Living with Courage
July 2012
Banner photo: Playing basketball at Nkhulambe Secondary School in Blantyre District, Malawi [© Alfredo Caliz/Panos Pictures]
Living with Courage
What is courage? Is it, as Aristotle said, refusal to succumb to the fear we feel facing danger, or does it require the actual conquest of fear and even a readiness to die? Where then is the line between courage and a reckless disregard for life? Because courage is hard to pin down, it is often delineated in terms of its opposite--the cowardice abhorred in all human cultures.
Philosophers and thinkers have identified courage as the greatest of all virtues, because it is the virtue that sustains all others. Courage, though, is not only the province of the virtuous: it is also claimed by those with vicious motives. Very often, courage has been associated with particular ideals of maleness and manhood, with military valor and martial glory. But as Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and others made so clear, courage is the necessary heart of nonviolence.
The nature of courage comes into sharper focus when refracted through the prism of our own lives. Few of us are called upon to risk death in battle, nor are we faced with the choice of shirking a heroic but risky feat. But we all need courage to endure adversity, and each of us knows the extent to which our lives are limited by fears of one kind or another.
From the perspective of Buddhism, courage is the quality that enables us to expand our lives and manifest our innate potential--to do the difficult thing we know to be right. Courage impels us to grow beyond our own selfish concerns, to take action for the happiness of others. For this reason, Buddhism sees an integral relationship between courage and compassion. As SGI President Daisaku Ikeda succinctly puts it, courage makes our lives brilliant.
