Ionce asked my three wise men — I mean my higher self — “What is tolerance and what destroys it?” They answered, “When tolerance is absent we understand what it should be and we set about trying to create it.”

One thing inimical to tolerance is envy, which in the words of Honore de Balzac, “lurks in the human heart like a viper in its hole”. And truth to tell, whether we agree or disagree with him, whether we believe that man is inherently bad and in need of salvation, or that he is born with the Buddha nature and may either be corrupted by the world or find his way to enlightenment, the fact remains that we are part of the animal world, and firmly linked to the animal within us, be it viper, dove, tortoise, bird of paradise, butterfly or whatever, and must learn to live with all other creatures as well as with ourselves, in order to create, maintain or restore tolerance in the world as microcosm or macrocosm. After all, if we cannot tolerate ourselves, how can we do so to others?

Tolerance is likely to exist where envy, fear and ignorance do not hold sway. Fear is of course a basic animal reaction, and we like our animal friends and neighbours are subject to it. Where we are confident of ourselves and of our society we are more likely to have that largeness of mind — gunjaish, if you like — which allows us to look with equanimity upon other social systems and those who either dwell in or believe in them.

Perhaps we are also less likely to fear those of a different species who cross the borders guarding our territory, though even here, where that species appears in great numbers, the fear of being outnumbered or even of being driven out by them may breed distrust, dislike and eventually intolerance of them, with very ugly results.

Where there is space and means of subsistence for all, a society may be tolerant, but bearing in mind the tremendous degree of migration within the world, there is no guaranteeing that established resident and migrant, or various migrant groups, will live together in peace and tolerance.

Then history records many instances of explorers who were given short shrift by those whose countries they discovered. There's an interesting contrast here between two place names in New Zealand — two names for the same place, given first by Abel Tasman and Captain James Cook. Tasman was quickly driven away by the Maoris from what he called Murderers' Bay in the South Island. Then a hundred years or so later along comes the gentlemanly Captain Cook, who is well-received and names the place Golden Bay.

Ignorance breeds intolerance. We read currently of schools being blown up and burnt, along with their books, in Fata and Swat, for example.

When the great Chinese scholar Xuangzang reached Nalanda University in 631AD, there were 10,000 Buddhist priests and scholars in residence there. But when Mishi Saran, author of Chasing the Monk's Shadow, arrived 1,400 years later, only the ruins of this great seat of learning remained. “The bricks were deformed into clumps, which spoke of a very high heat, as did the dark, burnt patches... where fire must have raged for days after Central Asian invaders sacked the university in 1197,” she wrote.

Elsewhere one reads that it took six months for the fire to die down, so huge was the library. Thus knowledge, its records and its champions fall beneath the two-edged sword of ignorance and intolerance.

On a lighter note, a former colleague of mine in Japan related how he and one of his university chums had invented a new philosophy with only two tenets, which were, “Whatever happens, it's all right,” and, “Nothing matters”. Does this smack at all of tolerance, or should they be smacked for promulgating irresponsibility, maybe even relativism?
Pope Benedict XVI speaks with considerable distaste of relativism. After all, if everyone is right nobody is wrong, not even the liars, cheats, murderers and so on. Relativism does not equal tolerance.

Finally you might ask, “Dare we hope that in time the whole world will be tolerant?” Let me ask a counter question, which is, “Doesn't tolerance spring in part from enlightenment?” However, there's a catch in this. When the renowned Burmese Buddhist teacher, Sayadaw U Pandita was asked whether eventually all would be enlightened, his answer, given in his book, The State of Mind Called Beautiful, was that “Frankly, this does not seem likely to happen any time soon”. He goes on to recommend development of the paramis, two of which are loving-kindness and equanimity.

Loving-kindness — if the whole of mankind — or at least a sufficient number of us, a critical mass in other words, were to develop and practise this, oh, what a world we should see, full of mental kindness, words and acts of kindness, and with people radiating tolerance and goodwill instead of the distrust and hatred which seem to be springing up everywhere, a rampant growth of noxious weeds choking to death the values we once held dear.
In fact, the great Sayadaw Sensei quotes from the Samyutta Nikaya, advising that “radiating loving-kindness even for the time it takes to pull a cow's udder once is far better than making huge rice offerings (three hundred giant pots of it) three times a day”. Of course, he means a quick and expert pull on the udder, not the greatly laboured kind that I used to perform on tolerant cows as a child, taking ages to squeeze out just one drop, which was not even the milk of human kindness.

As to equanimity, its function is impartiality and its manifestation is the state of mind containing neither ill-will nor selfish love. It is a state of perfect balance, and its practice involves developing equal love (and let us add tolerance) towards all conscious beings, beginning with a few of those around us and gradually radiating out towards all. But like tolerance itself, this attitude is not likely “to emerge upon us from the dusk of an evening, like a dream become real,” to quote Thomas Carlyle. No, it takes a lifetime of constant work.

Let Charles de Gaulle have the last word. — “We may go to the moon, but that's not very far. The greatest distance we have to cover still lies within us.”