Let’s look at the compassion wing teachings, and look at the methods. There’s a series of techniques that culminates in these incredible levels of compassion and love for beings – all beings, all beings.
There’s a series of bullet-point techniques that you can spend years on in retreat, and it’s progressive, gradual, incremental, and the basic, the fundamental, the foundation upon which the others are developed is this attitude they call “equanimity.”
In Buddhist teachings, in the earlier stages of practice, the wisdom wing, the word equanimity is used to refer to a quality you’d cultivate within yourself such that you’d be less up and down, less berserk, you know, more stable. That’s the consequence of practice – the consequence of lessening attachment, lessening anger, and so on.
But this equanimity here is a different definition: it’s an attitude in relation to others. It’s defined as, in my words – and this would be when you’ve accomplished it – the heartfelt recognition that what we call friend, enemy, and stranger – and there’s no fourth category on this planet – are equal to each other from just one point of view: they each want to be happy and they each don’t want to suffer.
Friend, who is the object of attachment: the person whom you adore, whom you’re attached to, your beloveds, your friends, your poodle, whoever it is you adore, and especially, though, if they do what your attachment wants – that’s called the friend.
The second one is the enemy – we mightn’t use that word, but that’s the person who proactively doesn’t do what I want. That’s the ex-husband being mean to me, the colleague who hates me, the next-door neighbor who does something I don’t like, whoever it is who harms me. That’s the enemy, and basically they’re doing what my attachment doesn’t want.
The third category, which is 99.999% of the universe, is called strangers. And what’s that mean? That means those who’ve neither harmed me nor helped me.
How do I feel about the friend? I adore them, I love them, I have compassion. They’re virtually the only ones we have love and compassion for, pretty much, automatically. Then you’ve got the enemies, and we do not have love and compassion for them – no way, you know? And the third category, strangers, we don’t care – indifference.
So there’s love and compassion for the first lot, anger and resentment and certainly no love and compassion for the second lot. And the third lot? Complete indifference. Why? Because they neither harm me nor help me, so they don’t even come onto my radar.
This is the universe! These are the three poisons that Buddha refers to: attachment overexaggerating the deliciousness of the object, aversion overexaggerating the ugliness of the object, and indifference totally not caring. We can see that everybody on the planet is like this: dogs, monkeys, humans, ants. The three poisons run everybody!
Equanimity is the starting point in the gradual development of love, compassion, great compassion, and eventually culminating in what they call in Sanskrit “bodhichitta,” this outrageous attitude of putting others first, only wanting them to be happy and to not suffer, and never ceasing to make this happen. Christians would call them a saint.
But the starting point, the foundation, has to be this shift from, at the moment, ego wanting only the beloveds to be happy, and not wanting the ugly ones to be happy, and not caring about the rest. That’s how these three poisons manifest in relation to sentient beings.
Even as we’re talking, visualize them: Put the enemy right in front of you: the husband who’s mean to you, the ex-boyfriend, the person who’s unkind to you, whoever it might be.
Then, to the left, your beloved, the person you have attachment for, and whom you also love.
And on the right put a stranger there: say, somebody in this room whose face you can see but you don’t know them at all, they’ve not touched your life.
To the front the enemy, to your left the friend, and to your right the stranger. You have them right there as we’re talking.
The moment I say to my friend, “May you be happy” – that’s the definition of love – it’s got strings attached: I want you to be happy, sweetie pie, as long as you keep making me happy. That’s pretty clear, we are like that.
It’s got strings attached, or as Lama Zopa says, it’s unstable love. We know that’s how our love is at the moment: I did love my husband once, when he was doing what my attachment wanted, but now he’s a creep, and he doesn’t do what my attachment wants, so now I chuck him out, and now I don’t have love for him, I have aversion for him.
Okay, we know we can practice wanting him to be happy, but we have to work on it. If you are adoring me every day and doing everything I want, it’s easy to love you, to want you to be happy. This is how we are in samsara, you know? We’ve got to look at this carefully.
Ego’s logic – it is not logical! – is I only want to be happy those who make me happy, I only want those not to suffer who want me not to suffer.
In other words, our love and compassion are only for a small group: that could be the poodle, but it won’t be the rat, could be the poodle, but it won’t be the cockroach. We know that, because we don’t like cockroaches – they don’t do what my attachment wants. But even if your poodle shits everywhere, we don’t care – we even love the shit because we’re attached to the poodle! We can see this.
So we’ve got to shift from only wanting my beloveds to be happy because they make me happy to wanting everyone to be happy because they want to be happy. And that comes eventually in this process, and it’s based on equanimity: recognizing the bare fact that they all want to be happy.
We’ve got to step out of the equation, see these three people as separate from us. We have to prove to ourself that these three people from their point of view – from their point of view, not from mine, from their point of view – they are driven – this is what the Buddha’s saying all the time – they’re driven just naturally by the wish to be happy every second and by the wish not to suffer every second. It’s just primordially the way it is for every living being.
We’re trying to loosen the grip of these labels that we believe are absolute and total: when we see people through the lense of attachment, all we see is the beauty; when we see them through the lense of anger, all we see is the ugly; when we see them through the lense of indifference, all we see is boring.
These are not valid labels! That’s all Buddha’s getting at really – these are not valid labels. There is some semblance of truth there – it’s true that person is kind to you, it’s true the other person is mean to you, and it’s true the third person doesn’t do either. These are facts – but we base our love and compassion on these facts, which is totally self-centered.
We’re trying to get ourselves out of the equation and see these three separately, and we’re trying to see how these three people, regardless of whether they’re murderers or saints, are driven, each of them equally, by the wish to be happy and not suffer. That’s it! That’s the simple point, and it’s profound. That’s equanimity.
You can practice this daily, you know? You’re a grandmother, and you have your divine grandchild, whom you adore, playing with the smelly kid next door, whom you can’t stand, you know? Right there, equanimity: “Give it a break, Robina, back off!” He might be a creep, and she might be a saint, but think, “He wants to be happy just like she does, and unfortunately, due to his karma, he’s mean to people, because he thinks that’ll bring him happiness – but he wants to be happy, just like her.”
Based on this equanimity we can then go through the practices, step by step, and gradually develop genuine love for others, and then find ways to help them actually find happiness.