Landscapes of Compassion

Nestled at the corner of Greed Street and Delusion Avenue 

A bit of compassion works away quietly

Sure of its place 

Of the Four Immeasurable Minds, Compassion, Loving Kindness, Sympathetic Joy and Equanimity, Compassion is perhaps the practice we believe we understand the best. As a term it certainly pops up more often in conversations than Loving Kindness and Sympathetic Joy or even Equanimity. Even in Buddhist circles where Loving Kindness, Sympathetic Joy and Equanimity are more commonly used, they tend to stimulate discussion about what does it really mean to show Loving Kindness, to express Sympathetic Joy or how does Equanimity differ from passivity. It is not taken for granted that these concepts are automatically understood.  Yet because Compassion does plop so easily out of our mouths it risks being the one component of the Four Immeasurable Minds that we understand the least and therefore practice the least skilfully.

In What the Buddha Taught Walapola Rahual reminds us that in Buddhist the practice of Compassion is meant to be joined with the practice of Wisdom so that, in his words, we don’t become either a “good-hearted fool” or a “hardhearted intellect”. But even with wisdom and a sense that our compassion is metered by our sense of its effectiveness (The question that often arises, “Am I being helpful when I give the homeless woman my change or am I enabling an addiction?”), it could be argued that Compassion implies an inequality. I can help you because I have the means seems to imply that you can’t help me because you don’t have the means.

So if I am being Compassionate does that action also carry with it a dose of arrogance on my part? That was the core of a conversation between the Dalai Lama, philosophers, spiritual leaders and health scientists reported in the book Healing Emotions edited by Daniel Goleman. The Dalai Lama deferred to the basic Buddhist teaching that we all want the same thing—the end of suffering. And everyone has the right to be as happy as I would like to be. In that regard there are no differences between me and the homeless woman who would like my spare change.

But at the end of that discussion I still don’t know what I should do with my spare change. If she and I want the same things, do I give her the money because she is suffering and I have the money to give? Or do I withhold it because my charity has the potential to fund her drug habit and increase her suffering?

The other day I happened to be reading Tim Ward’s classic book What the Buddha Never Taught. In the book he describes seeing Mother Teresa leaving Mother House, her convent in Calcutta, on the way to a conference in Africa. As she left three beggars threw themselves down on the ground in front of her pleading with her to help. He describes her stepping around them, touching one gently as she passed and looking him fully in the eye as she shook her head no. In a place where there is no end to the suffering it wasn’t that she was deciding who was deserving and who wasn’t. She wasn’t trying to determine if her generosity would be used well. It was simply that in her life it had become important to know what her work was and what it wasn’t. She saw each of these beggars as individuals-people clearly in need. But in that encounter on her way to Africa they were not her work.

For most of us, our work won’t be as clearly selfless as Mother Teresa’s was. We struggle to find a core of honest generosity in our work that lets us give of ourselves what is ours to give. Without that core we tend to give aimlessly until we are depleted and are forced to turn away from all the human suffering in front of us.

 In the next post we will continue the Landscapes of Compassion theme. We will see what lessons we might  draw from the Buddha’s life and from the lives of some other very ordinary Buddha’s. These are lessons that might help us find our work and perhaps allow us to engage with compassion with all those who suffer-even when, as sometimes we must, we shake our head “no” in the presence of suffering that we have come to realize is not our work.

  

With Gratitude 

Frank