Compassion and Wisdom

Compassion and Wisdom

There was an interesting statement that compassion without wisdom leads to needless suffering and misery (or that was my take on it), which gave me pause as my primary focus for many years has been developing more compassion. It has never been my experience that compassion for those around us leads to misery and suffereing. Sharon had an unusual experience giving a lecture on meditation and compassion to a Russian audience as the they were not following her explanations. It turns out the Russian translation of compassion goes back to the root definition of heart rendering pain. It is no wonder that the audience was perplexed when she was describing how to develop more compassion (or heart rendering pain) into their lives.

This has not been my experience, so the question was how does wisdom balance compassion. On contemplating this question, it became clear to me that the wisdom which the Buddhist teachings were talking about was more like equanamity, the ability to see that all the misery and suffering around us is temporary in nature, caused by the delusions that we all suffer from, imagining that our current situation is somehow permanent and has signifigance, while in fact it is all part of the process developing true vision where we can see the transient nature of all our troubles and fully appreciate the love and joy which are natural and our birthright.

It seems that early in life, before I started on a spiritual path, I had gotten quite good at eliminating misery and suffering from my own life through variations of the conptemplations used by Buddhists. These contemplations are discussed at various points in these tales and elsewhere, but the down side of these contemplations is that while they can eliminate the misery and suffering from our lives, without being balanced with compassion, they lead to a cold and empty life. The Buddhist teachings explain that wisdom without compassion leads to cold indifference, which is my experience.

It is through compassion that we can develop our connection to the people around us. According to the Buddhist teachings, there are two aspects of compassion. The sharing of the sorrows of the people around is one aspect of compassion while the other is celebrating their successes. For me this means that whenever I see someone struggling, I wish them well, pray that they will grow and learn from their current challenges. This allows me to develop the warmth of connection to those around me without getting caught up with any needless misery or suffering; seeing their challenges as temporary and, in a certain sense, beneficial.

This is not to minimize the distress others may be suffering, which can be quite real, but rather not allowing it to disturb our core serenity, recognizing the temporary nature of the distress, and allowing it to develop and pass without fighting it or hanging on to it. This is the essence of equanamity. Just as pain and hunger can be accepted without impacting the joy of life by not giving them any great meaning (other than the normal consideration of whether we need to do something different to protect our health), so we can accept and experience the distress of others without granting it any great meaning (beyond the consideration of whether there is anything we can do to alleviate their distress).

The middle step of the process is to do what we can to help those who are in distress, but this also involves equanamity. While we should certainly do what we can to help others, this needs to be balanced with acceptance, deciding if this is the right time and place for action. If you can recognize the eternal nature of each person's essence (their soul, so to speak), then it is easier to understand and accept that their temporary predicament is simply a step in their growth and development, and anticipating their eventual success even if this is not the time or place for us to help.

The final step in the process is to celebrate the success of others. As we early on wished others well and then did what we could to help them develop (within the constraint of the right time and place), it is important to share the joy of success with others. This is the other aspect of compassion (according to Buddhist teachings) and strengthens our connections to the people around us, making our lives sweeter. It is with the balance of compassion and wisdom that we can live our lives full of joy, appreciating all our blessings and not being disturbed by the inevitable challenges which we require to really flourish.

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This page was last updated on November 25, 2011