Mudita: Sympathetic Joy You Can Give

Your six-year-old brings you a drawing: a cat. The cat has five legs, a green tail and a smile half the size of its face. You could be honest: “Cats have four legs.” Or you could put the drawing on the fridge, right in the middle.

In the second case the child glows until bedtime. So, apparently, does the cat.

Nobody was rescued. Nothing bad was happening. There's simply a bit more joy in the world now, and someone put it there on purpose.

That's mudita — sympathetic joy, the third brahmavihara.

Mudita, the quietest of the four

Mudita (muditā) is translated as “joy”, “gladness”, “sympathetic joy”. There are four brahmaviharas, and in that family it's the quiet sister nobody talks about much.

With metta, kindness, it's clear what to do. With karuna, compassion, too. People ask about upekkha, equanimity, all the time: how to stop being jerked around, how not to react. But how do you work with mudita? Almost nobody asks.

Odd, isn't it? It seems obvious: being glad is pleasant, what's there to learn? Yet mudita slips past, like a train you watch from the window of another train.

The reason may lie in how it's usually explained.

What's wrong with the usual explanation

The Visuddhimagga, the great commentarial treatise, describes sympathetic joy as gladness at the good qualities and good experiences of other beings. Someone did something good, and we're glad for them.

Sounds lovely. In real life it works about half the time.

Take a golden retriever that's found a tennis ball. Total happiness, tail spinning like a propeller. But what good qualities of mind is it known for? What has it worked on, what virtue has it reached? By that logic, being glad for it isn't really allowed.

There's another reading: be glad at whatever makes someone else glad. Not great either. Your neighbour is singing karaoke at 2 a.m. and is perfectly happy. Should you rejoice with him? Ideally sing along?

Joy comes in many kinds. Not every kind is worth multiplying.

What is mudita, really?

To understand mudita, go back to empathy. Cognitive empathy, that is: the ability to see what's going on with someone else. Not catching their feeling, but understanding it. Not only pain, but joy too, and any inner state.

All the brahmaviharas rest on that understanding. They differ in where it's pointed.

Metta is a sense of belonging, of connection with others rather than rejection. Say you're standing in the passport queue after a night flight. Everyone's tired and crumpled, someone's arguing with the officer. You can stand there quietly hating everyone. Or you can notice: each of them has their own road; someone will be met with flowers, someone flew in for a funeral. Inside, there's suddenly a bit more room. That's metta.

Karuna is empathy towards suffering. And action so that there's less of it.

Mudita is empathy towards joy, towards good states. And deliberate action in thought, word and deed so that joy arises in others.

Not any joy, of course. Not the 2 a.m. karaoke kind. The clean, healthy kind: the kind that leaves nobody worse off.

«Karuna lowers the sum of suffering. Mudita raises the sum of joy.»

Think back to the five-legged cat. The drawing didn't need saving. Someone simply saw that this small person would be glad, and made it happen.

Joy is like a candle flame. Light someone else's candle from yours, and yours doesn't grow dimmer. There's just more light in the room.

That's all mudita is. Very clear, very healthy. For many people it's the closest of all: some are simply happiest when they're making others glad. For them it's the best way into practice.

A force that holds you up

All the brahmaviharas are about love. And mudita is one of its strongest forms. Sometimes films show it best.

“Life Is Beautiful”, late nineties. Italy, the Second World War. The hero is a Jewish man married to an Italian woman, with a little son. Father and son end up in a concentration camp. The boy is only a few years old; his father hides him and all the while turns what's happening into a game: it's a competition, score enough points and you win the grand prize.

This man radiated joy even before the war. And in the camp he kept giving it to his son, day after day. The boy survives, and in the film the story is told by him, grown up.

Joy given on purpose turns out to be not a decoration of life but something to stand on.

Or “Jojo Rabbit”, a more recent film. A boy grows up in Nazi Germany and believes the ideology one hundred percent. His mother, played by Scarlett Johansson, thinks very differently and works with the resistance. She doesn't lecture him. She dances with him, makes him laugh, gives him joy — and that's how she slowly leads him away from hatred.

Both films are morally very strong. And both show that mudita isn't a small thing like an emoji in a chat. It's a huge expression of love.

How to practise mudita

The practice is simple, no complicated technique.

1. 1

   In daily life

   Look at any being — a person in a queue, a courier, the neighbour's dog — and keep in mind: may all beings dwell in joy. May there be joy. And when you get the chance, do something small that adds to it.

2. 2

   In meditation

   Sit and repeat this phrase, or just one word: “joy”. And watch how it works on the mind and body, how the joy grows.

3. 3

   Without hurry

   Each repetition is like feeding a sourdough starter. Nothing to see today, nothing tomorrow. Then one day the dough rises on its own.

That's sympathetic joy: not waiting for a reason to be glad, but noticing where you can create one.

Instead of a conclusion

You can spend your whole life waiting for a reason to be glad for someone.

Or you can become that reason.