“The best excellence is to have great altruism.”

When we think about bodhicitta and try and cultivate it, it becomes completely clear that without equanimity, bodhicitta is impossible. Equanimity is the first prelude, it is neither included in the seven-point-cause-and-effect instructions nor in equalising and exchanging self with others. These are the two primary methods to develop bodhicitta.

Bodhicitta requires us to have acceptance and great compassion for each and every living being, no matter who they are, how they treat us, what their political views are, and the stuff that we usually use to discern who is on my side and whom I need to be suspicious and afraid of. With bodhicitta you cannot have suspicion and fear of sentient beings, and you cannot play favourites. It just does not work. I am not even talking practically, when you are trying to teach people. Clearly that does not work. But in your mind, you cannot develop love and compassion with partiality. The two do not go together, they do not compute.

I think it is very important that we pay a lot of attention into developing equanimity. Love makes people feel good. Compassion is a little harder because you must look at their suffering. Love goes with love, light and bliss, which we all want to have them quickly, cheaply and easily. But to even have equal-hearted love for people we have to get rid of the partial mind that is attached to the people we like (our friends, and maybe our relatives), get rid of the anger at the people who are our enemies, and the apathy towards strangers. Yet when we look at our experience all day long and throughout the year, we are constantly evaluating people and putting them in one of those three categories, and then being attached to the friends, having aversion and dislike for the enemies, and not caring at all about the strangers.

I think the meaning of equanimity boils down to the same thing if you developed real, genuine equanimity. You would see everybody as a friend but know that some people at this moment do not reciprocate that feeling towards you. From your side, you would not call them an enemy; you just know they do not reciprocate right now, but you still see them as a friend. This happens in normal life too, doesn’t it? We have friends, people who we see as friends, who may have stopped liking us a long time ago, but we still have warm feelings for them, “It is a friend, it is just something that happened temporarily.”

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