Of the four Brahma Viharas, mudita is the one we find to be a little strange. When we cultivate mudita, we are never envious or jealous of anything. If we cultivate this Brahma Vihara well, we really don’t mind when the home team loses a big game; we’re happy for the people who rooted for the other team. In politics, we really don’t care who garners the most votes; we are happy for the people whose candidate won even if our candidate loses. We are happy for the person promoted over us, the guy who got the girl, even the winners of a war that our side lost.
That strikes a lot of people as being a little strange.
As we have pointed out in several places, we use Zen in its meaning of meditation. The Zen school does not teach the Four Brahma viharas nor does it practice metta/lovingkindness meditation. But many practitioners of the Zen school do not reject Theravada practices.
Mudita is usually translated as sympathetic joy, empathetic joy, happiness in the success of others. If we feel a connection with others, mudita comes naturally. If we are alienated from others, we have to work at taking delight in their happiness, especially if we see it as coming at our expense. The successful cultivation of mudita brings some of the most tangible rewards of Buddhist practice. We stop grasping for success because we have it automatically. There are lots of people getting what they want and we can be happy for them every day. We win every time they win. Success and happiness are all around us. And with mudita, we get to soak it up.
But failure and unhappiness are everywhere as well. We see people holding Will Work For Food signs. We know the hospitals are full. Bankruptcy court is packed every day. Crimes are committed and people die in wars started for no sound reason. What good is mudita when there is no joy to share? That, obviously, is where compassion, another one of the four Brahma Viharas, becomes important.
We can’t cultivate sympathetic joy for those who are doing well without also cultivating compassion for those who aren’t. And the same person may one day be a source of happiness and a source of sorrow the next. So whenever we see an opportunity to practice mudita, it is almost always balanced by an opportunity to practice compassion. Compassion is not pity. It is simply the absence of callous indifference.
The greatest act of compassion we can bestow is to teach the art of mudita. A person walking out of bankruptcy court can take joy in the financial success of others rather than bemoan his or her own failure in that regard. A hungry person can be happy that others have plenty of food, instead of being envious. The art of mudita cultivation relies upon the observation that every negative thought has a positive thought to offset it.
The path to awakening includes the art of always moving to the center, away from the edges, away from extremes. Mudita is a flywheel that keeps the wheel of happiness from going too fast and the wheel of sadness from going too slow. When we exult in our own success, mudita tells us to slow down, to come down from the heights of sakkaya ditthi, the wrong view of self. Joy in one’s own success is obviously sakkaya ditthi because we have to separate from others to feel that we have succeeded where others have not. But when we bemoan our lack of success, mudita pulls us back up.
We can destroy the wrong view of self, cultivating the right view of no self, of interconnectedness with others, and enjoy the wealth of success that surrounds us. By practicing the Brahma Vihara of mudita every day, we are cultivating samma ditthi, the right view of self.
Some say that the transition from sakkaya ditthi to samma ditthi is like the transition of a drop of water into the ocean. That analogy gives us some idea of how great that transition is, but the transition is in fact much greater. It is more like the Big Bang, from nothing to everything.
So daily cultivation of mudita at every opportunity might be something we should consider.
Mudita is an advanced state of lovingkindness. We can develop lovingkindness by practicing lovingkindness meditation. That meditation roots out hostility, aggression, alienation, and pessimism. Just as importantly, sustained daily practice of lovingkindness meditation causes our cup of lovingkindness to run over and when that happens, mudita appears. It is lovingkindness on steroids.
So we begin with daily practice of lovingkindness meditation, and mudita, joy at the happiness of “others,” begins to develop. And when it develops, we are happy that we started our daily lovingkindness meditation and stuck with it.
One of the most thoughtful writers on the subject of lovingkindness and mudita is Sharon Salzberg, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society of Barre, Massachusetts, and author of Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness. Since her photo is used in another blog post, here we picture another thoughtful writer on mudita and many other subjects, Norman Fischer, former co-abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center.
