Thought for the Day, 21.08.2020. On BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p08p7wg5
As Ellen Degeneres’ Kindness brand runs into trouble, how does kindness look from a Buddhist perspective?
The American TV host Ellen DeGeneres has been called the Queen of Kindness. Her daily show features stories of people acting kindly and she signs off each day with the words: ‘Be kind to one another.’ This espousal of kindness lends a frisson to accusations that, behind the scenes, the Ellen DeGeneres Show has allegedly had a culture of racism, bullying and sexual harassment.
Most of us ruefully recognise the truth of the sardonic wisecrack: ‘The secret of success is sincerity, and once you can fake that you’ve got it made.’ But we also like the idea of a TV programme that champions kindness. The Ellen DeGeneres Show was connecting with a yearning in both believers and non-believers to inhabit a kinder world, away from the traumas of the news cycle, in which we all give and receive love and care.
This certainly resonates for Buddhists. Buddhist ethics is, essentially, a training in being kind; and Buddhist meditation is, at least in part, a systematic way to develop a kindly emotional outlook. But the value in these teachings is not that we respond warmly to the sentiments they express. These are practices, and the most important thing to say about the practice of kindness, in the Buddhist sense, is that it’s hard.
It’s easy to think myself a kind, thoughtful, nice person; much harder to maintain that after several hours speaking to a call centre. It’s hard to be kind to people you don’t like, or don’t like you, or get in the way of what you’re trying to achieve. And if the appeal of kindness is its simplicity, what does it mean for the judge who passes sentence, the manager who must reprimand a failing employee, or any of us facing the complexities of our lives?
Buddhism doesn’t hold that virtuous actions must be painful to be sincere, but it does teach that the ultimate basis for kindness is a sense of our fundamental solidarity with all beings. Feeling this requires us to go beyond self-interest, in all its subtle manifestations; and that’s what makes it hard.
Perhaps we should refrain from judging public figures we only know through their media images. Instead we might do better to distinguish between sentimental, cost-free accounts of kindness and more challenging alternatives that require of us a degree of renunciation.
