Meeting Up with Mudita

This is the second iteration of this essay. The first one inadvertently limited comments to paid subscribers. Comments are open to everyone.

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There is no one-word English equivalent for the Pali word mudita, normally translated as sympathetic or unselfish joy, the feeling of taking pleasure in the well-being of others. English speakers have envy and jealousy, but we do not have mudita. There are more than 170,000 words in English, but nothing to express this way of loving, a flourishing of benevolence. It’s hard to believe that this is a weakness in the language. It must go deeper than that. Some phenomena call for signifiers, some do not. I saw a pasta dish at the flea market today that was in good condition and a bargain at three dollars, but it said pasta across the bottom of the bowl which I found unaccountably off putting, as if you need to dish out all the linguini with clam sauce before you know what you’re eating. I’d rather have a label for sympathetic joy, to balance out schadenfreude, the German term that so succinctly describes the frisson of pleasure I’ve been known to feel when someone else gets an unflattering haircut. Schadenfreude has been adopted for use in English prose, but mudita has not yet been so canonized.

I have had some modest success in my efforts to corral the eruptions of ill will in my consciousness, to notice the tendencies towards jealousy arising. But subtraction seems to be easier than addition. To grow in love, to cultivate mudita, calls for a new mathematics, a new botany. It’s not the same as being able to feel compassion for someone else’s suffering which can sometimes be confused with a patronizing do-goodism. To experience mudita is to share in another’s joy out of wholehearted, unspoiled affection for that person. To experience mudita is to return to a childlike state where playfulness is contagious and joy is abounding. I’m not so naive as to suggest that this is the only condition of childhood, but it remains a possibility in the sandbox.

Photo by Fabian Centeno on Unsplash

I’m told that mudita is a neglected subject in spiritual literature. It does not seem to be an easy or straightforward concept to digest in our culture and cries out for unpacking. One idea is that it begins with simple appreciation of the good in other people. In the tradition of Thich Nhat Hahn, this is called flower watering. We recognize that other people are deserving conduits of goodness that contribute their merit to the greater well-being and we encourage these flowering qualities by watering them. Looked at in this light, mudita is not only something that rises to the surface when someone else is blessed with good fortune, but is, in the words of the Buddhist writer Natasha Jackson, “A quiet stream of sympathy and understanding flowing within the individual all the time.” This could be you or me. I wonder if this is what I’ve heard described as the love that no one remembers.

I am aware of my almost complete lack of knowledge of this subject. Sometimes this is a good thing, as it often is when people engage in interfaith dialogue, coming to new ideas with beginner’s mind. Instead of writing from a doctrinaire position where I’ve studied the fine points of Buddhist philosophy as a coherent system, I come to you from the sandbox, where I am playing, innocent of the possibility that someone might throw sand in my face. “We have so little of each other now, so far from tribe and fire,” as the poet Danusha Laméris has written. I find myself feeling curious and a little bit hopeful about new ways of being. All I know is what formed me in Jewish mysticism and in life’s struggles. From this novitiate, I observe that mudita is born of humility, generosity, forgiveness, and deep listening. To break it down to its constituent parts helps to demystify it for me. I’m reminded of the mental gymnastics I had to do as a Hospice chaplain when someone wanted me to say the Hail, Mary with them. I used to call it simultaneous translation. I could try to adopt someone else’s language, but in the end, it was humility, generosity, forgiveness, and deep listening that spoke to me, an awareness of interbeing. And I would know then, as it is written in Deuteronomy, “this thing is very close to you. It’s in your mouth and in your heart.” Now it needs to be acknowledged and then taken out for a walk, aired out in the light of day and given a name, mudita.

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.