The Buddha (c. 470–390 BCE) would have agreed.6 He claimed to have discovered a realm of sacred peace within himself that he called nirvana (“blowing out”), because the passions, desires, and selfishness that had hitherto held him in thrall had been extinguished like a flame. Nirvana, he claimed, was an entirely natural state and could be achieved by anybody who put his regimen into practice. One of its central disciplines was a meditation on four elements of the “immeasurable” love that exists within everyone and everything: maitri (“loving kindness”), the desire to bring happiness to all sentient beings; karuna (“compassion”), the resolve to liberate all creatures from their pain; mudita (“sympathetic joy”), which takes delight in the happiness of others; and finally upeksha (“even-mindedness”), an equanimity that enables us to love all beings equally and impartially. — 10: 145-152
Christians in Europe were taught to expound every sentence of the Bible in four ways: literally, morally, allegorically, and mystically. Indeed, as a Catholic child in the 1950s, this was how I was taught to read the Bible. For the Christians as for the rabbis, charity was the key to correct exegesis. Saint Augustine (354–430), one of the most formative theologians in the Western Christian tradition, insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended, any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity.73 — 51: 768-773