Altruism and The Six Perfections

by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

The main theme of Buddhism is altruism based on compassion and love. The feeling of compassion is important whether you are a believer or a nonbeliever, for everyone shares or feels the value of love. When we human beings are small children, we very much depend on the kindness of our parents; without their kindness it would be difficult to survive. Again, when we become old, we very much need the kindness of others — we are dependent on it. Between those two — childhood and old age — we are quite independent, feeling that since we have no need to depend on others, we ourselves do not need to practice kindness. This is wrong.

Those engaged in the practice of compassion feel much happier internally — more calm, more peaceful — and other people reciprocate that feeling. Through anger real peace, friendship, and trust are impossible, but through love we can develop understanding, unity, friendship, and harmony. Thus, kindness and compassion are the most important things, precious and valuable.

We human beings have a sophisticated brain as a result of which we have developed much material progress. However, if we balance external development with internal development, we can utilise material things in the right way. At the same time as we enjoy material progress, we will not lose the value of humanity.

Because compassion and altruism are so important, I will explain a little from the Buddhist teaching on how to practice them. The type of good attitude about which I am speaking is a feeling, when faced with choosing your own or others’ welfare, to choose others’ welfare rather than your own. Cherishing others’ interests and neglecting your own cannot be developed immediately; training is needed. In Buddhism there are two main techniques for developing such an altruistic attitude, one called the equalising and switching of self and other and another called the seven fold quintessential instructions of cause and effect. For the first the theory of rebirth is not necessary, whereas for the latter it is. As I have explained the first elsewhere, I will talk about the seven old quintessential instructions of cause and effect today.

In order to have strong consideration for others’ happiness and welfare, it is necessary to have a special altruistic attitude in which you take upon yourself the burden of helping others. In order to generate such an unusual attitude, it is necessary to have great compassion, caring about the suffering of others and wanting to do something about it. In order to have such a strong force of compassion, first you must have a strong sense of love which, upon observing suffering sentient beings, wishes that they have happiness —  finding a pleasantness in everyone and wishing happiness for everyone just as a mother does for her sole sweet child. Again, in order to have a sense of closeness and dearness for others, you must first train in acknowledging their kindness through using as a model a person in this lifetime who was very kind to yourself and then extending this sense of gratitude to all beings. Since, in general, in this life your mother was the closest and offered the most help, the process of meditation begins with recognising all other sentient beings as like your mother.

This system of meditation, therefore, has seven steps:

1 recognising all sentient beings as mothers

2 becoming mindful of their kindness

3 developing an intention to repay their kindness

4 love

5 compassion

6 the unusual attitude

7 the altruistic intention to become enlightened.

To do this meditation, it is necessary to know about the process of rebirth. The final reason showing that there is rebirth is that your consciousness, being an entity of mere luminosity and knowing, must be produced from a former moment of consciousness — from a former entity of luminosity and knowing. It is not possible for consciousness to be produced from matter as its substantial cause. Once consciousness is produced from a former moment of consciousness, a beginning to the continuum of consciousness cannot be posited. In this way, the general and most subtle type of consciousness has no beginning and no end; from this, rebirth is established.

Since rebirths are perforce beginningless, everyone has had a relationship with yourself like that of your own mother of this lifetime. In order to train in such recognition, it is necessary first to have a mind of equanimity. You begin by noting that within our minds we have three main categories for others — friends, enemies, and neutral beings. We have three different attitudes towards them: desire, hatred, and a neglecting indifference. When these three attitudes are generated, it is impossible to generate an altruistic attitude; therefore, it is important to neutralise desire, hatred, and indifference.

To do this, it helps to reflect on rebirth. Since our births are beginningless, there is no limit to their number; thus, it is not definite that those who are now our friends were always friends in the past and that those who are now our enemies were always enemies in the past. Even in terms of this one lifetime, there are persons who early in your life were enemies but later on turned into friends and others who were friends early in the life but later on became enemies. Hence, there is no sense in one-pointedly considering a certain person to be just a friend and another person to be just an enemy.

When you contemplate in this manner, the one-pointed apprehension of some persons as friends and others as enemies and the consequent generation of desire and hatred will become weaker in strength. Imagine in front of yourself three people — a friend, an enemy, and a neutral person — and, while observing them, consider that there is no certainty that any one of them will at all times either help or harm. It is important to do this meditation with regard to specific persons and not just all sentient beings in general, the latter being too vague for a change of attitude to apply to specific people. Gradually, a sense of equanimity will develop toward these three, after which you can extend this feeling slowly toward other beings.

When you have undergone this change, the next step is to consider that since everyone’s births have been beginningless and thus limitless in number, every single person has been your best of friends, parent or whatever, over the course of lifetimes. Taking this realisation as a basis, you can slowly develop an attitude considering all sentient beings to be friends.

Then, consider the kindness that they individually afforded to you when they were your parents. When they were your mother or father, usually the best of all friends, they protected you with kindness just as your parents in this lifetime did when you were small. Since there is no difference in the fact that people have been kind to you whether they expressed that kindness recently or a while ago, all beings have equally shown kindness to you either in this lifetime or in other lifetimes; they are all equally kind.

Also, even when others were not your parents, they were very kind to you. This is because most of the good qualities that we have are produced in dependence upon other persons. As I will be explaining later, the practice of the six perfections depends almost entirely on other sentient beings. Similarly, in the initial practice of ethics, in the abandonment of the ten non-virtues — killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, divisive talk, harsh speech, senseless chatter, covetousness, harmful intent, and wrong views — these are mostly done in relation to other sentient beings. In addition, even in our present lifetime, all these many facilities that we enjoy — nice buildings, roads, and so forth—are produced by other people. Also, in order to become enlightened you have to engage in the important practice of patience, and in order to practice patience you need an enemy; thus enemies are valuable.

If you consider the matter in depth and in detail, even great enemies who for a period of time single-pointedly harmed you extended great kindness to you. The reason for this is that from an enemy you can learn real tolerance and patience whereas from a religious teacher or your parents the strength of your tolerance cannot be tested. Only when faced with the activity of enemies can you learn real inner strength. From this viewpoint, even enemies are teachers of inner strength, courage, and determination. Due to having an enemy, you also may come closer to reality, peeling off pretensions.

When altruism is practised, enemies are not to be neglected but should be cherished even more. So, instead of getting angry at your enemies you should think to repay their kindness, for one should repay any kindness that has been extended to oneself. If you did not repay it, it would be vulgar.

After becoming mindful of others’ kindness, a feeling to repay that kindness comes. How is it to be repaid? The next step is to generate a sense of love, wishing for the happiness of all sentient beings, wishing that beings bereft of happiness have happiness and all of its causes. As much as you view sentient beings with love, finding a sense of pleasantness in everyone and cherishing them, so much do you generate the next step, compassion, which is a wish that they be free from suffering and all of its causes.

The generation of love and compassion involves a change of attitude on your own part, but the beings who are the objects of these feelings are still left suffering. So, having generated love and compassion, the next step is to extend these altruistic attitudes beyond just the thought, “How nice it would be if they were free from suffering and its causes and came to possess happiness and its causes,” and develop the stronger thought, “I will cause them to be free from suffering and its causes and to be endowed with happiness and its causes.” Here, you develop the strong determination not just to generate such good attitudes in mind but actually to free those beings from suffering and establish them in happiness through your own effort.

This high intention will endow you with great courage to take on the great burden of all sentient beings’ welfare. When you have this strength of mind, as great as the hardships are, so great will become your sense of determination and courage. Hardship will assist your determination.

Not only for practitioners of religion but also for other people, courage is important. The saying that where there is a will there is a way is indeed true. If when we get into a difficult situation our will or courage lessens and we fall into the laziness of feeling inferior, thinking that we could not possibly accomplish such a difficult task, this diminishment of will cannot protect us from any suffering. It is important to generate courage corresponding to the size of the difficulties.

The helping of others refers not just to giving food, shelter, and so forth but also to relieving the basic causes of suffering and providing the basic causes of happiness. For instance, in society usually we do not just give food and clothing to people but try to educate them so that they can develop to the point where they can take care of their own lives. Similarly, in the Bodhisattva practices one does not just give persons temporary material things to relieve them of poverty but also teaches them, so that they themselves will know what to adopt in practice and what to discard from within their behaviour.

In order to teach these things to others, first it is necessary to know persons’ dispositions and interests as well as to know the beneficial doctrines exactly as they are without omission or error. To help others, you must have many capacities. Therefore, as a branch of the process of helping others, it is necessary to achieve the enlightenment in which the obstructions preventing realisation of all objects of knowledge are utterly removed.

For a Bodhisattva who is seeking to help others, from among the obstructions to liberation and obstructions to omniscience, the obstructions to omniscience are worse; they are what a Bodhisattva wants to get rid of most of all. In fact, there are even cases of Bodhisattvas using afflictive emotions, which are obstructions to liberation, to aid others. Nevertheless, since the obstructions to omniscience are predispositions established by the conception of inherent existence (the chief of the obstructions to liberation), it is necessary first to remove that conception of inherent existence. Hence, for a Bodhisattva to accomplish others’ welfare in a complete way, it is necessary to remove both obstructions, those to liberation and those to omniscience.

The complete removal of the afflictive obstructions is called liberation; this is the state of a Foe Destroyer (arhan, dgra bcom pa). The removal, in addition, of the obstructions to omniscience is  called Buddhahood, a state of omniscience; this is sought in order to be of full use to others. A mind which, for the sake of sentient beings, seeks to achieve such highest enlightenment is called a mind of enlightenment — an altruistic intention to become enlightened. Generation of this attitude is the last of the seven cause and effect quintessential instructions.

Within Buddhism this is the best of all altruistic attitudes. When this altruism is transformed into action, you engage in practising the six perfections: giving, ethics, patience, effort, concentration, and wisdom. There are three types of giving — the giving of resources, of one’s own body, and of roots of virtue. It is the most difficult to give away your own roots of virtue, and it is also the most important. When you have a strong sense of giving and dedicating to others your roots of virtue, you no longer seek for any reward for yourself. Even though mere giving can be done by those seeking their own benefit, a Bodhisattva’s giving is not involved in selfishness at all.

There are many types of ethics, but with regard to the Bodhisattva ethics the main practice is to refrain from or to restrain selfishness. In Sanskrit, the word “ethics” is shıla, which is etymologised as meaning “attainment of coolness.” When persons possess ethics, their minds have a peacefulness or coolness free from the heat of regretting what they have done.

With respect to patience, there is the patience of not worrying about harm from an enemy as well as the patience that is voluntary assumption of suffering and the patience of bringing about the welfare of sentient beings. The patience that is the voluntary assumption of suffering is very important. It is a case of not withering in the face of suffering and serves as a basis for increasing effort in order to oppose the roots of suffering.

Effort is crucial in the beginning for generating a strong will. We all have the Buddha nature and thus already have within us the substances through which, when we meet with the proper conditions, we can turn into a fully enlightened being having all beneficial attributes and devoid of all faults. The very root of failure in our lives is to think, “Oh, how useless and powerless I am!” It is important to have a strong force of mind thinking, “I can do it,” this not being mixed with pride or any other afflictive emotion.

Moderate effort over a long period of time is important, no matter what you are trying to do. One brings failure on oneself by working extremely hard at the beginning, attempting to do too much, and then giving it all up after a short time. A constant stream of moderate effort is needed. Similarly, when meditating, you need to be skillful by having frequent, short sessions; it is more important that the session be of good quality than that it be long.

When you have such effort, you have the necessary “substances” for developing concentration. Concentration is a matter of channelling this mind which is presently distracted in a great many directions. A scattered mind does not have much power. When channelled, no matter what the object of observation is, the mind is very powerful.

There is no external way to channel the mind, as by a surgical operation; it must be done by withdrawing it inside. Withdrawal of the mind also occurs in deep sleep in which the factor of alertness has become unclear; therefore, here the withdrawal of the mind is to be accompanied by strong clarity of alertness. In brief, the mind must have stability staying firmly on its object, great clarity of the object, and alert, clear, sharp tautness.

With respect to the last perfection, wisdom, there are in general many types of wisdom; the three main ones are conventional wisdom realising the five fields of knowledge, ultimate wisdom realising the mode of subsistence of phenomena, and wisdom knowing how to help sentient beings. The main one being explained here is the second, the wisdom realising selflessness.

With regard to selflessness, it is necessary to know what “self ” is — to identify the self that does not exist. Then one can understand its opposite, selflessness. Selflessness is not a case of something that existed in the past becoming non-existent; rather, this sort of “self ” is something that never did exist. What is needed is to identify as non-existent something that always was non-existent, for due to not having made such identification, we are drawn into the afflictive emotions of desire and hatred as well as all the problems these bring.

What is this self that does not exist? In this context, “self ” refers not to the person or “I” as it usually does but to independence, something that exists under its own power. You should examine all types of phenomena to determine if they exist under their own power, to see whether they have their own independent mode of subsistence or not. If phenomena do exist under their own power, then when you investigate to find the object designated, it should become clearer and clearer.

For instance, consider your own person (the usual type of “self ”) or “I.” The “I” appears from within the context of mind and body; however, if you investigate these places from which it appears, you cannot find it. Similarly, with regard to this which we point out as a table, if you are not satisfied with its mere appearance but investigate its nature, searching among its various parts and separating out all of its qualities and so forth, there is no table left to be found as the substrate of those parts and qualities.

The fact that things are not findable under analysis when you search to find the object designated indicates that phenomena do not exist under their own power. Objects are not established objectively in and of themselves but do indeed exist; even if under analysis I search to find the table and cannot find it, if I hit it with my fist, it will hurt my knuckles. Thus, its existence is indicated by my own experience. However, that it cannot be found under analysis indicates that it does not exist in its own objective right, and thus since it exists, it is said to exist through the power of a subjective conventional consciousness.

That objects exist in dependence upon a subjective designating consciousness is the same as saying that they are only nominally existent. Therefore, with respect to your “I” or person, when you search to find it among its bases of designation, mind and body, it cannot be found, and thus there is just the mere “I” that exists through the force of conceptuality.

How things appear and how they actually exist differ greatly. A person engaging in practice of the perfection of wisdom does this kind of analysis and then examines how things appear in ordinary experience, alternating analysis and comparison with the usual mode of appearance in order to notice the discrepancy between the actual mode of subsistence of phenomena and their appearance.

In this way the inherent existence which is the object of negation will become clearer and clearer. As much as the object of negation becomes clearer, so much deeper will your understanding of emptiness become. Finally, you will ascertain a mere vacuity that is a negative of inherent existence.

Since emptiness, from between positive and negative phenomena, is a negative phenomenon and, from be tween affirming negatives and non-affirming negatives, is a non-affirming negative, when it appears to the mind, nothing will appear except an absence of such inherent existence — a mere elimination of the object of negation. Thus, for the mind of a person realising emptiness there is no sense of, “I am ascertaining emptiness,” and there is no thought, “This is emptiness.” If you had such a sense, emptiness would become distant. Nevertheless, the emptiness of inherent existence is ascertained and realised.

After such realisation, even though whatever phenomena appear to exist in their own right, you understand that they do not exist that way. You have a sense that they are like a magician’s illusions in that there is a combination of their appearing one way but actually existing another way. Though they appear to exist inherently, you understand that they are empty of inherent existence.

When phenomena are seen this way, the conceptions that superimpose a sense of goodness or badness on phenomena beyond what is actually there and serve as a basis for generating desire and hatred lessen; this is because they are based on the misconception that phenomena are established in their own right. On the other hand, those consciousnesses that have a valid foundation increase in strength. The reason for this is that the meaning of emptiness is the meaning of dependent-arising. Since phenomena are dependent-arising, they are capable of in crease and decrease in dependence upon conditions.

In this way, cause and effect are feasible, positable, and once cause and effect are validly positable, it can be posited that bad effects such as suffering can be avoided by abandoning bad causes and that good effects such as happiness can be achieved by training in good causes. If, on the other hand, phenomena did exist in their own right, they would not depend on others, and if they did not depend on others, cause and effect would be impossible. Thus, once dependence is feasible, causes and effect can be posited, and if dependence were not feasible, causes and effects could not exist. The final reason proving that things are empty of inherent existence is just this dependence on causes and conditions. When people do not understand this doctrine well, they mistakenly think that because phenomena are empty, there is no good and bad, no cause and effect. This is complete misunderstanding.

It is so important to be able to posit and have conviction in cause and effect that it is said that between giving up belief in the cause and effect of actions and giving up belief in emptiness, it is better to give up the doctrine of emptiness. Also, due to the importance of having belief in cause and effect, various explanations of emptiness are given in the Middle Way and Mind-Only Schools. In some systems of tenets it is even accepted that phenomena inherently exist because without analytically findable existence many persons cannot posit cause and effect for the time being.

Knowledge of the final mode of subsistence of phenomena must be within the context of not losing the cause and effect of actions conventionally; if in an attempt to understand the final mode of subsistence one lost the presentation of conventionally existent cause and effect, the purpose would be defeated. Just as children must go to primary, secondary, and high school before going to college or university — proceeding to the higher levels based on the lower — so, it is in dependence on having gained ascertainment with respect to the cause and effect of actions that later the profound view of the emptiness of inherent existence is ascertained without losing the earlier conviction in cause and effect and its consequent practices.

If someone thought that because phenomena are empty there could not be any good or bad, even if that person repeated the word “emptiness” a thousand times, he or she would be moving farther and farther away from the meaning of emptiness. Hence, a person who has great interest in emptiness should pay great heed to the cause and effect of actions.

That, in brief, is the practice of the perfection of wisdom. These six perfections are the heart of a Bodhisattva’s implementation of altruism.