From September to December 2018, I will explore the Buddhist Tradition of the Brahmavihara – four virtues or ‘sublime attitudes’ and a set of associated meditation practices. I am conducting this project in parallel with Patrick Laudon in Tokyo. Each month, we will focus on one of the virtues, starting with a daily meditation on the first week, then observing its impact on our daily life, and finally reflecting on the reasons for this impact, capturing the experience in a short written reflection. This is not an attempt at embracing Buddhism or meditation, but rather, explore how inherited frameworks can apply in a contemporary setting.

Mudita – empathetic joy – is the deliberate cultivation of positive feelings associated to the success and happiness of others. The meditation practice starts with an evocation of my own joy – whether energetic or content, grand or modest. It then invites me to think about three people in turn, a good friend, an indifferent person, and somebody who frustrated me – and in turn, think of those people as able to experience joy, and rejoice in their happiness, repeating, ‘May you be happy, may your joy continue, I am happy for you.’

The setting was peculiar: shortly after I started my daily Mudita meditation, I went on a silent retreat and begun my journey with Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, where – as a first step – I prayed for gratitude at the magnificence of the created world. The two practices somehow merged, Christian and Buddhist empathetic joy. And – possibly through the make-up of my own mind, or the circumstances, feeling joy at the joys of others was incredibly easy, like plugging a lamp into the mains and pressing on a button for light to shine in the room.

This kind of joy, however, I experienced as closely connected with humility. Mudita says, it is irrelevant where the joy comes from, or who feels it first – it can and it must circulate. Therefore, let go of your critical ego: instead, align yourself emotionally to the positive emotions of others. In other words – let a situation affect you, rather than critically standing aside and judge. Be not a cold observer, but a warm participant.

There is a profound hospitality to Mudita: celebrate with the traveller, make them feel welcome, do not critically judge their customs or experience, but give a space for their feelings to resonate. Joy has a preventive effect. It connects people, increases the perceived value of time spent together, and thus avoids relationships or situations collapsing. As warm air rises, allowing the balloon to gently glide above the ground, the collective uplift of empathetic joy allows a group to float above petty differences and swamps of despair, easily moving past obstacles which, to those heavier souls creeping on the ground, stand in the way of many collective endeavours. Mudita – thus – should be cultivated for its transformative power.

More keenly than ever, I noted how dangerous the absence of Mudita could be. I went out with a friend for dinner – an intelligent friend, with one of those dark, cynical forms of intelligence. I would share some joyful details of my life, and he would crush them down with questions to make a point. This, I realise, is the absence of Mudita – refusing to partake in the small joys of others on ethical grounds, because we see them as unfounded, vain, or slightly ridiculous.

Moliere painted this remarkably in his Misanthropist. The protagonist, Alceste, is quick to criticise those around him, their vanity, their lies. He dreams of finding ‘a distant place where one could have the freedom to be a man of honour’, but instead, sees vice everywhere. Romantic interpretations have made him a hero of truth, and this play a satire on social hypocrisy. But I like to read Moliere differently, as a much more incisive critic of pride: the fierce egotistical belief that some of us have an ethical duty to tell the truth, all the truth and nothing but the truth, at all times and in all settings – preferably covered in a thick coat of black paint, in case anybody may be distracted by gentle reflections of light on the shape of that truth. The consequence resembles the sins of the angels: a terrifying drop  into despair which, through sheer power of gravity, threatens to drag everyone around us down the same pit of darkness.