Immeasurable compassion

• Brief review of how to develop loving-kindness
• Compassion: the second immeasurable
• Cultivating a state of mind that wishes for oneself and others not to suffer and freedom from the causes of suffering
• The complementary relationship between compassion and loving-kindness
• The differences between compassion, empathy, and pity
• Balancing compassion and wisdom
• Obstacles to compassion & remedies

Tibetan teachers, based on Buddhist teachings, say that when we wake up every morning, it’s good to remind ourselves how fortunate we are that we’re still alive. It’s something we may take for granted, because we’ve already woken up so many mornings in our life. We just kind of assume it’s just going to keep happening, morning after morning. But that’s deceptive. There are people who don’t wake up in the morning. They die during the night due to accidents, or just don’t wake up. Some people fall asleep and they don’t wake up again, even though the doctors can’t find anything wrong with them. So, it’s not something we should take for granted, something we should take lightly. It’s actually really wonderful that we’ve lived through the night and woke up for another day.

It’s wonderful not so much because we can have fun or we can enjoy ourselves during the day, but because we still have this precious life. We have this human life with all the ideal conditions, outer and inner, that give us the opportunity to engage in spiritual practice, to work on our mind, to make our mind more positive and less negative, more happy and less miserable. And, better still, we can do things for others. There’s always something we can do to help other beings, even just smiling at them and making a phone call or sending a text message or an email, asking how they’re doing and showing our concern and our love.

There’s always things we can do for others, even during a pandemic, even during lockdown. So, it’s good to really appreciate this opportunity that we have. Don’t take it for granted, cherish it, feel joyful about it. And then determine that we want to use each day of our life, to the best of our ability, to do what’s beneficial for others and to avoid doing things that are harmful to others. And we can aim for higher states of mind—if we’re comfortable with that—the mind of enlightenment, awakening, so that we can help all other beings in the best possible way. See if you can generate thoughts like that as your reason for engaging in this session this morning.

Review of the previous day’s teaching

In case there are people who are just joining this retreat, if this is your first session, we are focusing on ways in which we can open our hearts more and increase positive states of mind, such as loving-kindness and compassion and so forth. These are what are called the four immeasurable thoughts in Buddhism, or the four Brahma-viharas, the four divine abodes. We started yesterday with the first, which is loving-kindness—metta—an attitude of care and concern for others, wanting them to be happy and wanting to do whatever we can to bring them happiness. Although we have to understand that we have limitations in how much we can do for others; even a Buddha cannot insert happiness into people’s minds. That’s just not possible. Each one of us is responsible for our own mind, our thoughts, our experiences.

The Buddha taught the causes of happiness, so by learning about these and putting them into practice, we can create the causes of happiness for ourselves. And we can share these with others so that they, too, can create the causes of happiness. But we cannot make somebody happy; we can’t force somebody to be happy if they’re not. We need to understand that otherwise we might get frustrated and fall into depression and despair. If somebody we know and love is unhappy, maybe suffering from depression, and we want to do whatever we can to make them happy, it may not work. So, it’s important to have this wish for others to be happy and do what we can to make them happy, but it’s also important to understand that we can’t force that to happen. Even if we were a Buddha, we would not be able to do that.

But even if somebody is suffering from depression or grief or whatever, and really deeply unhappy, we can help them in spiritual ways. For example, we can help them by doing prayers, doing meditations, dedicating our merit for them, and just showing as much kindness as we possibly can. And there’s a good chance that we’ll get through eventually; there’s a good chance that the person will at least appreciate what we are doing for them and that we’re offering some advice that they could use to help change their minds. Maybe after some time it will get through, and they will start listening and paying attention to what we’re saying and doing it.

But we can’t expect that. That’s what I’m trying to say. Don’t expect that you will be able to do that, because if you expect that, if you’re attached to that and it doesn’t work, then you might get frustrated and unhappy yourself. All we can do is try our best, do our best, and then be happy with that—even if we don’t see results immediately in the other person. 

And yesterday, we were looking at how one method for cultivating loving-kindness is to bring to mind different individuals and then just repeat to oneself certain phrases, such as “May you be happy,” and so on. And it’s good to do that, even if we don’t feel immediate results or if this wonderful feeling of loving-kindness doesn’t come up in our mind every time we do that. That may not always happen, but it’s still good to say those words to oneself, and slowly, slowly the mind starts to change. And we also looked at how we need to include ourselves in this meditation. We need to cultivate loving-kindness for ourselves, even though the traditional Tibetan teachings don’t mention that. Maybe they didn’t need that. Maybe they already had love for themselves, and they didn’t need a specific method for doing that. But many, many people in the West, and maybe other countries as well, do have a problem with feeling love for oneself.

And so it is good to include oneself in the meditation. And it’s also said that loving oneself might be the hardest of all. It might be easier to love others, but when it comes to oneself: no way. We also might have resistance. We might think, “Oh, but isn’t that selfish? I shouldn’t do that.” That is addressed in the book In Praise of Great Compassion by Venerable Chodron and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It’s Volume 5 in this series. And the first chapter of the book is about the four immeasurables. On page 12, it says:

Some people may wonder if generating love toward themselves is selfish or self-indulgent. Cultivating love toward yourself is not selfish, because the goal is to generate love toward all beings, which includes yourself.

I’m a being too. We say, “May all sentient beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.” We don’t say, “May all sentient beings—except me—have happiness and the causes of happiness.” I’m a sentient being, too. I deserve love. So, it just makes sense that we include ourselves. You are no more or less important than others. You are also worthy of love and kindness. Since many people suffer from self-hatred, this meditation is an excellent counteracting method. While cultivating love for yourself alone does not bring meditative absorption, it does get you going in the right direction.

Concentration and the four immeasurables

In the Pali tradition, the context for cultivating these four thoughts of love and compassion and so forth is that they are methods for attaining higher states of meditative absorption: the jhanas. In Sanskrit, they’re called dhyanas. In Pali, they’re called jhanas. These are meditative states of very deep concentration, deep absorption. For example, with loving kindness, you first generate loving kindness and make that very firm and stable in your mind. Then you focus on that. You make that your object of concentration. It takes time and effort, but eventually you can attain these meditative absorptions in that way. Then you can attain the formless absorptions and so on.

It’s quite a high practice, maybe higher than most of us are capable of at this point in time. But it’s so good to at least cultivate loving kindness as much as we can for ourselves and others. That sentence means if you’re only meditating on love for yourself, you will not be able to attain these jhanas. You have to do it for as many beings as possible. But at least you’re going in the right direction. And then conversely, following selfishness and self-indulgence is unkind to yourself and causes misery. So, if we just only cultivate love for ourselves and not for others, and we’re very self-centered and self-indulgent and narcissistic and so on, that eventually leads to suffering and problems. We don’t want to just stop at cultivating love for ourselves and not for others and using others as objects for our own happiness. That’s not what we want to do.

But in the context of trying to cultivate love and kindness for more and more and more people and beings, we need to include ourselves in there. Self-centeredness, which makes you greedy, easily offended, and vindictive, does not bring you happiness, whereas developing mental tranquility that is free from afflictions does. The point is, it’s not selfish or self-indulgent to cultivate love and kindness for ourselves, provided we’re not only caring about ourselves and not about others. And so if we do have this problem of self-hatred and self-criticalness, which is an obstacle to loving ourselves, I think it’s helpful to look at what our mind is saying. “Why do I not love myself? What’s my reason for not loving myself?” And when I do that in my own mind, I find that there are certain phrases, certain statements, my mind is making about myself. And sometimes they’re just horrible and harsh.

Examining self-criticism

And would I ever say that to anybody else? No way! I would be totally ashamed to say such things to anyone else. So, the things that I say about myself are really awful when I stand back and look at it. That can be really helpful, to just look at what your mind is saying and ask yourself, “Is this right? Is this nice?” And it can also be helpful to try to figure out where is that coming from? Why do I say those things about myself? This could lead to an exploration that might take us back to childhood. And we might find some scary things there. And we might even need help from a therapist to do this kind of exploration. But it’s helpful to do that.

Try to figure out where these nasty thoughts, these self-hateful, self-critical thoughts, are coming from. It might have to do with our childhood—our experiences with our family, our parents and so on. But this doesn’t mean we should blame our parents. If they said those kind of things to us, it could be that’s the way they were brought up by their parents. That’s the only way they know. They didn’t know any other way of being parents. And so the exploration can go further back into our grandparents and how they raised our parents. And then, again, maybe our grandparents were raised that way. Some families do have this tradition of harsh parenting, thinking that’s a good way to bring up children.

They think that’s how children should be brought up. They just didn’t know any better. So, instead of being angry and blaming our parents and grandparents and so on, we can have compassion for them, understanding that they just didn’t know any better. And they themselves were brought up that way and probably experienced a lot of suffering in their life as a result of that. That can be helpful to do that exploration and generate compassion and forgiveness. But it may not be necessary for everyone. And also it may not work. Maybe you were brought up really well.

And so then the cause might lie in past lives, which could be harder to access. I’m not saying this is necessary for everyone to do, but it can be helpful for some people to understand where that’s coming from. And it’s also helpful just to get into a debate with oneself, to look at what your mind is saying. For example, the mind is saying, “I’m just completely bad. I’m horrible. I am unlovable. There’s nothing good about me at all. I can’t do anything right.” If those are the kind of statements that the mind is saying, just check: “Is that really true?” Do a reality check. Is it really true? I have nothing good about me at all. I never do anything right. I’m totally unlovable. Nobody could ever possibly love me. You’ll probably find that’s not true. I’m sure there are people who love you—probably your parents, probably some friends, your spiritual teacher, the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.

They love everybody. They don’t find anybody who’s unlovable. So, if they can see things in you that are lovable, why can’t you see them? These are just some examples of things you can do in your exploration. And it may take time to kind of work through this. But it is helpful. There’s a very beautiful quote by Thich Nhat Hanh. He says:

With practice we can see that our wounded child is not only us. Our wounded child represents several generations. Our mother may have suffered throughout her life. Our father may have suffered. Perhaps our parents weren’t able to look after the wounded child in themselves. So, when we are embracing the wounded child in us, we are embracing all the wounded child in our past generations. This practice is not a practice for ourself alone, but for numberless generations of ancestors and descendants.

That’s what Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in his book, Working with Your Inner Child. And then there are also lots of resources from Western therapists, Western psychologists, about healing the inner child and so on and self-compassion. One book that I know of was written by Kristen Neff. She and her colleagues did research on self-compassion for ten years and found a lot of research-based findings on the benefits of self-compassion. There’s a wonderful book by her called Self-Compassion and also a website with more resources.

That’s one that I know of, but there are probably others as well. Brene Brown is also recommended. She’s also done a lot of research—more on the topic of shame, but that’s a big part of it, just feeling a lot of shame about ourselves. We think, “I’m not worthy” and so on. There are lots of resources out there that you can get help from to work on overcoming those kind of feelings of self-hatred and lack of self-love, lack of self-compassion, shame and so on. And just to share one other thing in the book by Sharon Salzberg on loving-kindness: she says that loving-kindness is a state of mind rather than an emotion.

I found that really helpful too. We tend to think of love as an emotion and that we should be kind of emotional when we have love or loving-kindness. So, it’s helpful to think of it as more of a state of mind. Ideally, we’re trying to cultivate that state of mind, so it’s with us all the time. It doesn’t necessarily mean this excited feeling of “Oh, I love you, I love you!” But rather, it’s just a way of looking at oneself and others and understanding that we all want happiness, and we deserve happiness. It’s acknowledging that, respecting that, and just living our life with that awareness and doing whatever we can to bring happiness to others. It doesn’t have to be a big deal, but just being friendly, kind, smiling, attentive to others’ needs and answering the needs of others for happiness, for help, for support, and so on. I found that helpful to think of it as a state of mind rather than an emotion.

Another method for cultivating loving-kindness

Yesterday I talked about one meditation for cultivating loving-kindness. And there’s another meditation that can help cultivate loving-kindness, and that is to think of the kindness of others, to think of what others do for us. I won’t go into explaining that because that’s probably quite well-known, but we think about our mother and our father and people who provide us with food and our teachers who’ve taught us and so on. It’s looking at all the different ways in which we receive kindness from others in every aspect of our life. Thinking about that really helps open up our heart to them, to other people and other beings, and it’s just natural that we want to be nice to them, be kind to them in response to what they do for us.

Love versus compassion

So, I’d like to move on now to the second of the four measurables, which is compassion. Compassion is similar to love, but it has a somewhat different emphasis. Loving-kindness wishes others to have happiness, and compassion wishes them to not suffer, to not be unhappy. We can think of them as like two sides of a coin, two sides of a hand: they’re very complementary, but there’s just a little bit different emphasis. For example, when we see someone who is suffering, who is unhappy or in pain or struggling to deal with some difficulty, then the feeling that arises in that situation would be compassion: “There’s somebody who needs help, and I want to help them.”

Whereas love can arise any time—just seeing another person and knowing that they want to be happy and I want to help them be happy and finding ways of bringing that about. The word compassion is standard in many languages—Spanish, Italian, French. I think it’s a Latin base. And at the root of it,  “com” means with, and passion has different meanings. Passion can mean emotional, but it can also have the sense of suffering.

For example, we talk about the passion of Christ, right? The passion of Christ: that’s the expression that’s used. And that means it’s suffering—the suffering he went through when he was nailed on the cross and so on. In Italy, they have the idea that compassion means “suffering with.” When you have compassion for another person, that means you are suffering with the other person. You have to suffer along with their suffering. And they’re not too keen about that. For some people, it has a kind of connotation that you have to suffer. Some people actually think that: if you have compassion for someone else, that means you have to suffer with the other person. There can be some resistance to that. 

In German, it’s mitgefühl; does that have the same connotation? So then, I was curious about the terms in Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan—if they have that connotation. In Sanskrit and Pali, the term is Karuna, like our dear little kitty, Karuna. And I had some difficulty finding the meaning of Karuna. I don’t know Sanskrit myself, but I think it was Sharon Salzberg who said the sense of Karuna is a quivering of the heart in response to another person’s suffering. The heart is quivering; it’s shaking.

So, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re suffering. Your heart is moved. And then the Tibetan term is Nyingje. Nying is another word for heart or mind. Heart and mind are seen as the same thing. And then Je is like when we say “Je Rinpoche”; it has the sense of being noble, being venerable, being respectable, respectful. Maybe we could call it noble heart. Nyingje means noble heart. I’m just kind of guessing that’s the sense of Nyingje. Again, it doesn’t have a sense of suffering along with the other person but rather of having a noble heart, a venerable heart or mind.  I found it helpful to look at the terms in Sanskrit and Tibetan as opposed to the Latin or German or European words.

And there’s a quotation from His Holiness the Dalai Lama about compassion. He says:

Genuine compassion as opposed to pity or personal distress when seeing others suffer is deliberately cultivated for a good purpose. Unable to ignore sentient beings’ duhkha—suffering—compassion wishes them to be free of it.

Our minds may be temporarily disturbed because our apathy has been challenged or shaken up out of our apathy and our passiveness. There may be some disturbance there. But this type of mental disturbance spurs us to be more tolerant and kind. It makes our minds strong and determined to aid others and brings benefit to ourselves and others. So, he makes a distinction between compassion and pity. If you look up the word compassion in dictionaries, it sometimes says pity. Sometimes compassion and pity are equated. But there’s a very nice distinction between compassion and pity made by Stephen Levine. He’s passed away now, but he was a teacher in the Vipassana tradition who taught mindfulness, and he also did a lot of work with dying people and wrote a number of books about death and dying.

And he said there’s a difference between compassion and pity, although they can look similar. He said that when our fear touches another person’s suffering, that is pity. But when our love touches another person’s suffering, that is compassion. I can relate to that because I remember when I was traveling before I went to India and learned Buddhism, and became a nun and encountered beggars. The first time I encountered beggars, I think, was in Morocco. Back in those days, you didn’t see beggars on American streets like you do now or on European streets—homeless, miserable-looking people.

It was in Morocco that I first encountered them. And it kind of shocked me in a way. I felt moved and wanted to help them. But I was also afraid. I was afraid of getting too close, afraid of sharing my limited resources with them, because then I wouldn’t have much for myself. I wanted to make them last as long as possible so I could keep traveling and so on. There was definitely fear there. So, that was more like pity rather than compassion. And also, pity can involve a sense of superiority, like, “I’m up here, and you’re down there, you poor thing. And I don’t want to get too close because I might catch what you have.” That kind of feeling is more like pity. 

Courageous compassion

Compassion is more like you’re on the same level: “This is another human being just like me.” And not just a human, an animal, too—another being. So, “This is another being like myself who doesn’t want to suffer but is suffering. And I can understand that because I’m a being also and I know I don’t want to suffer.” There’s more of an equal feeling rather than “I’m up here and you’re down there.” And our heart is moved enough that we want to help them, even if we can’t. It’s not always possible to help another person who’s suffering. We may not have the knowledge, the skill, or the means to help them. But at least we want to. There’s that strong wish to help that person or that being.

Even if it’s finding somebody else who does have the skill and the means to help them, like by calling 911. But we’re not just indifferent and walk away, thinking, “Oh, well, I hope somebody will help them.” And we’re not afraid. It takes time to overcome that fear. But His Holiness says, in his experience, compassion gives courage. Compassion gives courage. And I can see that in myself. I’m much more courageous now than I used to be. I’m so frightened when I see suffering. But I want to get in there and do something to help this person. So, genuine compassion gives us courage to overcome our fears.

But it takes time. It may not happen immediately. But the more we work on cultivating compassion, the more we will find courage to help. And another excellent resource about compassion is the book A Fearless Heart by Thupten Jinpa, who many people might know. He was a monk, and he became a Geshe. Then he became a layman and got married, had kids. But he also has a PhD in religious studies from Cambridge, I think. He’s very, very knowledgeable about Western philosophy and science and so on. And he’s been a translator for His Holiness on many occasions, especially in the Mind Life conferences. So anyway, he was involved in setting up a compassion training program together with Stanford University.

And that’s been ongoing for many years, training people in compassion. So, the book A Fearless Heart explains that whole process of how they developed that program and the basic components of that program. He also brings in the story from his own life and so on. It’s a wonderful book about compassion. In that book, he describes compassion as:

A sense of concern that arises when we are confronted with another’s suffering and feel motivated to see that suffering relieved.

 I’ll repeat that.

[Compassion is] a sense of concern that arises when we are confronted with another’s suffering and feel motivated to see that suffering relieved.

And then he breaks it down into four things. There are four things that happen almost instantaneously when compassion arises in us. The first thing is awareness of suffering or need. And this is more on the cognitive level. And there may not be much actual feeling at this moment. We just see there’s a being in need, or in pain. And we’re aware of that. And the second thing that happens is sympathetic concern. This is emotional. Here, our heart is starting to quiver, starting to move: “There’s another being, like me, who’s suffering, who needs something.” And the third thing is wishing that suffering to end. So, this is on the level of intention: “I don’t want them to suffer.” And here it starts to turn into action—a sense of wanting that suffering to stop, to end.

And the fourth is readiness to help it end. So, this is motivational. Here, there’s more of a sense of wanting to do something. We might even already be moving our body to do what we can, rather than just being paralyzed. These four things can happen really, really fast, maybe within a couple of seconds. But there is a little process there. 

We all have compassion. Buddhism says that. I don’t know if scientists say that. Actually, I’ve heard and read that in the past, scientists, philosophers, sociologists and so on had a pretty negative view of human beings and even believed that human beings are by nature selfish and aggressive. That was the belief for a long time—until recently, until the last few decades. And now they’re starting to find more evidence to the contrary, that human beings do have a nature of being kind and compassionate. And that’s in accordance with Buddhism. Buddhism says everyone does have compassion and kindness, even animals.

Changing views of human nature

And this is because of the nature of our mind, which Buddhism says existed a long time before this life. It has no beginning, in fact. And compassion and kindness are natural qualities in everyone’s mind. We’ve had it before. We’ve had it in our past lives. We’ve been super compassionate and kind in our past lives. We’ve been mothers to everybody else. They talk about how everyone has been our mother, but the converse is true as well. We’ve been everybody else’s mother, too. We have given birth to and taken care of every sentient being. Every sentient being has been our child. So, compassion is there in our mind. And it seems that scientists are starting to recognize that these are natural qualities in human beings. And there’s evidence of that.

Like these experiments they’ve done—I don’t know if you’ve seen videos. They take these little kids who are sometimes just six months old or one year old. And in one experiment they show a puppet show. And in the puppet show there’s one puppet who’s showing helping behavior and another puppet that’s showing harmful, interfering behavior. Then after the puppet show, they ask the child, “Which puppet would you like?” Most children want the helping puppet. These are pre-verbal kids, but they are attracted to helping behavior rather than harming behavior. And they do other experiments where they get a little child in a room and there’s somebody in need of help. And often, without any prompting, without any offer of reward, the child would just go and help this person who’s in need of help.

I read of another type of research experiment on children’s reaction to emotion. They’re in a crib. They’re still very, very small. And they hear a voice with some kindness and emotional content, like love and concern. And the children either don’t cry or respond with a smile and attention and moving. But if they’re exposed to a voice devoid of any emotion, like a very dry, sort of non-emotional or non-caring tone, the babies start crying. So, they have that kind of a response already with them, even at that young age. That’s really young—still in a crib. 

It’s good that they’re even doing these experiments and looking into it. And I hope more and more people can open up to the findings of this, can be more optimistic about human nature. I have friends in Israel who are psychologists and have a training program that involves learning traditional methods of psychoanalysis as well as Buddhism and meditation. They told me that Freud’s view of human nature was really, really dismal. He thought the best we can do is just become kind of normal functioning human beings in the world. But we always have these basic natures of aggression and sex drive and selfishness.

Fortunately, later psychoanalysts had a more positive view of human nature. So, it does seem that among professionals, there is improvement in the view of human nature. And that’s really important, because if you don’t think that human beings can get much better than being aggressive and just keeping that under control, then they’re not even going to try to help people improve beyond that. Having a more positive, optimistic view of human nature and human potential is really important so that we can encourage human beings to actualize their potential, as we do in Buddhism. And one question here is the difference between empathy and compassion. Those are two terms that are used a lot these days.

The seeds of compassion are within us all

And there are different opinions about what is empathy and what is compassion. But in Thupten Jinpa’s book, A Fearless Heart, it explains that empathy is the ability to understand any kind of feeling another person is experiencing. So, that can include joyful feelings as well as suffering feelings. It’s just being able to tune in to another person’s experiences—any kind of experience they may be having. Whereas compassion is specifically related to suffering, to unhappiness, pain, and so on. It’s tuning into that.

For example, if we see children playing and looking very joyful, empathy understands that joy. But that doesn’t necessarily lead to compassion, because they’re happy, they’re not suffering. Whereas when we see a child looking sad or crying, empathy understands that they are unhappy, and then that leads to compassion. It seems that empathy underlies compassion; it leads to compassion in cases where we observe another person suffering. That’s one way of explaining it, but you can also find other explanations. And in Buddhism, we don’t really have a term for empathy. Thupten Jinpa didn’t mention a term in the book. It’s not something that’s commonly explained. But I don’t think that means Buddhism doesn’t acknowledge the existence of empathy. They just didn’t name it. But for sure, we have the ability to understand another person’s feelings and emotions. Maybe they just feel it’s so obvious we don’t need to talk about it. It’s already there. 

So, that’s just a bit about compassion, trying to identify what compassion is. And I think it is helpful to look at our own experience, to explore our own experience and identify compassion. It is there; it does come up. Again, it’s easiest when there’s a little child or a little animal—a puppy or a kitten—who’s looking sad, crying. It’s that response that comes up in our heart. I used to wonder if animals can have compassion. And it seems they can. I witnessed a case of this myself. I was staying at Tushita Meditation Center in Dharamsala, which is kind of up in the forest. And there are lots of wild monkeys who love to come and hang out in the garden at Tushita and find things to eat. I was in my room one day, and I heard this noise like a baby monkey in distress. It was this squealing sound.

It just went on and on and on. So, I finally went out to see what was going on. There was a whole tribe of monkeys on the ground, you know, finding things and eating them. And there was this little baby monkey up in a tree all by itself, screaming, making all this noise. And I thought, maybe he doesn’t know how to get down. Maybe he wants to be with the other monkeys but doesn’t know how to get down. And I was kind of wondering, “Why are the other monkeys just ignoring this baby monkey?” But then, as I watched, one of the monkeys on the ground went up into the tree and went beside this squealing monkey and was kind of calming it down.

And I thought, “Oh, that must be the mother.” But I had some doubt because it looked kind of small. It didn’t look big enough to be a mother. Then, after a few minutes, another one of the monkeys on the ground, a bigger one, went up the tree. And as soon as that monkey got up to where the baby was, the baby jumped into her arms. So, I figured, “Oh, that must be the mother.” But then who is this other monkey? And why did that monkey respond before the mother did? Who knows? It may have been a sibling, but I don’t even know if monkeys can recognize siblings. To me, that was a sign of compassion because scientists would say, “Oh, it’s just biological instinct that mothers take care of their babies,” but this was not a mother taking care of a baby.

A number of years ago, we had somebody from Singapore here. It was when we were still in Ananda. We did our meditations in one of the rooms and stuff. And this young woman was having a hard time and missing her family. She was sitting there crying quietly next to me during the meditation. And Karuna came into the room and put both of her forepaws on this woman’s knees and kind of nudged her in the arm and then sat there until she calmed down. And she did because she was so stunned by having this little cat. That’s when Karuna was pretty small, but I was quite surprised. Karuna was well named. But there are lots of stories that people tell about when they’re in pain or sick, depressed, grieving, and their pet seems to pick up on it and will come and lie on them or lie next to them and just be with them. 

In Seattle, there was an AIDS hospice called Bailey Boucher, and they had pet therapy there for the patients. This one woman had a cat she would bring in every week and just put the cat down on the ground, on the floor, and without fail, that cat always would go to the room where the person was close to death. It would jump up on the bed and just lie right beside them. It kind of gives you goosebumps. And I’ve heard other stories of animals in the wild, like a lions and dogs, adopting a baby deer. So, it’s definitely not a biological thing because it’s one species looking after another. I think that shows that the seeds of compassion, of Karuna, are there in the mind of all living beings. I find it very helpful to think of memories of early childhood where I think I was quite compassionate, and I think we all had that.

I can look back even into the kindergarten for an example of this. It’s the first kind of compassion. I saw kids who were quite rich or wealthy looking, and they had toys with them. And I remember wondering, why do they look so unhappy, you know? I wanted them to be happy. I really had this strong wish for that, but then there’s also a nasty story that goes with it. My mother had migraine, and so she took medicine. And then I thought, “Hmm, my mother, when she takes this medicine, is always happy afterwards.” So, I took this medicine to kindergarten because I thought it would make them happy. Everything went well. Nobody died, but it could have been a bad situation. But, still, there was that natural wish for others to be happy.

Balancing compassion with wisdom

And I think it’s helpful for us to look into our own experiences where we had this natural wish that somebody would be happy. Can I quote another thing from His Holiness the Dalai Lama that I just read today and I found really, really helpful, especially thinking about a difficult person, maybe, or somebody who’s doing harm? He said:

True compassion isn’t just an emotional response, but a firm commitment founded in reason. Therefore, our compassion for others doesn’t change, even if they behave negatively. Our sense of responsibility for others gives rise to a wish to help them actively overcome their problems.

So, that’s another thing about compassion: it needs to be balanced with wisdom. I’ve heard this term—I don’t know the origin of it—but they talk about “idiot compassion.” That sounds kind of insulting, but it just means compassion without wisdom. Like in the case of my Kindergarten story: I was just a little kid; I didn’t know any better. I was  trying to help. But we’ve probably all had experiences like that, where we really want to help and we try to help, but we don’t know how to do it quite right. And we might even make things worse. But at least there is compassion there. And that’s a good thing. We want to help. We try to help. But ideally, we need to have wisdom.

We need to have the ability to assess the situation and think about what would be the best way to help. And if we can’t do it, then we can find others who can, and so on and so forth. That’s the best form of compassion: wise compassion. That’s why, in the Mahayana tradition, they talk about the two wings of a bird. If we want to progress on the Bodhisattva path, if we want to ascend to the state of awakening, we need these two wings, these two sides of the path: compassion on one side and wisdom on the other. Those two will balance; they will keep us balanced, and we’ll and be able to use our compassion wisely.

If we lack compassion, if we only have wisdom without compassion, then our mind may be sort of very intelligent and very smart and very wise, but it’s lacking that warm-heartedness that reaches out to others and cares about others and tries to help others. So, we may be sort of cold and analytical, like a robot. And that’s not good either. It’s helpful to think about what would happen if we have compassion without wisdom and what would happen if we have wisdom without compassion; it’s helpful to see the need for both of those aspects of the path. 

Obstacles to compassion

And now let’s look at some obstacles to compassion, because I think we can see the benefit of having compassion and want to have more compassion, but there are things that can hinder it. So again, we have a far enemy and a near enemy. What do you think the far enemy is—the opposite of compassion? 

Audience: Cruelty? 

Venerable Sangye Khadro (VSK): What did you say? Anger? Well, anger can be. Anger is more the far enemy of love. But yes, it definitely can stand in the way of compassion.

If you’re really angry at somebody, even if they’re suffering, we may think, “Well, you just go and suffer. You deserve it.” But it’s usually mentioned that cruelty is the opposite. Cruelty is really the opposite of compassion. Cruelty is where we take pleasure in making others suffer. So, we do things that cause others to suffer, and we feel good about it. And we take pleasure in their suffering. We hear stories like that of people—even little kids—who take delight in torturing animals or torturing other children and actually feel happy about it. And then, of course, there are people who do that torture, who engage in torture.

That’s the opposite of compassion. But I think even if we don’t make the other person suffer ourselves, but we see or hear about them suffering, and we don’t like that person, then we feel, “Ha! I’m glad you’re suffering. I’m glad! You deserve it!”—something like that. And even to feel pleasure over another person’s suffering is not a nice state of mind; it’s definitely not compassion. So, we have to look out for that and not let that be our mode of being. 

Remedies to cruelty

And there are remedies to this. If we do happen to notice it in ourselves, the first would be, of course, mindfulness: just watching the mind and being honest. If that kind of thought or feeling comes up, don’t deny it. But apply remedies to it. Work on trying to make sure that doesn’t keep coming up. And there’s no need to feel ashamed because it is normal. I think it’s quite normal that we may have that because we’ve had it before in this life, and we’ve probably had it in past lives as well. It’s just a remnant of past experiences. We don’t have to identify with it. We don’t have to think, “That’s me. I’m a cruel person.”

It’s just a thought, just a feeling, that comes up in our mind because we’ve had it before—maybe as a child. I did some really nasty things to my younger siblings when I was a child that I feel very ashamed of. So, as a child, we might have indulged in that. And once a thought or feeling arises in our mind, it leaves an imprint for that same kind of thought and feeling to come again. That’s just a natural process, like what happens in nature. For example, we have this problem here of this noxious weed: knapweed. A knapweed plant grows and just naturally leaves seeds for other knapweeds to grow. It’s just a natural process. It’s similar in our mind: one kind of thought leaves the imprint for that same kind of thought to come up again.

So, we need to notice those kind of negative thoughts and have a clear awareness that “This is not the way I want to be. That’s not the kind of thought I want to have in my mind.” And, you know, we can try to throw it out and replace it with something positive. It’s just like we do with our knapweeds. We can work on replacing that kind of thought or feeling with those of kindness and compassion, understanding that the other person is just like us; they are another sentient being who doesn’t want to suffer. So, why should I wish them to suffer? That’s not nice. I wouldn’t want someone to do that to me. The golden rule is very helpful: don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want anyone to do to you. Do to others what you would want people to do to you. That’s kind of common sense.

Antidotes to pity

But it’s helpful to remind ourselves of that. And then what do you think the near enemy of compassion is? Well, the traditional view is that it’s pity. We could say personal distress—getting really upset. And there’s a fearfulness there and maybe also some confusion about “What do I do? I don’t know what to do, so maybe it’s better I just walk away, get out of here.” That can appear in various forms. We already looked at Stephen Levine’s explanation of the difference between pity and compassion. So, it’s good to just watch our mind, to watch our experiences, and try to recognize when it’s compassion and when it’s pity. And it’s important to try to work more on having genuine compassion, because that gives courage. And the more courage we have, the less likely we will be to feel afraid and confused in that situation. But also, cultivating more wisdom about what can be done to help others is also important. I know there are ways of helping others, even on the level of prayer.

For example, someone is dying and there’s no way we can stop that process of dying—they’re definitely dying—and maybe they’re also in pain, and nothing can stop that. But we can help on a spiritual level. We can pray for them; we can think of the Buddha. We can imagine the Buddha above their head sending light into them. We can do prayers and mantras for them. There’s always something we can do, even in such extreme situations. I was just thinking of this experience I had. It wasn’t a human being; it was an animal. I was in New Zealand, and we were driving to the airport. I was leaving. We stopped at a beach on the way, just to splash around in the water a bit. And it was a pretty much deserted beach. There were no people.

But we saw these possums. There are a lot of possums in New Zealand. And there’s this whole movement of trying to get rid of possums, because there’s too many of them. And there’s a belief that they’re endangering native animals, like Kiwi birds. So, apparently what the government does sometimes is they’ll drop poisoned food for them. That’s horrible. The possum will eat it and then die. I think that’s what happened with this possum. Because normally they don’t come out during the day. This was the middle of the day, noontime. And this possum was wandering around on this beach and looking really miserable, really confused. And I thought, “Oh, I have to do something.” I didn’t want to get too close, though, because I didn’t want to get bitten or scratched by it. So, I just got as close as I could and started saying mantras, as many mantras as I could. And after a while, it started coming towards me. But I still kept my distance.

And eventually it just sort of laid down in front of me. And I was actually sort of praying to the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas that it could die while I was there—so that it could die hearing mantras, because we had to leave and go to the airport. I couldn’t stay there all day. But I was able to stay with it until it finished the dying process. And then I kind of put my hand on it and blessed it with mantras that I was saying. I really felt it picked up on the energy that I was putting out in the mantras. Because it did seem to be drawn to me. And I was just thankful that I was able to be there for this little creature in the final horrible moments of its life. And it’s the same with human beings. If we’re with someone who’s in pain or dying and we’re saying mantras or doing meditation, we might be able to notice that it does have an effect on them.

It does help them to be more calm. There’s always something we can do. So again, remedies to pity would be mindfulness: eing able to notice and detect the difference between pity and compassion. We can only do that through our experience. We can read explanations of it, but then we have to look inside of ourselves and acknowledge, “Oh, this is pity,” or “This is compassion.” And then we can put more energy into genuine compassion, and try to work on overcoming the pity, which is fear-based. We can work with whatever our fears might be and try to overcome those and encourage ourselves. Those are the traditional obstacles to compassion that are mentioned.

Other obstacles to compassion

But in my own experience, I can see other things that can be obstacles to compassion. One is a kind of denial of suffering. For example, suffering is painful, suffering is ugly, suffering is something we don’t want to look at or deal with. So, we might find our mind going in that direction of “I don’t want to know about it. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to look at it. I don’t want to deal with it.” That’s what I call denial. And I can see that in myself.

I probably told this story before, but when I was in university and starting to get interested in other spiritual traditions, I met a woman who was a Buddhist. She was a follower of Suzuki Roshi and practicing Zen meditation. She’s the first Buddhist I ever met. And I asked her if she could just tell me something about Buddhism. So, she started talking about the Four Noble Truths. And as soon as she talked about the First Noble Truth of true suffering, I reacted. She said something like, “Oh yeah, life is suffering.” And I said, “What? How can you say that? Life is wonderful, life is beautiful.” And she just looked right in my eyes and she said, “I can see that you’re suffering.”

And it was like a slap in the face. I couldn’t say anything because it was true. What she said was true, but I was somehow in this denial mode. And I think that’s how it is for a lot of people. There’s this thing of pretending that everything is wonderful and fine and happy and okay and not looking at suffering. And then maybe it will go away by itself. That’s what I mean by denial. Suffering will not go away by itself. It will not go away by not looking at it, by denying it. That’s why the very first thing the Buddha taught after he attained enlightenment was that there is suffering.

You’ve got to look at it. You’ve got to deal with it. It’s not going to go away by itself. It can go away. There is a solution. It’s not something permanent forever, but you’ve got to accept it, acknowledge it. So, that’s one thing that can be in the way of compassion. Because if we don’t acknowledge the existence of suffering, how can we have compassion? Compassion starts with acknowledging that yes, there is suffering. There is suffering in myself and there is suffering in others. There is suffering in the world. You have to acknowledge it. 

But then, another obstacle is despair. That’s kind of like going to the other extreme. It happens when we do start to look at suffering and acknowledge it, then start feeling like, “Oh my God, there is just so much of it everywhere we look. It’s in me, in everyone—oh my God.” Despair is being overwhelmed and feeling like there is nothing that can be done: “It’s horrible. It’s awful. It’s going to be there forever.” That’s another state of mind we might slip into: feeling hopeless, feeling pessimistic.

We’ve got to watch out for that one. And that’s what can lead to things like compassion fatigue and burnout. And that’s not helpful. Because then you might just shut down. That’s one thing that could happen: “I can’t deal with this anymore. I’m just going to shut down. I’m not going to read the newspapers, not going out, not talking to anybody. I’ll just watch Netflix all day long.” But you can’t—that’s full of suffering too. Maybe Disney movies. Yeah, just try to get away from it. Then you go back into denial. So, watch out for despair. Because like the Dalai Lama says, we want to keep being engaged in the world, engaged with others; we want to have courage, optimism, and hope. And we want to just keep doing whatever we can to relieve suffering.

How to maintain your emotional balance

I think there are some ideas in Buddhism that can really help us to keep this balance. Denial and despair are like two extremes. And we might find ourselves swinging between one and the other. So, we want to find a middle way that avoids those two extremes. I think some Buddhist ideas can help with that. One is just to understand that suffering is part of life: the first noble truth. It’s part of samsara, anyway—cyclic existence. As long as we and others are in this situation where we are not enlightened, we haven’t yet awakened to our true nature, our true potential, so we’re still be clouded by ignorance and confusion and other afflictive emotions.

As long as we’re in that situation, there is suffering. And there will continue to be suffering. It’s just a natural part of samsara. It takes time to get used to that idea. Initially, we probably feel denial and despair. But eventually you can get to the point where you understand that’s just how it is. And that can help us be in the middle. Here’s another story. When 9-11 happened, I was in Europe at the time. And I was really upset. I got quite emotionally out of balance because of that one. And I heard this story.

Lama Lundrup, I don’t know if any of you have met him. He was a wonderful lama who was the abbot of Kopan Monastery for many years until he passed away. He was really, really wonderful, kind, and compassionate. He was a real bodhisattva. I heard that when somebody told him about 9-11, he just remained calm and said, “That’s samsara,” or “This is samsara”—something like that. “This is samsara.” When I heard that story, I thought, huh? It almost sounded like indifference or apathy. But then I thought about it. He was in Tibet. He was in Sera Je monastery when it was bombed.

It was 1959, when they had this uprising in Lhasa. And the Dalai Lama fled and many other people fled. Sera Je Monastery got bombed during that time. It was kind of right on the outside of Lhasa. And he must have been there, so he must have had first-hand experience of bombs falling, destroying his monastery, killing and wounding his companions, and he had to flee. He was one of the lucky ones to get out. So, I don’t think his response was indifference and uncaring and denial, but it was very much informed by first-hand experience of that kind of thing. I see that as just a deep awareness, a deep, deep acknowledgement that this is samsara; we are in samsara. And as long as we are in samsara, terrible things are going to happen again and again and again.

And we need to use that awareness and that understanding to put all our energy into getting ourselves out and helping others get out as well, to following the path to awakening. For me that was helpful—just to see how my mind was still very much shocked by such things happening. It was shocking. But on the other hand, there are worse things that happen in samsara than that, and continue to happen and will continue to happen in the future. That’s why we have to get ourselves out and help others as well. So anyway, that’s just a kind of illustration of what I consider a kind of healthy acknowledgement of the reality of suffering in samsara. We are no longer kind of shocked, but not indifferent. I don’t think there was any indifference there. 

Then another thing is impermanence—just to remember that suffering is impermanent. No suffering will last forever. Sometimes it only lasts a few seconds or a few minutes, sometimes maybe a few hours. It may last a few years; it may last a lifetime, but eventually, sooner or later, all suffering will come to an end. The Buddha found a way to end suffering and the causes of suffering such that they will never arise again. And he taught us how to do it. We have access to those teachings. It’s just a question of putting them into practice and doing them. So, that can be helpful to think, “It’s not going to be there forever. It does exist, but it won’t be there forever. Every living being will be able to be free of suffering and its causes once and for all.” That can help to cool down our distress.

And another point is to reflect that suffering isn’t necessarily bad. Suffering can be a great teacher. There are all kinds of methods, especially in the teachings on Bodhicitta and thought transformation, on how to make use of suffering and problems. They teach us how to actually transform those experiences into the path, enabling us to progress further on the path. So, it’s not necessarily bad. And I’ve also heard lots of stories of people who aren’t exposed to Buddhist teachings, but they still find meaning in suffering; they find benefit in suffering. It helps them have more compassion.

One person I know got cancer in his twenties, and he told me that was the best thing that happened to him in his life. I was sort of surprised, so I wanted to know why. And he said that when he was getting treated and recovering from cancer, he had to stay with his family, and he hadn’t been on good terms with his family prior to that. But while staying with his family during that period of time, they worked things out, and they were able to come to a really good place in their relationship. He worked out problems with his family. And he also became interested in meditation. He’d never meditated before. I think  Zen was his first exposure to Buddhism, and so he started learning Buddhism and meditation.

And then eventually he recovered, fortunately. And then eventually he even became a monk, and he has been a monk for many years—very happy, studying very hard. That was even before he met Buddhism, and he found ways of learning and growing from that experience of suffering. There are lots of stories like that, where suffering can be a life-changing experience for the better. 

And one last thing is to just be practical. Do what you can, and accept what you can’t. It’s like in Shantideva’s verse: there’s no need to be unhappy if there’s a remedy; if there’s something you can do about it then do it. If there’s nothing you can do, accept it. Because being unhappy isn’t going to make things better; it’s just going to make things worse. That’s a really good thing to keep in mind. And I really like the serenity prayer they use in Alcoholics Anonymous, which is kind of similar to Shantideva, but has another element to it as well. It says, God, but we could leave out the God.

We could say Buddha, or Guru, or Chenrezig, or whatever. But it’s, “Grant me the serenity to accept what can’t be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference.” That’s really, really beautiful, really profound, and really helpful when we are facing difficulties, whether it’s our own personal ones or somebody else’s. It’s helpful just to say, “Is there something I can do, something that can be changed?” And then we can do it. But with things that can’t be changed,  we can accept it. And then it’s imporant to have that wisdom that is able to tell the difference. 

And a way to meditate on compassion is similar to the one we did with loving kindness, except that you bring to mind different people, and then think about how they are suffering, and then say words like, “May you be free of suffering. May you be free of physical suffering.” You can sort of make your own words, but it’s just focusing on wishing the other person to be free of suffering.