Dr. John Young 1/6/08
Buddhist Compassion
The Buddha was a north Indian prince 2600 or so years ago. A wise woman had told his father that he would either become a spiritual leader or a great monarch. His father wanted to keep the Buddha as a prince and so he tried, as so many parents do, to shield his son from the sufferings of the world. It is said that the Buddha did not see death, severe suffering, or even old age until he was a young man, and, then, as happens so often in religious stories, he is said to have encountered them all in one day, and to have noticed that only a holy man seemed to be able to see all this suffering without being destroyed by it. The Buddha left his kingdom, a young wife and baby son, to become a Hindu holy man seeking enlightenment in the face of tragedy. Now days we would say that he was compelled by facing life’s traumas to drop everything and go on a spiritual search. That spiritual search lasted for a number of years. The Buddha became an adept holy man, full of spiritual disciplines and religious understanding, with four disciples of his own, but he was not at peace within himself. And so he sent his followers away, and began a prolonged meditation to try to understand the appropriate response to the tragic realities of life.
Eventually, he discovered what the Buddhists call the four noble truths. First, that life is full of suffering. Second, that the reality of most suffering is that it is caused by obsessive human craving and perceiving oneself as a victim. Third, that therefore the way out of suffering is to overcome obsessive craving. And fourth that the way to such peace of mind is found through the 8 fold path, appropriate: understanding and thought, speech, action and livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration.
Many Westerners are attracted to elements of Buddhist understanding. The Buddha was a Hindu reformer who stripped spirituality down to a disciplined life that focused on coping gracefully with life’s realities. This is what the Buddhists call enlightenment, and the Buddha called “waking up,” which is what Buddha means: ‘wake up.’ Waking up, or being positive but realistic about life is what spiritual maturity is all about. So, we, Unitarian Universalists are appropriately drawn to Buddhist teachings, and there are many Buddha-tarians among UUs.
What I want to concentrate on in today’s sermon is not, however, the enlightenment half of Buddhist teachings but the other central pillar of Buddhist teachings which is compassion. Buddhists talk about compassion with as much frequency as Christians talk about love, and just as many Christians get vague about what Christian love really means; so, many people looking at Buddhism feel that Buddhist compassion is also often rather vague. This sermon is my attempt to get specific about what compassion in Buddhism is philosophically all about.
If you would like to learn more, I would recommend the insights of Buddhist thinkers Walpola Rahula, who was a Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hahn, a Vietnamese Mahayana Zen Buddhist monk, the Dalai Lama, the present leader of the Tibetan Buddhists, and Joanna Macy, a contemporary American Buddhist among others.
I am going to talk about Buddhist compassion in terms of four central Buddhist concepts: metta, karuna, mudita, and upekkha. Metta means extending unlimited universal love and good will to all living things without discrimination. Karuna means to feel passion for the suffering of all living things. Mudita is sympathetic joy in the welfare, happiness, and success of others. Upekkha is developing equanimity about the vicissitudes of life.
Metta is that aspect of compassion by which we learn to extend love and good will to all beings without discrimination. It is the Buddhist application of the Golden Rule; you do to others as you wish them to do to you. The truth is that we all would prefer that other people consistently treat us as we wish to be treated. Buddhists try to extend this generalized love and good will to all beings, to all living things, not just to people. They try to be polite, respectful, patient, generous, and gentle with others because they believe that is the way they would prefer to be treated. They believe that this way of being works best even when the other person is not being that way with you.
To say that they attempt to practice this without discrimination does not mean that they do not recognize the differences between appropriate and inappropriate or that they do not prefer appropriate behavior. It means that it works better to practice good behavior with people even when they may be having a hard time or facing much turmoil or suffering and therefore not acting as we would prefer. As the Dalai Lama says distinguish not only between what is appropriate and inappropriate but what is required and what is not required. You need to do this diligent work joyfully. Root out your dissatisfactions and fill yourselves with the positive energies of metta.
Karuna is that aspect of compassion by which we learn to have sympathy for and empathy with the sufferings of others. Often, we need to understand others before we can be empathetic with them, but if we presume a sympathetic perspective, and assign ourselves the task in any situation of learning to empathize by better understanding, the loving compassion of empathy usually arises. In a classic Buddhist story, a woman is failing to recover from the death of a loved one. She is caught in the victimhood of her personal tragedy and seeks the Buddha’s help. The Buddha asks her to visit each home in her village and to discover whether there is any one there who has not faced the death of a loved one. She finds that everyone has had to face what she is facing, and she becomes liberated. She realizes, as I say each Sunday that we are surrounded by a circle of sorrow and of joy.
Thich Nhat Hahn talks about karuna as a continuing process of reconciliation: face-to-face, heart-to-heart, remembering the whole history of a conflict, remain flexible, dissipate hard feelings, reveal your own short-comings, decide by consensus, and accept and embrace the agreements. Karuna needs to become a life-style.
Mudita is that aspect of Buddhist compassion by which we learn to feel sympathetic joy in the welfare, happiness, and success of others. It is the opposite of the Exodus’ Tenth Commandment. Rather than urging people not to envy or covet others’ possessions, the Buddhists are advocating that we celebrate and savor the welfare, happiness and success of others. As Walpola Rahula argued it is startling how learning to celebrate and savor others’ joys seems to allow these satisfactions to fill the atmosphere and permeate us all. You do not need to possess them yourselves in order to find joy in them.
Upekkha is that aspect of compassion by which we learn to develop equanimity or balance about the vicissitudes of life. If we expect perfection or seek permanence in life we are bound to be disappointed. The dominant Buddhist images here are a river and a raft. The river keeps changing; you cannot step into the same river twice. Often rivers are too deep to ford and too swift to swim; so, we build rafts to get across them. Buddhism argues that it is a mistake once you build the raft and cross the river on it to then load the raft on your back in case you need it later. You will change; the situation will change; the river will change. You can build a new raft if you need one when you encounter a new impassable river. Don’t get bogged down in your life by trying to apply outworn solutions to new problems.
I started this sermon before I left town; so, naturally, I was thinking about it off-and-on while I was away. As many of you know, I have studied Buddhism for many years and perceive my philosophy of life as significantly influenced by Buddhist teachings. My son is named Rahul, which was the name the Buddha gave his own son. And now, my first grandchild, my daughter’s new son, has Sidharth as his middle name. Sidharth was the Buddha’s own name before he gained the honorary title of the Awake One. Buddhism is not a passing fancy or a casual interest for me.
Buddhist compassion is wise but it is, like love, hard to live in practice. While I was away, I encountered a woman at a lodge where we were both staying that almost instantly put me on edge. I found her annoying. She had something to say about practically everything and seemed almost totally preoccupied with herself. As soon as she was through with a subject, she simply moved on, and her attention to others was often superficial. From the moment I first heard her speak, her voice seemed to plead both that she needed everyone else to hear and that she did not quite believe in herself. We were eating several meals at a common table and finally she spoke of her attraction to Buddhism and another seat mate knew I was going to do this sermon and asked me what I thought. Instead of agreeing with this woman who had been annoying me, because I did mostly agree with what she said about Buddhism, I, in effect, took her to task by saying. ‘Well the Buddha did leave a wife and child, and there have been armies led by Buddhist monks.’ Instead of practicing Buddhist compassion with this stranger who had made me uncomfortable, I intellectually lashed out at her.
The Zen Buddhists have a standard expression that ‘if you meet the Buddha on the road, you should kill him.’ In effect, the one time Buddhism came up in my days away, I killed him, and I did not do it with compassion for my temporary neighbor, this vulnerable stranger. Compassion is not easy because we so full of ourselves, so always in the midst of struggling with our own issues instead of liberating ourselves to: 1. accept people where they are with love and understanding, 2. to realize that we are all suffering and join in a community of co-suffers who must find ways to become empathic with each other. To get past our obsessive cravings and our continuing need to wear the arrogant armor of our victim hoods. Third, Walpola Rahula’s emphasis upon the radiating ripples of embracing other people’s good fortune may be a key to changing these personal dynamics. Joanna Macy usefully identifies mudita as synergy. Fourth, to do compassion in these other aspects, we fourth need to develop equanimity, to find enough balance so that we are freed to turn outward and not to remain caught in our ephemeral egotistic, craving, stressed obsessive victim self. Then, we can learn to wake up in ways that allow us to become realistically positive about life as it is, and we will become spiritually mature in the Buddhist sense.