To Empathise is to Civilise

To empathise is to civilise.
To civilise is to empathise.

– Jeremy Rifkin

As mentioned in the video, ‘We are soft-wired to experience another’s plight [or joy] as if we are experiencing it for ourselves.’  Interesting. The monkey experiment illustrates the power of empathy and rejoice.  Some Dharma teachers teach that rejoice in a good deed of another is just as meritorious as doing the good deed itself. It’s also been dubbed as a ‘lazy way’ to create merits! I think this might be so – if the rejoice is total in understanding the goodness of the good deed.

In relation, the Ksitigarbha Sutra states that when we share merits of a good deed with another, as a natural law, the other party can only receive one-seventh of the merits – because the doer always creates more merits than the one shared with, who seems to have do nothing, though he or she must karmically deserve the merits indirectly too.

The video also says,’We are not soft-wired for aggression, self-interest, violence, utilitarianism but for sociability, attachment, affection, companionship.’ Our empathic drive to belong is the first drive – probably because we do know, deep down with our Buddha-nature, that we are interconnected. This could be why babies empathise with one another’s distress easily, as they might be instinctively closer to their original Buddha-nature when young, than when further conditioned to nurture or awaken habitual forces. In contrast, so-called ‘mature empathy’ which differentiates oneself and others is mature only in a worldly sense; not necessarily so in a spiritual sense, as the sense of a separate self deepens.

Some parts I disagree with in the video are the mentions that this is the one and only life, which increases empathy for its fragility. Because the belief that our lives are multiple, yet equally fragile in each lifetime worsens the existential crisis of the individual and us all – which nurtures even stronger empathy. The video also interestingly says that there is no empathy in the usual concept of ‘eternal heaven’ because there is no mortality or suffering there (while others either suffer on Earth or burn in eternal hell). This isn’t the case for the Buddhist concept of Pure Lands though, as beings there have the ability to even more clearly perceive suffering of mortals in Samsara, which nurtures greater empathy, to want to help them attain True Happiness.

It is possible that many humans’ genetic ancestry can be traced to a few dominant humans, but this doesn’t mean the biblical idea of Adam and Eve is true, especially since the dominant ones mentioned go way back further by more than 100,000 years, than the proposed dates in the Bible.