Generosity and spirituality
What do you expect when you help people?
The New Mindscape #10–1
In 2008, there was a massive earthquake in Sichuan Province, China. A few months after the earthquake, I went to Chengdu. I was very surprised as I talked to taxi drivers and other people. I expected them to tell me horrible stories or tragic experiences about the earthquake. But that is not what they were talking about. The taxi drivers talked a lot about how they drove people for free during those days after the earthquake, because they wanted to help. They didn’t say anything like, ‘Oh, it was horrible. I had to drive injured people around’, or ‘I lost so much income those days’. They sounded happy when they told me about it. I could sense that during that time, everybody was helping everybody else. People like the taxi drivers suddenly forgot about themselves. Their only concern was how to come in aid, to rescue people, or to help them in small ways.
As a result, I decided to do a research project on volunteers in China. Thousands and thousands of people from all over China had rushed to the site of the earthquake to help. Two years later, in 2010, I went to do interviews in many volunteer organisations in China, including some active in the earthquake area.
One thing surprised me. Of course, right after the earthquake, so many people went to the earthquake area to help to rescue the victims, and displayed their “higher self”, rather than their “lower self,” if you recall our discussion of the dual nature of humanity in The New Mindscape #9–3. When people are directly faced with acute suffering, suddenly, the good side of people was expressed.
But two years after the earthquake, I went to Hanwang, a town which was completely destroyed by the earthquake. Right next to the ruins of the town, there was a prefabricated refugee camp. All the inhabitants of Hanwang were living there, until they could be moved to new homes. I interviewed the volunteers there. There were different organisations helping with the education of children, giving psychological therapy, or providing other types of social services. At that time, two years after the earthquake, when I went there, there were three organisations providing such services in the refugee settlement. What surprised me was that the three groups were all religious groups. One was Christian, and the other two were Buddhist.
In the days right after the earthquake, when it had been on TV every day, everybody wanted to help. But a few months later, however, only a few volunteers were still there. And very few stayed there for two years, living in cramped pre-fabricated cabins for refugees. Some of them were university graduates. They had gone and stayed there for two years. But the only people who stayed for such a long time were religious people.
I was surprised, because it was religious groups that stayed there for such a long time. No other organisation, governmental or NGO, was still active in helping the earthquake victims.
Religious groups aren’t the only ones that teach people to be altruistic and to serve people — so do other groups. So why were other groups not there, but the religious groups were?
Perhaps their spiritual commitment compelled them to stay and help. Perhaps their spirituality made them more empathetic, and more willing to help people in need. Ordinary people don’t say that they live to help others. Instead, they would probably say they live to make money, or something like that. Perhaps nonreligious people would attach more importance to their personal affairs that they need to deal with. After a period of time, such people have to come back to their normal life. They wouldn’t devote their entire life to helping people. So it’s reasonable for nonreligious people to go back to their lives after a period of time. However, for some religious people, maybe they treated helping others as their objective in life. For them, being moral is a huge part of their purpose of living.[1, 2]
I think these answers point to a certain understanding of human nature. What should we really be doing in life? Certainly, not all religious people are willing to devote themselves for years to volunteering in difficult conditions. Nevertheless, it is true that religious teachings, culture and morality generally emphasise that even in their everyday life, people should do their best to help others, to serve their fellow beings.
I started to think about that, and interviewed many volunteers, and talked to them about their different experiences. I found that for so-called “normal” people, when we do something for other people, we often expect something in return. Perhaps this is at the level of “conventional morality”, as we discussed a few weeks ago. Marcel Mauss, a French anthropologist, developed a whole theory of the gift, of the exchange of gifts, help, and favours between people [3]. On the one hand, human beings are generous — they are always doing things for other people. At the same time, as in the practice of guanxi in Chinese culture, if you do something for others, you will expect that later on the favour will be returned. At least, if you are doing something for others, the others should express their gratitude. In all cultures, there is a notion of reciprocity. We are generous to others, but we expect reciprocity — we expect people to reciprocate either right now or in the future, either through help or gratitude.
But what happens in volunteering? I’m sure many of you have had or will have volunteering experiences — for awhile, it can be interesting, but no matter how many good things you do for others, at some point, some people may not be grateful, may take advantage of you, and may laugh or even scold you. Or simply, you might not see an obvious positive effect of your efforts. What’s worse, the government might even put problems in your way. It’s so much trouble. If you are expecting, consciously or unconsciously, something in return from the people you’re helping or the general society, sooner or later, you may be disappointed. This is one of the reasons why people who are at that level of motivation — or of conventional morality — may eventually lose their interest.
But for people who are engaged in a spiritual path, if you do something for other people, you don’t expect something in return from them. Somehow, the reward or benefit will be a spiritual one. In Buddhist language, it is called “merit” 功德. You are accumulating merit by helping people with a pure motive [4]. Thus, you don’t expect anything in return from the people you help, because you will benefit spiritually. If you have selfish motives in helping others, you will not gain merit, in fact you may even lose merit. Or, in other religious terminologies, by doing good deeds you gain blessings, you come closer to God, you progress spiritually.
People who follow this spiritual logic, may be able to persist in volunteering for a longer time. It might be easier for them to overcome the obstacles that they encounter when they were helping people — because they don’t expect anything in reciprocation from the people they help, and they will make spiritual gains. And it becomes easier for them to be detached from their material needs, because when they let go on the material side, they feel that they gain on the spiritual side.
For some of the Buddhist volunteers I interviewed, who were members of Tzu Chi Buddhist Compassion Merit Foundation of Taiwan 慈濟功德會, they not only help people, but they thank those people for accepting their help, because they consider that the greatest blessing in the world is to be able to help other people. So it is not the volunteers who are doing a favour to the people they are helping, but spiritually, it is the latter who are doing a favour to the volunteers! One can grow spiritually by helping people, by becoming selfless, and by overcoming the ego. So if one is given a chance to help, it is so wonderful, because being able to help is a huge gift. Therefore, people in Tzu Chi don’t want anything in return, but only the chance to help. They thank people for giving them the opportunity to love and to share.[5]
[1] Stephanie Denning (2021) Persistence in volunteering: an affect theory approach to faith-based volunteering, Social & Cultural Geography, 22:6, 807–827, DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2019.1633685
[2] M. Kyle Matsuba, Daniel Hart, Robert Atkins (2007) Psychological and social-structural influences on commitment to volunteering, Journal of Research in Personality, Volume 41, Issue 4, Pages 889–907.
[3] Marcel Mauss, The Gift. Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, 1925.
[4] Hsu, Mu-Lung. “Making Merit, Making Civil Society: Free Funeral Service Societies and Merit-Making in Contemporary Myanmar.” Journal of Burma Studies 23, no. 1 (2019): 1–36. doi:10.1353/jbs.2019.0001.
[5] Huang, C. Julia. Charisma and Compassion: Cheng Yen and the Buddhist Tzu Chi Movement. Harvard University Press, 2009.
This essay and the New Mindscape Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9014 Spirituality, Religion and Social Change, with the support of the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
