Self-love, self-kindness, and non-self

Someone wrote to me recently and asked two questions, which boiled down to:

1. Did the Buddha teach self-love?
2. Is loving yourself contrary to seeing through the illusion of self?

There was a third question, but it was a little quirky, and so I’ll deal with it at the end.

First, I explained that these days I find the language of “self-love” unhelpful, mainly because the word “love” is so open to interpretation.

Self-kindness rather than self-love

I prefer to think in terms of self-kindness — that is, treating yourself with the same warmth, supportiveness, encouragement, and forgiveness you’d show to a dear friend.

The idea of “loving yourself” can be tricky. If you talk about “loving” parts of your personality that are harmful to yourself or others, this can imply that you approve of them.

But if you talk about being kind to them, that implication isn’t there. You can be kind toward someone without approving of what they do. Being kind toward harmful parts of yourself implies working patiently with them and not judging yourself harshly for having them.

The Buddha on self-kindness

The Buddha mostly talked about self-kindness implicitly, but there is one place he talks about it fairly explicitly. Talking about people who act skillfully, he said,

Even though they may say, ‘We aren’t dear to ourselves,’ still they are dear to themselves. Why is that? Of their own accord, they act toward themselves as a dear one would act toward a dear one; thus they are dear to themselves

He explains that acting toward yourself “as a dear one” means behaving ethically — that is, acting with regard to your own and others’ long-term happiness and well-being.

He contrasts this with people who say they are dear to themselves but who act unskillfully, thus heaping up future suffering for themselves. In other words they think they are being dear (kind) to themselves but they are acting like their own enemies.

So for the Buddha, the thing was to genuinely be kind to ourselves (that is, to treat ourselves as we would treat a dear one) by acting skillfully. That’s a pretty explicit acknowledgement of the principle that we should be kind to ourselves and treat ourselves as friends.

We’re kind to others if we’re kind to ourselves

We should treat ourselves as we would treat a friend, and treat all others as we would treat ourselves. And so we should think and act as follows:

I want to live and don’t want to die; I want to be happy and recoil from pain. Since this is so, if someone were to take my life, I wouldn’t like that. But others also want to live and don’t want to die; they want to be happy and recoil from pain. So if I were to take the life of someone else, they wouldn’t like that either. The thing that is disliked by me is also disliked by others. Since I dislike this thing, how can I inflict it on someone else?

The general principle is both clear and beautiful: “The thing that is disliked by me is also disliked by others. Since I dislike this thing, how can I inflict it on someone else?” It applies to all actions. And so, the Buddha applies this principle to other forms of behavior, such as stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, and so on.

We could call this “self-love,” but I don’t, as I said, find that term very helpful. I think it’s better to say that we should be kind to ourselves — that is, we should treat ourselves in the same way as we would treat someone dear to us.

But no form of words, whether it be “self-kindness” or “self-love” is immune from misinterpretation. We have to understand that whatever we call it, “treating ourselves as dear” means acting skillfully, which means treating others as dear.

Dharma teachings work together

This mutuality of kindness for self and other is something the Buddha talked about in the Sedaka Sutta:

Looking after yourself, you look after others; and looking after others, you look after yourself. And how do you look after others by looking after yourself? By development, cultivation, and practice of meditation. And how do you look after yourself by looking after others? By acceptance, harmlessness, love, and sympathy.

One of the things about Dharma teachings is you can’t take just one of them and expect it to “work.” They’re designed to work together, synergistically. So “self-kindness” and “other-kindness” are mutually supportive. When I’m kind to myself that helps me be kinder to others. When I’m kind to others I’m helping myself, too.

Being kind is not being “nice”

One thing I think needs clarified, though, is that being kind to others is not the same as being “nice” to them, which is what people often do.

Being “nice” involves seeking approval from others. The assumption is: “If I act in the right way, others will like me and show me kindness.” It’s insincere, flawed, and ultimately selfish.

Niceness is what happens when we don’t have self-kindness, and so we try try to manipulate others into being kind to us in order to fill the void inside us. That void arises because we haven’t learned to be kind to ourselves. We don’t regard ourselves warmly, talk to ourselves encouragingly, and forgive ourselves when we’re not perfect. Because we don’t relate to ourselves kindly, we crave the kindness of others. Hence the manipulation.

Genuine self-kindness is when we respect ourselves, treat ourselves as we would a dear one, and have kindness and empathy for ourselves.  This naturally extends to others when we empathetically know that they are just the same as us: they want to be happy and they don’t want to suffer; their feelings are as real to them as ours are to us.

Self-kindness and non-self

My correspondent asked a third question:

The Buddha said to send metta/goodwill to all directions, but is towards oneself a direction? That would seem to be stationary, since you ARE yourself.

I replied that I thought this was an overly abstract way of seeing things that overlooks our actual experience.

My actual experience is, I perceive myself. Or at least I perceive various sensations, thoughts, feelings, and impulses that I collectively label “myself.”

This “myself” includes both perceiving and things that are perceived.

There is always an emotional tone to that perceiving. Someone can hate themselves — that is, they perceive themselves with disapproval. Someone can be kind to themselves, which means that they perceive themselves with gentleness, patience, supportiveness, and encouragement (as they would a dear friend).

So yes, I can have goodwill for myself. I can be kind to myself. When, in the final stage of lovingkindness practice, I “send” kindness in all directions, I’m simply letting my awareness be permeated by an attitude of empathy and kindness. I let my awareness permeate the world, which means I’m “sending” kindness everywhere. But I’m also permeating my own being with a kindly awareness, and so I’m “sending” kindness to myself. (Actually, there is no “sending” of anything. That’s just an imperfect metaphor.)

To say “you ARE yourself” is to treat yourself as a unified phenomenon — that is, as if you were a self. A true self (something completely unified) could not be in relation to itself. Rather, each of us is an amalgamation of various activities, processes, etc. That includes parts that can relate kindly, and parts that need to be related to kindly.

It’s because there is no unified self that we’re able to be kind to ourselves.