Grief, Love, and Buddhist Resilience

Should we be troubled by the thought that, after the death of a loved one such as a spouse, we might be resilient? That is, should we be troubled by the thought that we might adjust well, suffer little depression, anxiety, or inability to cope with or enjoy life, after a person we love very dearly dies?¹ When we reflect on how much our parent, spouse, child, or friend means to us, the mere thought of life without them can be distressing. We don’t presume that we will adapt and get on with our life after such a loss. So we tend not to be troubled by the thought that we may well adapt relatively quickly to the significant loss; for most of us the concern isn’t live in a Jamesian sense. But perhaps it should be?

One reason we might concern ourselves with the issue lies in the apparent fact that many of us are resilient in bereavement. Bereavement researchers tell us that about half of us will be resilient, managing the loss quite well, and adapting to it within a few months. Those who are resilient maintain “relatively stable, healthy levels of psychological and physical functioning” during bereavement.² A smaller portion of us will experience a higher level of distress and dysfunction, and will be slower to recover, taking perhaps a year. Only 10-15% of the bereaved suffer from “chronic” or “complicated” grief. Resilience is not uncommon.

While these empirical results seem reassuring, we must remember that they show only that we cope relatively well with that form of adversity, they do not show that grief is not a kind of adversity. The loss of a loved one is painful, difficult, unsettling, and even heartbreaking. It is well established that bereavement increases the likelihood of death significantly; researchers have dubbed this the “widowhood effect.”³ However, bereavement researchers also consistently find that for about half of us, the death of a loved one does not lead to depression, anxiety, and an inability to cope with the demands of life. For the most part, we adapt quite well to the death of those we love. Should we be troubled by this fact?

Certainly, the thought of one’s partner moving on to love someone else soon after we die, can make us uncomfortable. In “Love and Death,” Dan Moller has argued that we should be troubled by our capacity for resilience, which he characterizes as a kind of blindness to the significance of the loss suffered.⁴ As Moller sees it, it is an epistemic failure, a failure to recognize the significance of the deceased in one’s life. So even if resilience is prudentially advantageous – it helps us to carry on – it comes at a cost. The resilient person does not clearly perceive their situation, they fail to understand just how much they have irrevocably lost. This is troubling, Moller argues, because it suggests that we have a superficial capacity to appreciate others.

Moller’s interesting article has set the stage for this discussion, but he is not the only philosopher to have argued that we should be troubled by our capacity for resilience. Michael Cholbi, much in sympathy with Moller, has argued that resilience is regrettable insofar as it interferes with, or deprives us of, the self-knowledge that grief makes possible.⁵ Aaron Smuts has argued that resilience is an unattractive quality; it implies a kind of indifference to the loss of the loved one that cannot be squared with love for that person.⁶ We cannot both love someone and welcome future indifference about them. So, he concludes, resilience poses a problem for love and cannot be wholeheartedly embraced.

In this paper I will defend resilience against Moller’s epistemic argument and Smut’s indifference argument. Against Moller’s characterization of resilience as a kind of delusion, I will argue that the resilient person can accurately understand her loss. I will argue that recognition of others’ significance to us cannot be measured by dysfunction, and an inability to move on without them. The more prevalent and harmful forms of delusion concerning love and death arise from the human tendency to forget our mortality, and the impermanence of all living beings. As a result, we take people for granted. We fail to appreciate them and their significant role in our own welfare. Smuts argues that resilience is a condition that implies that the bereaved no longer cares for the deceased, and that is why the thought of moving on after the death of a spouse is unsettling. We would have to be alienated from our loving attachments to embrace the thought of our own resilience. Against this, I will argue that we can welcome the thought of recovery from loss without alienation. Resilience need not involve a failure to value or care about the deceased. Rather, we care about the dead (when we do) in appropriately different ways than we care about the living. On my account, resilience is not necessarily regrettable, nor need it be blind; it can allow for a clear perception of how others are important in our lives. While allowing that resilience can take a variety of forms, some of which may be unattractive, I explain how some core tenets in Buddhist thought lend themselves nicely to the development of a resilient character. Recognition of our impermanence and awareness of some of the causes of the suffering involved in grief, enhance our capacities to deal with loss. I begin by presenting the arguments against resilience.

1 What is wrong with resilience?

The findings about our capacity for resilience in the face of grief strike me as good news. As I see it, it is simply better that we cope well with the inevitable than suffer without hope of retrieving what is lost. Moreover, although we might flinch at the thought of our loved ones moving on after our deaths, we can also entertain the hope that those who love us will be resilient in response to our deaths, for their own good. So what makes resilience so unattractive to its critics?

For starters, it must be allowed that while our loftier selves might desire the resilience of, say, a beloved spouse, our lesser selves might recoil from the thought of that spouse happily taking up with another quite quickly after our death. The mere thought of our loved one’s resilience can leave us questioning how significant we really are for them. Remarriage soon after death suggests that the deceased is, in some important sense, replaceable. If we are replaceable, just how much did we matter in the first place? Secondly, we might think it unseemly, or inappropriate to embrace the thought that we will get over the loss of a beloved. It is one thing to believe what the evidence from social science tells us about resilience, but quite another to wholeheartedly embrace what it implies about one’s own case. We can feel repelled by the thought of our own resilience because it seems to imply the embrace of a future in which we no longer care for our beloved. These two sorts of concerns are advanced as problems for resilience: resilience involves a failure to perceive the significance of a loss, and resilience involves a disassociation, of sorts, from one’s love for their beloved.

2 Resilience as a Kind of Delusion

It would be a mistake to jump to the conclusion that the problem with resilience is that it indicates a failure to love. As Moller notes, a spouse might be willing to risk his life to save his spouse, but then respond resiliently to the spouse’s death. At work, he plausibly claims, is a general adaptive capacity that includes other valued aspects of our lives such as our physical well-being. Research indicates that we adapt pretty well to a variety of losses (including romantic relationships, the loss of a child, debilitating spinal-cord injuries, and serious medical problems) and in these cases we don’t suppose that the return to a baseline level of happiness was due to, for example, a lack of concern about our relationships, children, or health.⁷ Resilience is not apathy and doesn’t per se indicate a lack of love. So what is the problem?

According to Moller, the problem is that the resilient person, having adapted to the loss, no longer experiences it in a manner that allows her to know its significance. In the face of trauma, our “emotional immune system” kicks in, helping us return us to psychological health.⁸ A consequence of this adaptive capacity is that we are no longer able to register the significance of our loss. Moller’s argument depends upon an appeal to the perceptive capacity of emotions. Certain emotions are sometimes needed in order to fully appreciate one’s situation: “it is hard to envision someone being fully capable of recognizing a good or a bad without the appropriate emotional responses.”⁹ Psychopaths, for example, despite having normal cognitive abilities, lack the capacity to recognize the moral significance of their victims.¹⁰ To really appreciate a loss, to fully take it in, one needs to be able to feel its value. Without the feeling, there is only a “superficial discrimination” of the fact; the person doesn’t really get it. As Moller sees it, resilience involves moving beyond this emotional recognition of loss, and thus it is “a form of benign – or at least adaptive – blindness.”¹¹ Resilience is a kind of delusion, on his view, because it “seems to deprive us of our ability to care about those we love to their full measure after they are gone, and so deprives us of insight into our own condition.”¹²

However, Moller’s claim that the resilient person is deluded implausibly supposes that the acute, emotional period of taking in one’s loss, gives a “correct picture of how things really are, value-wise.”¹³ We can grant that certain emotional responses are necessary in order to accurately register the significance of a loss (which is why we can make sense of repression), but it doesn’t follow that the clearest perception of one’s situation lies ultimately in that recognition. That is, it is possible that a clear perception of one’s condition requires, at some point, an emotionally resonant recognition of the depth of the loss, but a clear, non-superficial accounting of the significance of what we have lost lies instead in an enlarged perspective that acknowledges human mortality. The emotionally resonant recognition of loss may be necessary but not sufficient for a clear assessment of one’s circumstance.

Consider, for example, a Buddhist view of the matter. In Buddhist philosophy, the correct picture of things is one which acknowledges the impermanence of all conditioned beings, and understands grief as, to some extent, a failure to recognize that fact. So the Buddhist will not agree that the clearest perception of one’s situation is the one in which sorrow and yearning has us in their grip. The Buddhist will allow that these emotions feature in grieving, but will plausibly deny that they correctly perceive the significance of the loss. Without denying that our loved ones feature importantly in our well-being, the Buddhist can retort that our changeable emotions are not the final arbiter of value; a clear perception of one’s situation requires a broader perspective, one which acknowledges that human lives are impermanent. So Moller’s claim that resilience is a form of blindness is too hasty.

To be fair, Moller provides an argument to convince us that the resilient response is, in fact, not a clear view of the situation. He argues that while resilience doesn’t show a lack of love for the deceased, it does show the deceased was less important to us than we think. We think that we are irreplaceable. But evidence of resilience and rates of remarriage suggest that we are not; they suggest that we are replaceable and not as important to each other as we presumed.¹⁴ Our adaptiveness thus indicates that we are actually less significant to each other than we supposed. What we now find precious and irreplaceable, once lost, will relatively quickly fade in its significance. Hence, according to Moller, resilience is a form of adaptive blindness.

The problem with this argument lies in its analysis of “importance.” Moller’s analysis over-emphasizes the counterfactual dimension. He notes that persons who are important in organizations make an enormous difference to their function; in their absence we miss them, and realize their significance or value. Those who are most important are thus irreplaceable; their absence leaves a void. Hence, Moller claims, those who are most important are unique and irreplaceable: “fungibility is antithetical to importance of value.”¹⁵ We think our loved ones are irreplaceable, but given the fact of resilience, and the tendency to remarry it seems they are not; we are superficial in our attachments.

However, while there is something to the claim that fungibility is antithetical to importance, it is an overstatement to suppose that others’ real significance to us can be accurately measured in this way. For one thing, we can imagine a bereaved husband who, after a life time of taking his wife for granted, remains despondent long after his wife’s death. He is not resilient, will never remarry, and now finds his wife to be irreplaceable. On Moller’s account the neglectful widow who continues grieving is perceiving the significance of what he has lost, seeing his situation clearly. By contrast, on Moller’s view, a resilient husband who didn’t take his wife for granted while she was alive, keeps her memory alive, but remarries relatively quickly, lacks the capacity to appreciate the loss of his beloved, and lacks insight into his condition. This is an unconvincing account of value recognition. It may involve a counterfactual dimension, but to ground it entirely in a failure to adapt begs the question against resilience. Furthermore, it advances a romantic over-simplification of how we love and value each other.

To see the problem with this approach consider Moller’s conceptual argument against resilience. He asks us to imagine super-resilient humans who are like us, but for the fact that they lack grief reactions, even to tragic situations. These “Super-resilient” beings remarry as soon as possible, often in a few weeks, and they have little to no grief reaction: “When their spouses drop dead in front of them, they shrug their shoulders and check what is on television.”¹⁶ The Super-resilient pity us, and wonder how we can tolerate suffering through weeks of deep grief. The fact that we find the Super-resilient troubling suggests that we are uneasy about resilience. But now consider the “Sub-resilient” who are like us but for the fact that “they never cease caring as deeply for their spouses as at the moment of death; the loss of that relationship is as deeply felt at half a century as it is at half an hour.”¹⁷ These non-adaptive beings have a “profound sense of mutual importance since the loss of a spouse is so devastating.” They think we are shallow. Moller contends that although we will think of ourselves as lying in a mean between two unhealthy extremes, we must admit that the sub-resilient have a stronger capacity to appreciate each other than we do. Thus we have reason to regret our resilience insofar as it leaves us less able to appreciate those we love.

However, the thought experiment doesn’t show that the sub-resilient have a more profound sense of mutual importance, nor a stronger capacity to recognize others’ value than the resilient, because these capacities cannot be directly inferred from persistent, negative emotional responses. The thought experiment seems to beg the question against resilience by assuming, but not showing, that a lack of caring is necessary to their resilience. But recognition of others’ significance for us involves more than postmortem suffering and dysfunction. To have a clear perception of what one has lost, one needs to start with a clear perception of what one has, and to have that one needs to recognize (attend to, appreciate) one’s loved ones while they are alive. We should be suspicious of the claim that the emotional distress in acute grieving is an apt measure of value; the regret and self-pity that can feature in grief are not obvious indicators of appreciation. As Christine Vitrano has pointed out, an extreme devastation response to a loss may indicate dependency or helplessness rather than love and appreciation.¹⁸

Furthermore, even were we to grant that the sub-resilient demonstrate a stronger capacity to appreciate their dead than the resilient, we could not generalize from this that they have a greater capacity to appreciate their non-deceased loved ones. That is, it would not show that they have a profound sense of mutual importance. The Sub-resilient would be dysfunctional, unable to fully attend to relationships with loved ones who remain alive. Appreciating people requires that we give them our attention, and that we recognize their contributions. When we feel devastated by a loss we are typically unable to do this. An accurate recognition of others’ significance is more complicated than Moller allows.

3 Resilience as a Failure to Care

Aaron Smuts follows Moller in holding that for certain kinds of knowledge or understanding, emotions are constitutive, as without them the understanding can only be superficial. But he argues that the real problem with resilience, the reason the thought of our own resilience provokes “appropriate” distress, is that it amounts to envisioning a future self that doesn’t care about what it deeply values now. To be resilient is to get over the loss of a loved one, to no longer care for them the way we do now. It is distressing to imagine a future in which we don’t love them as we do now. Having come to terms with her loss, the resilient person no longer has these strong emotions, and no longer cares for the deceased in this deep way. The real problem for resilience, according to Smuts, lies in the fact that it is like having part of yourself die; this explains why many of us will “recoil in horror” at its prospect.¹⁹

We recoil, he argues, because the envisioned future self who doesn’t care for one’s beloved is not a sense of oneself that can be wholeheartedly embraced. That future self is so radically different that, in an important sense, it isn’t me: “It’s almost as if we would be a very different person….Some changes are so radical, we cannot welcome their prospect. Loss of love for our beloved is one of them.”²⁰ Hence, a resilient future will be distressing to those who don’t now want to stop loving their beloved; only those who are alienated from their attachments could welcome a future without them. Smuts paints a pretty bleak view of the resilient person, describing the strongly resilient as robotic regarding their past relationships because they can only intellectually grasp their significance.²¹ As he sees it, the attenuation of care required by resilience will be disturbing to a lover. Those who are resilient in the future, he claims, will currently lack self-understanding, as they won’t be able to understand the significance of their loving attachments.²²

But this view of our attachments and desires, and our selves, is over-simplified. We can welcome radical changes to our desires without being alienated from them. Consider, for example, a person who has for many years spent all of her spare time and resources on travel to sunny, exotic, parts of the world. This desire to travel has shaped who she is, how she lives, and how she spends her time. But now she has a disease which makes travel to such places unsafe. She still longs for adventure, finds herself contemplating it, but evaluates the consequences for herself and decides against it. Although pleased that so much of her life has been shaped by love of adventure, because it is no longer feasible to continue living this way, she can welcome, without alienation, the prospect of a future in which she no longer desires it. It is important to note that she can embrace the radically different future without in any way diminishing the value of what she cares about. In coming to terms with her physical limitations she isn’t thereby indifferent to adventure travel, but simply adjusting to the possibilities for valuing it in the absence of full health. She might read adventure travel books, watch nature documentaries, help friends plan their vacations to exotic locations, or write an ode to adventure travel. It is not that she no longer cares about it - she has merely adapted to the ways in which it is possible to continue caring, given her circumstances.

Resilience is not a kind of indifference. When those we love dearly die, and we come to terms with this, we do not, as Smuts supposes, cease caring for them. However, our opportunities for caring for them become highly constrained. The resilient person need not cease caring about the deceased, but needs to find alternative ways of caring given that their beloved no longer exists. Of course, the ways in which we demonstrate care for and appreciation of the dead will be different from the ways that we demonstrate care for and appreciation of the living. The resilient bereaved might mark a death anniversary by looking at photos of the deceased, engaging in a shared favorite activity, or she might honour the deceased’s memory in more ritualistic ways. In this sort of activity a resilient person can continue to care about and appreciate the deceased, her good qualities and the ways they enriched her life. The resilient person can maintain a kind of relationship with the deceased and thereby continue caring. Resilience is neither necessarily unattractive, nor need it be distressing.

Resilience strikes me as an attractive possibility and one that I would wish for my spouse, and loved ones, in the event of my death. Of course, the thought of my spouse using my memorial service as an opportunity to find a new sweetheart, for example, is off-putting but that is not because resilience is off-putting. That is because such behavior would indicate a lack of sensitivity to the situation and its significance for himself and others. That some of us recoil at the thought of our own resilience may speak as loudly about our background assumptions about romantic love, our inability to recognize the inevitability of death, or our conception of what it is to be resilient. To the latter issue I now turn.

4 Psychological Research on Bereavement and Resilience

If we think of resilience as a capacity marked by indifference to the past, or as a shallowness of feeling to what has gone before, it will seem unattractive. But I have already argued against such depictions of resilience. It is worth noting that similar apprehensions about resilience have also held sway in psychology.

Until relatively recently, bereavement studies has been suspicious, even skeptical of resilience, and as a result the phenomenon of resilience was categorized as a failure to grieve. According to grief researcher George Bonanno, the concept of “absent grief” appeared in the psychoanalytic literature in the first half of the twentieth century, partly influenced by Freud’s description of grieving as “work.”²³ Subsequently, and without empirical substantiation, the idea that failures to complete the work of grieving led to mental health problems became entrenched, and ultimately psychologists and psychoanalysts became suspicious of the very possibility of resilience. Healthy, adaptive responses to the death of a loved one were seen as instances of absent grief, and resilience was dismissed as repression. But work in bereavement studies in the latter part of the twentieth century began to overturn assumptions about how people cope with grief. Unsubstantiated claims about standard stages of grief were discarded, and finally conceptual space was made for the very possibility of resilience.

As already mentioned, researchers consistently find that resilience is pretty common.²⁴ One review of the evidence, for example, reported that “bereaved individuals who exhibited relatively low levels of depression or distress have consistently approached or exceeded 50% of the sample.”²⁵ Resilience is understood to be relatively common, “does not appear to indicate pathology but rather healthy adjustment, and does not lead to delayed grief reactions.”²⁶ While resilient individuals may have brief lapses in their normal functioning, they “generally exhibit a stable trajectory of healthy functioning across time, as well as the capacity for generative experiences and positive emotions.”²⁷ Previously the role of positive emotions in adverse contexts had been ignored or was categorized as an unhealthy denial. But positive emotions play a role in grief and in recovery from loss. Bonanno describes grief as a kind of stress reaction through which we move in an unsteady oscillation; the resilient person’s capacity to oscillate between painful and positive emotions allows her to maintain stability in the face of loss.²⁸ Resilient persons don’t avoid difficult emotions, but balance them with positive memories and the laughter and compassion of others that is part of shared grieving. So the psychological study of resilience also suggests that it is a complex phenomenon, neither marked by indifference nor shallowness.

5 Buddhist Resilience, Attention, and Appreciation

Given that about half of us will fall into this category, it is reasonable to hold that resilience picks out a broad, general set of responses to loss, and that some patterns of response will be saner, and more attractive than others, some may even be admirable. Here I will make a case for a Buddhist-inspired account of resilience. In doing so, I do not suppose it to be the only way to be resilient. There may be a kind of person whose resilience depends on callous self-regard. That unattractive kind of resilience would raise concerns about that person’s capacity to love and to perceive the significance of his loss. But resilience need not take that form.

In fact, the psychological research on resilience suggests that resilient persons are not one single type.²⁹ The resilient are not exceptional people, but do have a set of adaptive characteristics that include: a capacity to find comfort in memory of loved ones; a capacity to adjust behaviors to suit the demands of different situations; confidence, and a sense that things will turn out alright; and the capacity to express emotions in some contexts and keep their feelings to themselves in others. Of course, our capacity to cope well also depends on numerous non-psychological variables such as financial resources, education, health, and the absence of other life stressors. Worries about paying the rent will clearly exacerbate the stresses of grief. Still, it does seem that resilient people have certain capacities that allow them to cope with adversity. They don’t avoid painful feelings, and can call up positive emotions.

The kind of resilience I will here defend fits with this psychological research. Moreover, my Buddhist-inspired account of resilience provides the clear view of one’s situation that Moller found lacking in the resilient person. On my account, a clear view of one’s situation includes recognition of the impermanence of our loved ones. This can help to return one’s attention to what one values so that it isn’t taken for granted. It is very easy to have one’s attention consumed by the details of our lives (especially what is going badly) and fail to see the bigger picture. Furthermore, my account can respond to Smut’s concern that it is not possible to deeply love our spouse and embrace the thought of moving on after their death. I will argue that Buddhist resilience does not imply a callous sensibility. Instead, the resilient person can, without alienation, love her spouse and welcome her own capacity to move on when the spouse dies. To make my case, I begin by sketching a few tenets that shape Buddhist conceptions of love and loss.

As is commonly known, according to Buddhist philosophy, suffering pervades life. The first of the Four Noble Truths simply acknowledges this fact - there is suffering. The second acknowledges that there is a cause of that suffering. Very roughly, our attachment to having things be a way they are not is the cause of suffering. The third claims that there is an end to, or cessation of, suffering, while the fourth states that there is a path of practice leading to liberation from suffering.³⁰ These truths are ennobling because fully understanding them frees one from needless distress. The suffering (dukkha) that is the focus of the Four Noble Truths, includes birth, aging, illness, death, encountering the unpleasant, separation from the pleasant, not getting what one wants, as well as the five aggregates that constitute the person.³¹ Suffering cannot be avoided, and so liberation from it requires understanding how it comes into existence and ceases. Because suffering is to be comprehended, Buddhist thinkers take it to be, in certain respects, valuable. It is not to be shunned because skillfully responding to it plays a role in liberation from suffering.³²

Suffering is both conspicuous and inconspicuous. To see this, consider the Sutta of “The Dart.” A person who is shot with a dart has conspicuous suffering - physical pain. However, if he becomes distraught, beats his breast, and laments over the pain, then he feels two pains instead of one, physical and mental pain. In becoming distraught, it is as though he has been shot with a second dart. By contrast, when the “instructed noble disciple” encounters pain “he does not weep beating his breast and become distraught. He feels one feeling – a bodily one, not a mental one.”³³ Buddhist philosophy advises that we develop our capacity to avoid the natural tendency to, as it were, shoot ourselves with a second dart.

Of course, loss presents itself as a kind of pain. In grief, we may experience various painful emotions: profound sorrow, longing, anger, regret, fear, shock, and disorientation. We may also experience joy in recollecting the deceased’s good character, and cherished memories. We may also experience relief. This may be especially prominent in cases where a prolonged and painful dying process preceded the death, but may also occur when the death marks the end of a complicated or trying relationship. In short, grief is complicated. The grieving feel a variety of emotions, including second-order attitudes about those emotions. We get attached to some of them and are averse to others. A bereaved person might, for example, feel relief and feel guilty about feeling relief, especially if her culture doesn’t acknowledge that relief can be part of grieving. Other social norms and expectations can influence how we respond to our own grief responses. Gendered assumptions about how women should respond, for example, can shape how a person feels about her own grieving. Others may expect us to fall apart and even presume a lack of loving commitment when the bereaved copes well, or remarries relatively quickly.³⁴ Dealing with loss involves not only our own first-order attitudes, but also our second-order attitudes.

Regarding our second-order attitudes, our tendency is to shoot the second dart.³⁵ We add to our suffering by, for example, finding ourselves wanting, our emotional responses too strong, or too muted. This may be further compounded by unhelpful interventions by well-meaning others who assume that all others will grieve in the same manner they did. Although we cannot change the fact that it is painful to lose someone we love we can, at a minimum, on a Buddhist view, refrain from adding to it. Insofar as Buddhism offers strategies to avoid shooting the second dart, it promotes resilience. On this account, the distraught, highly-charged emotional period of bereavement is not presumed to provide a clear indication of the significance of our loss.

In Buddhist philosophy, the sage (arahant) is equanimous and does not feel the strong emotions that besiege us when we are grieving. We might therefore distinguish between the arahant of the Buddhist texts and highly accomplished, contemporary Buddhist practitioners like the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh who describe themselves as feeling negative emotions like sorrow, as well as positive emotions that are typical in bereavement. These highly accomplished Buddhists are able to recognize, without attachment, these mental formations as impermanent, and avoid getting caught up in them because they do not relate to them as theirs. They do not identify with them; they observe rather than own them. This second-order capacity does not negate or reject as inappropriate the varied emotions that arise, but instead allows them to arise and cease without taking them to be authoritative. Less accomplished Buddhist practitioners can also benefit by bringing this perspective to bear on the experience of their thoughts and feelings, and thereby develop resilience. For example, by relating to strong emotions, such as the feeling of longing for the deceased, without attachment (even imperfectly), the griever in effect rejects the view that this longing provides a correct picture of how things really are value-wise. A clear view is not reducible to particular, strong emotional response.

Moreover, to have a clear view of one’s situation one cannot lose site of the fact that we are mortal. A clear view includes an awareness of the impermanence (anicca) of all conditioned things, and that includes those we love. Having a clear view of our situation requires a deep understanding that life involves the loss of loved ones. A Buddhist parable forcefully makes this point. A woman distraught at the loss of her child (unwilling to believe he is dead) comes to ask the Buddha for help. He says that he will provide medicine, but for this she will need to bring him mustard seeds from a home that has never experienced death. The woman goes door to door and, while people are willing to give her mustard seeds, they too have all lost loved ones. Ultimately she realizes that death is a universal human experience and is able to accept that her child has died. She takes her child’s body to a charnal ground and then returns to the Buddha, to become a nun.³⁶ While to some of us the Buddha’s treatment of the mother may seem harsh, the point of the story is not to advise us in grief counseling techniques! Instead, it is to compellingly remind us of one of the easily forgotten facts of the human situation. Having a clear view of one’s situation demands some awareness of the inevitability of loss.

Beyond refraining from shooting a second dart, Buddhism provides training of a deeper sort that can obviate typical grief responses, and in this sense can be said to aim to eradicate grief. The sage will have comprehended the doctrine of no-self (anatta), and so realize that there is no self that is unchanging that identifies the essence of the person. Peter Harvey describes the no-self doctrine in practical terms as the “persistent undermining of any attempt to take anything as “Self,” and thus be attached to it. It is a contemplative strategy to induce, in the end, a letting go of everything.”³⁷ This contemplative strategy is more akin to a commitment to a technique for framing one’s experience, than the adoption of a belief in a metaphysical fact.³⁸ So comprehension of the doctrine of no-self is a kind of success in practical knowledge. Practical knowledge of the impermanence of all conditioned beings also features in the Buddhist sage’s equanimity. The Buddhist sage is described as invulnerable to grief. In the Pali Canon, for example, the arahant Sariputta proclaims that, while in seclusion he has come to realize that he can face any kind of change and alteration of the world, without succumbing to “sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair.”³⁹ This prompts the Venerable Ananda to question how he might respond to a significant change in the Buddha, presumably his death. Sariputta replies that he would not be afflicted with negative emotions, and Ananda concludes that Sariputta has uprooted the mental formations on which grief depends. It seems that Sariputta has eradicated grief. Indeed, it is claimed that when the Buddha died, those of his disciples who were arahants had no need of grief, while those who grieved were not arahants.⁴⁰ So the enlightened beings of the Pali Canon are described as having eradicated grief. We might therefore be tempted to consider the Buddhist sage as just like the Super-resilient. However, that comparison would be too quick.

For one thing, arahants aren’t described as disposed to respond to the Buddha’s death by shrugging their shoulders and turning to the next thing. In declaring his predicted absence of grief, Sariputta also makes an evaluative claim – the world has lost a great being, whose longer life would have been for the welfare and happiness of all. The arahant apprehends the loss to himself and others, but without despair. Because the arahant’s resilience includes a recognition of significant loss, it doesn’t suggest the apathy of the Super-resilient. A clear perception of the situation is had, but without distress. Thus, the arahant’s idealized, equanimous response to death does not signal a superficial capacity to discriminate the significance of what has been lost. It might be objected that even if it is granted that practical knowledge of impermanence as part of the human condition can ease the suffering of grief, it cannot bolster the ability to appreciate the significance others have in our lives. In fact, it might be thought to imply that the loss of our loved ones is not very significant after all, given that it happens to everyone. Resilience, the objection goes, makes us somewhat callous, and while this means we will suffer less, it does not mean we will recognize the significance of what we have lost. However, it is false that resilience makes us callous. The question of how to properly value life (and particular lives) is distinct from the question of its nature. Recognition of life’s impermanence does not itself imply that it is, or should be experienced as, insignificant. So Buddhist-inspired resilience does not lead to the disvalue of loved ones. Death and loss are commonplace, but from that fact it doesn’t follow that when a loved one dies we have not suffered a significant loss; rather, it is a significant loss that is commonplace. Similarly, reflecting on the inevitability of our own death does not force the conclusion that our lives are not significant.

The objection supposes that in order to truly value something, one cannot be reconciled with its contingent nature. However, as I have argued, failure to recall the contingent nature of what we love plays a role in our taking it for granted. Reflections on impermanence have the potential to return our attention to what we currently value, and in doing so promote and enhance our opportunities for appreciating our loved ones while they are alive. Thus, awareness of impermanence challenges the human tendency to take things and other people for granted, and this leaves us better able to appreciate the significance of our loved ones. Buddhist-inspired resilience does not make one callous, nor does it leave one unable to appreciate others.

Buddhist-inspired reflections on impermanence promote a clearer perception of reality, while also reducing our tendency to take others for granted by acknowledging the contingency of our current situation. The Five Remembrances, or recollections, for example, exhort us to reflect on our own nature, including the inevitable facts of aging, illness and death. They also include recognition that “All things near and dear to me are subject to variableness, subject to separation” and finally that “I am the result of my own deeds.”⁴¹ What I do now influences my future self and my possibilities for happiness. Of course, the point of the remembrances is not to apply them when one is grieving. But as regular reflections, they shape how one engages in the world. This promotes resilience by priming us for the inevitable. These reminders can refocus our attention, so that we better recognize the significance of what we value in our daily lives.

Buddhist philosophy thus provides a means for enhancing our appreciation of others’ significance in our lives while promoting resilience. It rejects the romantic view of love for a more pragmatic conception that is consistent with resilience in bereavement. Smuts argued that a resilient person, who could embrace the thought of moving on after a loss, would have to be alienated from her own loving attachment. For this reason, he claimed that those who are resilient in the future “will have trouble understanding who they are now, trouble understanding the importance of their current relationships.”⁴² However, as I have shown, resilience is consistent with an enhanced sense of the significance of both one’s relationships, and oneself. Actually loving others requires giving them attention and appreciation. Buddhist-inspired resilience does not imply alienation, nor does it imply that the bereaved is indifferent to her deceased.

6 Conclusion

Philosophers of antiquity considered at great length how we should reflect on death and loss. The Stoics, for example, who exhorted that we live in accordance with nature, accepting with grace what fate has bestowed upon us, would not have found resilience troubling. Instead they would have commended it. I mention this because in Stoic philosophy, as in Buddhist philosophy, a great deal of effort is spent framing our emotional responses in unfamiliar ways. Both philosophies encourage alternative conceptions of our experience and our assumptions about how things should go. Here I have offered a sketch of how some core Buddhist tenets can inform our thinking about grief, love and resilience, that challenge standard conceptions of their relations.

I have argued that resilience, understood as a multi-faceted characterological response, is neither philosophically problematic, nor unattractive. In grieving we move between a variety of emotions, some of which are positive. The capacity to weather the storm of loss does not per se indicate a superficial appreciation for what we have lost, and it doesn’t show that we no longer care for our dead loved ones. I have argued that skeptical challenges attack a view of resilience that is too simplistic, and a conception of love that is overly romantic. The psychological literature is now acknowledging the complexity of grief and patterns of resilience. Our philosophical analyses should also operate with a richer, more plausible account of what resilient people are like, and should abandon the naive conviction that intense negative emotion is the sign of caring. The Buddhist-inspired account of resilience I have offered shows that resilience per se is not a troubling prospect.