corrupt, economic basket case was tailor made for the role.
I knew something of his upbringing – an absent father and a mother who was impossible to please. Super-intelligent, emotionally stunted and socially awkward, he ran rings around his contemporaries, asserted himself as leader and consolidated power with the same emotional detachment he had experienced as a child.
President Mugabe was obsessed with security, having food tasters for meals and travelling everywhere in convoys of bullet-proof Mercedes with accompanying outriders and soldiers. He didn’t trust the security of hospitals in his own country or neighbouring South Africa, travelling to places like Malaysia and Singapore for medical treatment. Fear approaching paranoia, constant scheming to keep power, resentment about being eclipsed in stature by Nelson Mandela, presiding over the worst currency hyperinflation in human history – what was it like to be him?
Viewed through the lens of childhood and subsequent conditioning, we may glean similar insights about our own particular bogeymen – or bogeywomen. Insights that help account for their behaviour. Invariably, instead of using the mud of their early years to seek transcendence, they have become mired in it.
What will it be like to be them in the future?
Karma is any movement of mind and that which it motivates. As explained in my article What is karma, exactly? our beliefs, interpretations and patterns of thinking propel us towards happiness or unhappiness far more forcefully than any external factors like an accident or a lottery win. Those external events are, in Buddhist terminology, merely ‘contributing factors.’ The main causes for the reality we experience arise in mind itself.
When we hurt others and see ourselves hurting them, we put a seed in our mind. This is unavoidable. Just as unavoidable is that when the conditions are in place, that seed will ripen and we will see people hurting us.
What happens to the mind of someone who has created deeply ingrained habits of hatred, cruelty, suspicion and brutality? People who boast about what they can do to others and get away with it? President Mugabe, for example, used to brag ‘I have a degree in violence.’
What other result can there be than for such a person to experience the fruits of their actions? They may still retain some control of circumstances while they are alive. But if we accept that mind is formless and continues in a subtle state after death as a dynamic bundle of karmic potentiality, the future experiences of awful people really doesn’t bear thinking of.
Many beings on our planet, human and animal, are born into desperately harsh conditions. As long as the karma is created to experience such horrors, they will continue to be experienced. Furthermore, advanced meditators through the ages have always been able to perceive realms of consciousness beyond the two broad categories available to most of us – animal and human – and tell us that hellish states not only exist, but that for those who experience them, subjectively they seem to go on forever. Long after people on earth have forgotten their names, beings will still be enduring the consequences of their negativity.
Such are the realities unknowingly created by awful people.
Where are the awful people?
Reflecting on the inner lives of awful people now and in the future, are two conventional tools to help develop compassion. There’s also an ultimate tool, so-called because it invites us to answer the deceptively simple question: where is the awful person, exactly?
“How do you mean?” You may reply. “She’s right over there. Just look at the her!”
“That one?” our lama may confirm. “Some people tell me she’s very popular. They say that she’s the answer to all their prayers.”
“Only an idiot would say that,” we may reply.
The question is: where is the awfulness coming from?
The answer, of course, is from our minds. There is a human being out there, on that we’re all agreed, but what those person’s qualities are and how we view their behaviour, is coming from us. It’s our karma forcing us to see them the way we do, because we are just as much the product of karma as those who see differently. That’s the whole point. Karma is what makes us experience reality as we do.
We may believe that we are being objective. There may be many who support and concretise our version of reality, our understanding of past events and current dynamics that make our perceptions of an awful person seem indisputably, even empirically correct. But understanding what is shunyata takes us to a place where we can accept that there is no inherently existing awful person. That awfulness - like beauty - is in the eye of the beholder.
If we’re perceiving awfulness, where others perceive an array of positive qualities, at the very least we may accept that a wide range of perceptions – projections, Buddhists would prefer to call them – are possible. That what we project, how strongly we project it, how frequently we project it, has more to do with our personal reality show than what’s coming from ‘out there’.
If we don’t like the show, there are things we can do. We can walk out, and refuse to engage any longer. If an encounter is unavoidable, we may try to make it as brief as possible. Some people make valiant attempts to find something positive in the person, some action that redeems them - even if unintentionally so.
The real fix is to address the underlying cause. By deepening our understanding of shunyata, we work on removing the screen on which we have been projecting our reality show, because when we’re able to do that, there is no longer anywhere for the projection to land. Not only are awful people a projection of our own minds, we discover, but we ourselves are too! Who we are, everything we think about ourselves, all our fancies and follies are as much a projection of our own mind as our champions or nemeses.
In the absence of such projections, what we discover is a dramatically different understanding of who and what we are. Not a little bag of bones karmically-driven to like this one and dislike that one, but a consciousness that is boundless, that is beyond concept, and whose natural state is one of abiding serenity.
The merest inkling that this is our true nature is life-changing. And if it takes our perception of an awful person to force us down the path to this awareness then perhaps they have their uses! Maybe they can motivate us to do something no kindly lama or dear friend was able to persuade us to do: to go within, to come to recognise the true origin of awfulness, and to take meaningful steps to let go of it. If so, those appalling beings may just turn out to be not so much ‘awful people’ as our most precious treasures!
Summary
If we feel besieged by an awful person or people, it’s time to practice compassion - not for their sake, but for our own mental wellbeing.
How? Reflecting on their conditioning and mental state may give us some insight into the bleak reality of their worldview. Considering how every movement of their mind gives rise to a future effect, how every negative seed must ripen as a future experience, may also give rise to compassion.
Separately, by recognising that their awfulness is arising from our mind, that we own the projection, empowers us to apply the ultimate antidote: to understand shunyata. In so doing, we not only come to recognise that ‘awful people’ lack any inherent qualities. We also completely re-experience who and what we really are. We come to recognise that our ultimate nature transcends the dualistic compulsions of karmically-driven behaviour. If it takes awful people to propel us in such a direction so that we taste, for even a moment, the boundless benevolence that is our true nature, then thank goodness for them!
May ‘awful people’ be the mud that gives rise to an infinite abundance of lotuses!
Photo: Bringing lovely Snoopy home to a happy owner
I’d like to share a quick photo update from Twala Trust, the animal sanctuary in Zimbabwe you support. Twala takes care of both indigenous as well as domestic animals in rural Goromonzi, Zimbabwe. Many of the people living there have to get by on whatever they can farm on small blocks of land, as well as doing informal trading and odd jobs wherever they can find one. For the elderly and single women in particular, dogs are not just for company, but for security too. Paying subscribers sponsor Twala’s ‘Doggy Tuesday’ program, which helps not only the dogs, but the local community too.
These quick updates are from Sarah Carter at Twala:
“Snoopy’s leg was broken and she underwent a complex pinning to repair her femur, and was also sterilised. Now she’s a registered Doggy Tuesday member who will receive free lifetime care from Twala, including supplementary feeding and all veterinary care. With the financial burden lifted off this family, who have no formal income, Snoopy can be a valuable and loved member of the household while accessing the care she needs and deserves. This is always our aim - keeping dogs with their families wherever possible but making sure they have good quality of life. Everybody benefits from Doggy Tuesday!
Kindness keeps The Twala Trust Animal Sanctuary going, David Michie and his newsletter subscribers have provided long-term support to Twala and made it possible for us to build new care facilities, keep the lights on by assisting with expanding our solar power system, keep the animals fed, and cover the costs of the community outreach part of Doggy Tuesday that enables us to provide care for the dogs of elderly rural residents in our community. The friendship and support of David and his wife Koala makes a real difference, every day, to so many animals and people. “
My heartfelt thanks to each and every one of my subscribers who support the many vulnerable sentient beings, animal and human. 50% of your subscription goes to help them.
Cultivating compassion actually has more to do with recognising that without compassion, all we will feel for awful people are hatred, anger, resentment, jealousy and every flavour of bitterness. It’s about recognising how extraordinarily toxic these emotions are to us.
I affirm these words…so very true…there are many reasons to hate what is happening to people in our country at the hands of those without compassion. My task is to not mirror their own fears and evils, but to shower them and others with the mirror of compassion…maybe it will change them, but certainly it is an armor to protect myself
Thank you David. I always remember my teacher the late Rob Nairn telling me “Peter, you must look at everyone you
Meet in life no matter what they are like, kind or cruel they are your teacher and your compassion must go out to them. They are teaching you
Many things. Love and kindness. Or patience and calmness. They are all our teachers and we must embrace them”.
I know it’s difficult sometimes, I have been through it while working for a boss who disliked me and tried to have me fired. It went down to a meeting with lawyers present. In the end I lost my position in the higher archly and 40% salary cut. However, I knew he was leaving in 3 months. So I got up from the table, put my hand on his shoulder and thanked him, in front of the lawyers. I then walked out the office. 3 months later he had lost his huge title and job. The new boss came in and reinstated my pay and and gave me even more responsibility.
Compassion works.