The Buddhist Path Through Conflict, Anger, and Interdependence
An Interview with Jay Garfield
Jay Garfield is an American professor of philosophy specializing in Tibetan Buddhism, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, ethics, and hermeneutics. He has written prolifically on the intersection of Buddhist thought and contemporary philosophical problems. His major authored works include Engaging Buddhism: Why Does Buddhism Matter to Philosophy? (2015), Buddhist Ethics: A Philosophical Exploration, and Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self. In this conversation, conducted by Mohammad Hadi, he explores the practical application of Buddhist ethics — interdependence, the “near enemies” of virtue, and the transformation of perception — in the context of personal and collective political turmoil.
Mohammad Hadi: I’ve really studied two of your books: Losing Ourselves and Buddhist Ethics. I prepared my questions almost two or three months ago, but meanwhile, some things happened personally and collectively in Iran. This morning, I was thinking — I am in a different shape. I’ve undergone some emotional changes because of things happening in my country from the outside and the inside: the threat of war, demonstrations, and uprisings. What is your advice to me as a person interviewing you from the perspective of Buddhist ethics? Facing this emotional turmoil, what comes from Buddhist ethics to me concretely?
Jay Garfield: I would say several different things. One is to really direct attitudes of care and friendship towards yourself. Try to direct attitudes of care and friendship towards the people who are in Iran, as well as a kind of impartiality or equanimity — an ability to not allow yourself to be excessively stirred up by what’s happening, and to maintain a little bit of calm.
The reason for that is because, no matter what your position is regarding the events in Iran or any place else, you will be a more effective agent if you can remain calm. This ability to insulate your immediate emotions from what’s happening is extremely valuable. That requires you to pay attention to your own emotional reactions, to pay attention to the causes and effects of how you feel, and to really care for yourself but also to care for others. Ask the question not “What do I do?” but rather “What can I do to be most effective in this circumstance?”
That’s a very different question because very often our emotions lead us to very quick responses — to either anger or to excessive excitement — and when we do that, we become less effective agents. You always want to think of yourself as a member of a community, and if you’re a member of a community, you have responsibilities to that community. Your primary responsibility is to act clearly, calmly, and thoughtfully. I think that’s often one of the hardest things to do, but I think that’s the most important thing. Take a long deep breath and say: “What’s happening there? Where am I? What can I do? How can I be most effective? What’s impossible? What’s possible?” I think those are important questions to ask.
Mohammad Hadi: Great, thanks. I was not planning to bring about this large context, but that was the context I was breathing in now, and I thought it was relevant — especially when the interpretation that you offered in the book is a kind of phenomenological interpretation. The emphasis in your book is that seeing itself is sometimes more than acting, more than doing. That’s why I ask for your advice directly: what helps me in terms of seeing?
Jay Garfield: Again, what I would say is: see. Really take time to see clearly. To see what’s happening, but also to see what’s happening inside you — to see what’s happening in your emotional state and in your cognitive state. Also, to see clearly who is acting and how: in Iran, outside of Iran, and on Iran. This is a complicated situation.
In the book, I talk about the four Brahma-viharas, or the four “divine states,” that characterize a way of seeing and a way of experiencing in Buddhism. One of those is friendship, or friendliness — we say maitri or metta. This is to really see yourself and others as friends. The trick — the hardest part there — is to see adversaries as friends. In a situation like the one you’re talking about in Iran — or I could say the same thing about the things I see happening in America — one’s first reaction is to get tremendous hostility and tremendous partisanship. You see some people in a very negative way and some people in a very positive way.
The trick is — and it’s very difficult — to try to see how you can be of benefit to everyone in that circumstance. Sometimes that might be by offering arguments, sometimes by offering support, and sometimes by opposing. But you oppose not out of anger; you oppose out of trying to set things right. It requires an attitude of care, which is recognizing who is suffering and why, and what you can do to alleviate that suffering.
You also have to recognize that you can’t alleviate all suffering. There is some suffering that may simply be beyond your reach right now, but there might be some that you could do something about, and you have to ask yourself how you could do something about that. That includes your own suffering, because when you’re in a state of suffering, you’re not an effective agent. It requires taking care of yourself and helping to care for others.
Think about it in terms of others on both sides, because those who are on opposing sides are there probably not because they’re evil, but because they’re wrong. That requires providing correction and considering how that correction could be offered most effectively. It requires a kind of impartiality. You don’t really help anybody in Iran by taking powerful sides in Berlin; you help by intervening on both sides and doing what you can to ameliorate the situation.
It also requires being able to see who is being successful — to see the successes that are happening, the change that can come, and to find joy in that. In every circumstance of change, in every period of transformation, there are going to be some successes. You must find those successes and be able to take joy in them, because you can’t simply be wrapped up in anxiety and anger. You’ve got to find ways to see positive things happening.
This might be a time, for instance, in which the kind of grassroots movements that are happening in Iran — the kind of dissatisfaction that’s finally being given voice — might make real regime change possible. That’s something to take some joy in. It requires asking yourself: “How am I perceiving this, but also how am I reacting?” It’s very, very easy when we’re deeply emotionally involved to react in ways that make us less effective and less happy — where we become part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Mohammad Hadi: Wonderful, Jay. Based on that, I start with the premise that in Mahayana Buddhism — and Tibetan Buddhism is a branch of Mahayana — what makes it different, in my opinion, is a focus on compassion and achieving enlightenment for all beings through rigorous mental and physical discipline. In that regard, coming back to my problem this morning: care, compassion, and even avoiding anger are all political issues in the sense that they are not only my personal, private issues.
Jay Garfield: I think that’s right. One of the big debates that I see happening in contemporary ethics — especially in Buddhist ethics where it encounters contemporary engagement, whether political, environmental, or engagement with racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism — is that there are many philosophers who argue that the right response, indeed the mandatory response to injustice, criminality, or harm, is anger.
These “pro-anger” philosophers — and some of them are very serious and decent people — say that if you’re not angry when you see oppression, racism, sexism, or whatever form human persecution takes, it shows that you don’t care and it shows a lack of solidarity. Therefore, anger is mandatory because without it, there’s no solidarity.
I think that’s dead wrong. I think that solidarity requires a commitment to act effectively on behalf of the oppressed. If I want to express solidarity with victims of racism, sexism, a military regime, or Islamophobia, the way that I do that is to act on their behalf, not to scream on their behalf. Screaming, yelling, and raising the temperature does nothing to alleviate oppression; it’s like pouring petrol on a fire. The way to express solidarity is actually to do something.
To do something and be effective, you have to be calm. That doesn’t mean you approve of these things — that would be crazy — but it means the way to show disapproval is to fight effectively against them. One great example of this in the 20th century was the way that Mohandas Gandhi fought against British oppression in India through his system of satyagraha, which was very similar to a lot of ideas in Buddhist ethics. Indeed, as you know, the present Dalai Lama sees it as just the same.
Gandhi really urged people that if they felt angry or hostile towards the British occupiers, they didn’t belong in his movement because they were going to be ineffective and they were going to create more conflict. The only way to make change was to make change in a way that expressed positive attitudes not only towards oneself and people on one’s own side, but towards the other side — to help them see that they’re wrong.
We saw how effective Gandhi’s movement was. We saw how effective the Reverend Martin Luther King’s movement was in the United States. Each of these were movements that forswore anger and conflict. My own view is that that’s just got to be right — that solidarity requires a commitment to be an effective ally, and effective allies are calm allies.
One of the things that I’ve always been impressed by is that when you look at serious training in martial arts — karate or judo — the first thing that people are taught is that if you’re in a struggle or a fight, you have to have your emotions calm. You’ll never be effective as a fighter if you’re angry and your emotions take over. The same thing is true about fighting for justice. You will never be effective if your emotions are driving you; you’ll only be effective if you can remain a cool, calm participant in those struggles. That’s not to say it’s easy; it’s really, really hard. But I think it’s really important.
Mohammad Hadi: Jay, on different occasions in the book — especially towards the end — you talk about… that was a digression, sorry, that was not my question. Now that you’re talking about anger, I think it’s the right time to ask. You talk about “near enemies.” In that regard, I think a lot of reaction to the lack of anger when it comes to care is coming from the eroded difference between impartiality and indifference.
Jay Garfield: That’s right, and that’s really important, because indifference is the “near enemy” of impartiality. Maybe I should back up for the sake of people who haven’t read the book and aren’t deep into Buddhaghosa — how this works. I think it’s actually one of Buddhaghosa’s most brilliant discoveries and contributions to world ethics. Buddhaghosa was a 5th-century Buddhist philosopher who worked primarily in Sri Lanka.
In his discussion of these four Brahma-viharas — to repeat them: friendliness (maitri), care (karuna), impartiality (upeksha), and the ability to take joy in the successes of others (mudita) — he said that each of these comes both with a “far enemy” and a “near enemy.”
His point was that the “far enemies,” though they’re terrible, aren’t really dangerous because everybody can see that they’re vices and should be avoided. For instance, the far enemy of care is just meanness — taking joy in the suffering of others. The far enemy of friendliness is wishing ill towards others instead of wishing well. The far enemy of impartiality is partiality. We can all see why those are bad.
But he said that each of these virtues has a “near enemy” as well, and the near enemies are dangerous because they feel like virtues. To take a couple of examples: the near enemy of friendship is nepotism — being a really good friend to people I like. It’s corruption, basically, but being unfriendly to other people. People say, “Oh, Jay, he’s such a good friend. If you associate with him, he’ll steer business to you; he’ll make it possible for you to skim a little bit of profit. He’s a really good friend.” Well, he’s not a really good friend; he is corrupt. But it feels really good when I say, “I take care of my friends.”
The near enemy of care, or of compassion, is “sloppy sympathy.” You say, “Oh, I’m such a caring person; I cry at movies,” or “I feel your pain.” You don’t want people to feel your pain; you want people to relieve your pain. If your surgeon is crying with you, they’re not going to perform good surgery.
These near enemies feel so good that you feel as though you’re virtuous. The near enemy of impartiality is this kind of coldness or indifference. That means you don’t respond at all to how anybody is feeling or acting. You might say, “Oh, I’m such a good Buddhist,” or “I’m such a good person because I’ve got this complete equanimity and nothing bothers me because I just don’t care what happens to anybody.”
The trick is to maintain that equanimity and that impartiality while caring about what’s happening and caring for everybody — taking the situation seriously, but not taking one side or the other as being the only one that you care about. That is difficult.
Buddhist ethical theory, as a theory of phenomenological transformation, is extraordinarily demanding. That’s important to see. But any ethical theory worth its salt — whether it’s a religiously based ethical theory, Kantian, or utilitarianism — when you take them seriously, they’re very demanding. That’s because ethics is not about patting ourselves on the back and saying that we’re doing fine; ethics is about setting the bar for individual perfection really high and trying to attain it. There’s a reason that very few people score tens in gymnastics or figure skating. We set the bar high and make it hard to achieve, and ethics should set the bar for personhood very, very high.
Buddhism is widely admired in the West for its commitments to progressive social activism. But is this really in the spirit of true Buddhism?
Mohammad Hadi: Great. I go back to my question from Buddhist Ethics. I quote you: “The three roots of suffering — attachment, aversion, and confusion — are each regarded as moral failings or pathologies, and they are not seen as specifically heterogeneous in character.” That’s very interesting for me. I would be thankful if you tell me about the difference there, because there is also a Western take — for example, a Stoic take — which is a little different from that, especially regarding whether they are seen as homogeneous or heterogeneous in nature.
Second question: confusion this morning is an issue for me, Jay. It’s not only anger, it’s not only aversion to the enemies of Iran or the rulers of Iran. There’s a confusion there, and I dare to say there’s a “collective confusion.” A lot of times, I see these individualistic interpretations of Buddhism. Is there any room for collective confusion also?
Jay Garfield: That was a great question. I really appreciate the fact that you saw the affinity of Buddhism to Stoicism, but also the difference. Many people think of Buddhist ethics and Stoic ethics as exactly the same. They are very similar, but a big difference is seen in the question about confusion and what would be seen as an epistemological problem in Stoicism but is seen as a moral problem in Buddhism.
This has to do with the idea of ethics as being about how we see. For instance, if I just see women as stupid or playthings or individuals who can be ignored, it is not enough when somebody says, “You’re being sexist,” for me to say, “Oh, I didn’t know women could think. How surprising.” Or if I say, “Africans must be really stupid,” and someone says, “You’re being a racist,” and I say, “No, I just didn’t know any better.” All of that’s wrong. We’ve got responsibilities not to be racist, responsibilities not to be sexist, responsibilities not to be homophobic, and responsibilities not to be Islamophobic.
You can’t get out of having these kinds of morally problematic beliefs by saying, “Oh, I was just wrong; I never realized that Jews could think. How curious.” You can’t get out of it that way. Buddhism sees that the way we see the world isn’t just a matter of what we know and what we don’t know, but it’s morally tainted.
The big moral confusion — the biggest one for most of us — is seeing ourselves as being at the center of the universe and our own interest as being what we really care about. That can inflect things in a lot of different ways, and that’s what gives rise to the near enemies. If I say I am really upset about what’s going on in Iran, or the United States, or South Sudan, or Gaza — pick the place you’re really upset about, the world is full of them — and I’m really upset because it makes me feel terrible when I see that stuff happening, the moment you say that, you’ve ruined the moral valence. Because now what I’ve done is I’ve put my own feelings and my own response at the center, and that becomes the near enemy of actually caring.
It’s one thing to say, “I feel really outraged about what’s happening in Gaza because of what’s happening to Gazans,” and then asking, “So what can I do to improve that situation? Is it demonstration? Contributions? Talking to people? Writing to my representatives?” What is it that I can do, rather than screaming and railing and yelling and saying, “It makes me feel awful”? I think that is what really shows that confusion is at the basis of this.
One of the first things that we have to do in transforming our moral vision — not easy — is to identify our own confusions. Identify the point at which I’m either seeing this from only my perspective and seeing my own perspective as important, or seeing this only from the standpoint of my own country, or my own movement, or my own people and saying, “That’s what’s important.” Rather than seeing a situation that is fraught with suffering on all sides and asking myself: “From where I sit, what is the best intervention in which I can engage?” It’s a very different kind of question that requires calm, clarity, and insight. That requires seeing it not in terms of me, but in seeing the situation and then asking what I can do about the situation.
Mohammad Hadi: Jay, my next question is from the book Buddhist Ethics, page 26. I quote you: “The state of awakening is grounded in an understanding of one’s own nature and that of the world so internalized that it transforms one’s perceptual experience, just as disciplinary expertise transforms the way one sees objects in one’s domains of knowledge or skill. Shantideva, for example, in the sixth chapter of How to Lead an Awakened Life, argues that we can come to see those who appear to harm us as in fact benefiting us by offering us the opportunity to practice patience, issuing in a response of gratitude rather than a reaction of anger.”
I would be really thankful if you could elaborate on those key terms, like practicing patience in the face of injustice, not being angry, and practicing gratitude. To common sense, they sound extraordinary — demanding.
Jay Garfield: Yes. There are two issues there: the general point and the specific one. The general point is about perception and expertise, and the specific one is about anger and patience. Let me take the first one first.
Anybody who’s acquired a really deep skill — say, become an art historian, a botanist, a radiologist, or a great athlete — knows that one of the important transformations is how you see the world. If you study art history, before you studied it, you just see a lot of pretty pictures. But then after you’ve studied art history, you say, “Oh, that’s impressionism. Look, that’s a Van Gogh,” or “Look, that’s an 8th-century Persian illuminated manuscript.” Now you’re seeing through expertise and things show up in their specificity.
Or if you’re a botanist, instead of just saying, “Oh, there’s a bunch of plants around here,” you say, “Oh, that’s an elm tree, and that’s an African violet, and that’s—” I don’t know enough plants to even pull this one off. But you see things in their specificity. Trained radiologists look at an X-ray — I just see a bunch of blur — and they say, “Uh oh, there’s cancer right there.”
When we acquire expertise, we acquire these tremendous perceptual skills. One of the insights of Buddhist phenomenology is that as we gain expertise as ethical agents, we gain perceptual skills. Instead of seeing the world as centered on me and my interests, I see the world as interdependent. Instead of seeing myself as autonomous — and seeing every action I do as my own source of pride because I did it all by myself — I see myself as an interdependent agent who depends upon others.
Instead of seeing somebody else as acting out of malice or evil, I see them as acting in a web in which other people and other circumstances are determining what they do. It’s that transformation that takes you from seeing the world as a group of autonomous agents to seeing the world as a group of interdependent phenomena of which we are parts.
Now, when we come to this issue about patience, that really comes home to roost. The example that Shantideva was giving is meant to be the high point that we’re aiming for, and it’s very difficult. But let’s imagine some easier parts to practicing patience.
Imagine that you live in a city where there’s a lot of traffic. When you drive to work or even to the hospital, you’ve got to deal with a lot of traffic. Anybody who lives in Berlin and drives has had that experience; certainly anybody who lives in Tehran and drives has had that experience. As you’re driving along, somebody cuts in front of you in traffic. Your first response is: “That asshole! I’m going to show them!” You lean on your horn or drive up to their bumper and you become very angry.
Notice what’s involved in that response. One: you’ve decided that person has no good reason for what they did; they’re just being selfish and did it out of pure malice. Second: what’s important is how I feel — I was driving quite happily, they got in front of me, and now I feel really awful. So the obvious way to respond to that asshole is to scream and lean on my horn. Of course, it does a lot of good, right? You’ve probably noticed that when you lean on your horn and scream in traffic, suddenly everything gets better.
But notice that there’s a big problem of perception here. You can ask yourself: “Why did he do that?” Maybe he’s running to the hospital because he’s just heard that his child has been injured. I should feel really bad for him and make space. Or maybe he’s somebody whose mother has just died and all he can think about is his grief and he didn’t even notice me. It’s not out of malice; it’s because he’s consumed with a problem. Or maybe this is somebody who’s seriously mentally ill and he himself can’t control his impulses. I should feel bad because he can’t get psychiatric care.
When I look at the situation: before that, I was behind that car in front of him; now I’m behind this car. Big deal. It’s going to cost me two or three seconds in my life. When I come to see things that way, I can say to myself: “He’s actually done me a favor.” Now I recognize that while my first impulse was to be angry, by taking this as an example of seeing the world in terms of interdependence — seeing that there are tons of causes and conditions that I don’t know about that caused him to do what he did — I’ve come to see the world a bit better. Maybe I should write him a thank-you note: “Thanks for cutting in front of me; you showed me something important.”
That’s what Shantideva is talking about. I think it’s relatively easy — though not as easy as it sounds — to do that with traffic. It’s a lot harder when somebody commits a serious wrong. But again, the same thing applies. Do we say to ourselves, “That was an autonomous agent; you did that all by yourself”? Or do we say, “There are causes and conditions that led them to act like that; they don’t have a very good life”? Yes, I’ve been harmed by it, but they’re probably in worse shape than I am.
My getting angry isn’t going to suddenly take away the harm and make things better. In fact, the best thing I can do is to reflect on what they did, reflect on my response, and become a less angry person. If I do that, then I can actually be grateful for what they did — not think it was a good thing, but recognize that it was something that benefited me more than it harmed me. That’s hard, and it’s meant to be hard. But I think when we think about it, it’s not only difficult, it’s rational. It’s a more clear-eyed vision of how human beings work and the nature of the world that we live in — a world of interdependence, not a world of independence.
When we attribute independence to others or to ourselves, we exaggerate our emotional responses. Let me give another example, kind of the flip side, about pride. Very often in the United States, parents say they want their children to grow up to be proud of their achievements, to stand on their own two feet, and to be independent. When I hear that, I think that’s complete nonsense.
Independent? Is that supposed to mean that the child is supposed to think that they grew all of their own food, built their own house, knitted their own clothes, and taught themselves to read and write? That’s nuts. Everything we do is a result of interdependence. It’s much better to raise them to be grateful to their teachers, to their parents, to their friends, to the folks who built their infrastructure, and to the farmers who raised their food.
I would rather say I’d like to raise my children to be grateful, not to be proud. If they excel in a sport, I want them to think, “Thank you, coach… I owe you a lot,” and to recognize that their success depends upon the success of others. As students — and we’re each students — whenever we do something that reflects what we’ve learned, we should have a moment of gratitude towards our teachers and our parents. If we grew up to be decent people, thank your grandmother and your mom. Don’t act in pride.
All of that just makes us better people, but all of that comes from transforming the way we see ourselves and see the world — to see in terms of interdependence and not in terms of independence. That’s what makes us better moral agents.
Mohammad Hadi: Great, wonderful. Thank you for the examples, so concrete. Yet, there is something visceral I feel. I think it is really challenging to be able to see — seeing is not as easy, especially as radical as it is in Buddhism.
Two things are very challenging for me: seeing, and realizing this interdependence. In the absence of that seeing, people like me try to roll up their sleeves and start only acting or reacting through anger, through whatever cognitive or emotional possibilities. Sometimes I think that failure in seeing things, or avoiding to see things, or avoiding to recognize this interdependency results in a lot of “near enemies.”
I can even go so far as to say that sometimes I avoid seeing because there is a shame in seeing similarity between me and my rulers. My rulers are totalitarian; I am homophobic. My rulers have double standards; in Germany, I am an indifferent citizen. There is this kind of ethical avoidance.
Jay Garfield: That’s right. A great friend and colleague of mine once summed everything up so beautifully. He was a Tibetan colleague, and I was always embarrassed because his sense of English was better than mine. He said: “All of Buddhism can be summed up as the path from being reactive to becoming responsive.”
I thought that was just a very beautiful way of putting it. We’re very naturally reactive, and we’re reactive because we see everything in terms of what it means for us and our narrow self-interest. In Buddhist cosmology, the model there is to think of that as inhabiting the “animal realm” — just snapping and reacting when something happens without being able to pause and to think.
Our goal is to become humane, to become human — and in the wonderful Yiddish expression, to become a mensch, a true human being. That means responding openly to people but not reacting thoughtlessly. It doesn’t mean being indifferent. You don’t want to replace reactivity with coldness; you want to replace it with openness, recognition, and responsiveness.
Now, you’re right, it’s really hard. You can’t just say, “Oh damn, I realize I’ve just been a very reactive, self-centered person all my life… I’m going to change my mind about all of that and be a better person now.” You can say that, but that’s like saying, “Gee, I’ve never picked up golf clubs before, but I’m going to be a professional golfer today.” There’s a lot of practice ahead of you.
I think that’s an important lesson to remember. In that passage that you read, it said it’s also to internalize that vision so that it becomes part of who we are. When we begin studying a particular domain, we don’t know anything and we don’t even know what we’re seeing. Then we learn to see something and to think it through very hard and to draw inferences about it. Then when we get really good, we just see stuff. And when we get really, really good, we’re not even aware that we see it — we just respond.
Mohammad Hadi: There are lots of examples of that in Zhuangzi, for example.
Jay Garfield: Exactly. This is the “Butcher Ding” point. I like to say that Buddhism isn’t about leading a virtuous life; it’s about leading a virtuoso life. It’s about that kind of mastery of our moral existence. Just as it takes years and years of practice to become a virtuoso pianist, or to be a virtuoso butcher as Ding points out, it takes years and years of practice to become a virtuoso person. But the first step is recognizing where we are and saying, “I’m actually not very good at this yet, and I know what I’ve got to do.” That’s what practice is all about.
Mohammad Hadi: That’s a wonderful point for me to go to the next question, because I was thinking about the question of knowledge. I quote you: “Moreover, it is possible to know a lot of Buddhist metaphysical or ethical theory and to be a good philosopher, but not to be transformed by that knowledge, just as it is possible to know a lot of Western moral philosophy and not be transformed by that knowledge.”
That is an interesting point. What hinders this transformation? Why does knowledge alone not suffice? You talked about exercises — what is missing there?
Jay Garfield: Well, I think there’s a lot of things that hinder that kind of development. One is the fact that these three root pathologies — attachment, aversion, and confusion — are really innate features of our own psychology as human beings. In a lot of ways, we’re fighting against our psychological nature to recognize our true nature.
Each of these involves a kind of sense of illusion about the world, seeing the world as it’s not. If we’re used to optical illusions — my favorite example is the Mueller-Lyer illusion, where we draw two lines that are the same length and then draw arrowheads pointing out on one and pointing in on the other — suddenly one of them looks longer than the other.
Knowing that we’ve just done that doesn’t prevent us from seeing the illusion. That’s what’s so wonderful about it: you can draw it in front of people, they see it, and they still fall for the illusion. I think our emotional system is wired for the illusion of our own central importance, and also for the illusion of our causal independence — the illusion of this kind of freedom and the illusion that other people have that kind of causal independence.
So we’re trying to uproot stuff that is very deep. One way of putting that is that we’re really born with a very serious “mental illness,” and that’s why I call these pathologies. We’re born with cognitive states that work against us all the time. What we’re trying to do is perform a kind of psychiatry on ourselves.
That’s really hard, but we can do that. Just as nobody’s born a great pianist, or a great art historian, or a great baseball player, with training we can work against our innate laziness and our inability to do those things and become great at them. But that does require practice.
Mohammad Hadi: There is something fascinating in Tibetan Buddhism for me. When it comes to impartiality, they use a lot of imagination in order to enhance it, in order to cultivate that impartiality. The role of imagination is remarkably beautifully put. I read a part of your book: “The practice of exchange of self for others and the attitudes of friendliness and care to which it aims to give rise does not entail an erasure of the boundaries between individuals, any kind of self-abnegation, or disregard for one’s own interest. Instead, as McCrae points out as well, it involves an imaginative projection into the perspective of others.”
This is against the interpretation of Buddhism as something isolatory, that you go to your own cave and you don’t care about society. Quite the opposite — not only are you in society, but also you can imagine, you can put yourself in others' shoes and stretch your imagination.
Jay Garfield: I think it’s very beautiful. I think that recruitment of the moral imagination as a tool for self-improvement is something that also has a place in Western philosophy. Where you really see that is in David Hume and Adam Smith, the great Scottish Enlightenment philosophers of the moral imagination, who both emphasized that the way that we become better people is by using our moral imagination to see people who are distant from us as though they’re proximate.
Buddhist ethicists have been doing that for a long time as well. While Buddhist practice often does involve isolating oneself — maybe in a cave, maybe just on a cushion in your study in the morning — the point of that isolation is not to be isolated. The point of that isolation is to have the space and the time to exercise the imagination to create better connection. It’s a laboratory of extension of the imagination, and I think once we recognize how powerful our moral imagination is, we can recruit that to improve ourselves.
Does an ‘engaged’ Buddhist really have to draw on this picture of the Buddha as a ‘social activist’ to find support for their own activism?
Mohammad Hadi: Jay, there is a beautiful differentiation in the book that I liked, and I see it in relation to liberation. Page 104 of the book, I quote you: “Liberation not as cosmological sense but emotional. By avoiding the classical understanding of rebirth in Buddhism, you say: if we think of rebirth in the various realms as a metaphor for our constant cycling between emotional states, this amounts to a meditation on the consequences of our actions for ourselves. We can then think of liberation not as an escape from the cosmological realm of endless rebirth, but as a liberation from pathologies that rob us of control over our basic emotional states to the world.”
There is something great there, because in the book you try to prioritize this kind of emotional rebirth rather than this classical Buddhist cosmological rebirth. I can even stretch it a little further and say that a lot of people prefer to do revolutions outside because they are not able or they fail to do revolutions to themselves — to the way they can overcome their own emotions.
Jay Garfield: That’s right. That was also Gandhi’s great insight: that revolution begins with self-transformation. Jane Fonda, the great American actress, during the Vietnam War made the wonderful quip that “Revolution has to be an act of love.” But that requires first transforming yourself so that you can act in that way. That’s where revolution begins. I think that’s extraordinarily important to remember.
Mohammad Hadi: And I really liked that you highlight this emotional transformation there, not only this cosmological understanding of Buddhism — that oh, it is only a rebirth in another life, in another corpus. Nobody knows about these things, that’s why I prefer to be silent about it. But the thing is that well, in front of me concretely is the kind of transformation or a rebirth that I can experience in my day-to-day experiences.
Jay Garfield: And if we pay attention, we notice that we go through every realm a few times every day — sometimes every hour. When you recognize that, you realize that our psychology is something to which we’re kind of slaves. Getting control over that and being liberated from that pathological cycling is a really great thing.
Mohammad Hadi: Right. There is a wonderful part I noticed in the book on generosity. I quote you: “One might think that generosity is manifested primarily in action and in speech, but Shantideva insists that it is instead a state of mind and a model of experience.” So I’m quoting the book: “If the perfection of generosity eliminates all poverty, given there is still so much destitution, how could it be that the protectors perfected it? The perfection of generosity is said to be the intention to give everything, along with the fruits of the act, to all beings. Therefore, it is simply a state of mind.”
Tell us about generosity. I think I have misunderstood generosity my whole life.
Jay Garfield: Of course generous people give, but the giving is a manifestation of generosity or a consequence of it, not the generosity itself. Because stingy people give as well, and they give for different reasons.
But what generosity is, is actually seeing others as a “field for your giving.” The giving can be of different kinds. Sometimes we give material goods, giving money to charities or giving a gift to somebody who needs it. But sometimes what we’re giving instead is protection — giving somebody shelter in a storm, giving somebody a lift when they’re stuck by the side of the road, or giving somebody a hand with a difficult job. It doesn’t involve giving goods, but giving of our time and giving of our capacities.
Sometimes it involves giving teaching — giving somebody a lesson that they can carry with them. All of those things can be acts of generosity. Sometimes a smile is a great act of generosity, or just a greeting to somebody can be a great act of generosity — just acknowledging them.
People think sometimes when you see people who are very poor, maybe homeless people or beggars, that you can only be generous by actually giving them objects. But sometimes the most generous thing you can do is to have a conversation — to actually treat somebody as another person rather than as an annoyance on the sidewalk. What that requires is that we come to see other beings as possible beneficiaries of our lives, rather than rivals or impediments. That’s what Shantideva is saying: generosity begins by transforming the way you see other people around you; you see them as possible objects to help.
Mohammad Hadi: Wonderful. If you don’t mind, I have one more question. It is on patience. I end this conversation with a quote from the book: “The Mahayana account of the perfection of patience reminds us of how deeply phenomenological Buddhist ethics is. Patience is not an action or a disposition to act on this account; instead, it is a way of seeing ourselves and others. It is an attitude that allows us to take harmful events as nothing but normal occurrences in life, to be avoided when possible, but never as reasons to cause further harm either to ourselves or to others.”
Jay Garfield: Again, patience emerges from understanding interdependence, from understanding the fact that everything that occurs occurs as a result of countless causes and conditions. So there’s never an appropriate target for anger.
Instead, when unfortunate things happen, our task is to try to make the situation as good as we could possibly make it. That’s what patience is: it’s the recognition that when things are not going well, or when somebody is doing something that causes adverse consequences for us or for other people about whom we care, the task is to say, “What can I do to improve the situation?” not “How can I punish the bastard?”
I think that’s just an extraordinarily important transformation. The further we can go in transforming ourselves in that way, the more effective we become as agents in the world, and the better we become at being able to accomplish what we actually hope to accomplish. Because anger is always an obstacle.
Mohammad Hadi: Wonderful. Thank you very much, Jay. You already made my morning, my day, with this beautiful conversation.
Jay Garfield: It’s been a pleasure talking with you, and I hope that your listeners enjoy our conversation.
