Compassion and Reflection

I have recently been exploring the idea of compassion as a reflective act, not just a feeling. This is a big step for me; in my mental maps, I tend to associate compassion with emotions such as sympathy and pity. But in my more recent readings on the subject (Anderson, 2017, and Miller, 2018), I tend to think of compassion as a more nuanced, interpretive attention to situations, similar to what we do when we read books or understand literature. I have even been considering my early days as an undergraduate student in English. Studying English literature has lead me to wonder, what makes the context of a book come to life? It's the way that different positions interact to create that moment of engagement for the reader. When a book opens, we see the characters, the author's history, and the reader's history intersect and come to life together. For me, "compassion" is more about seeing and examining the delicate interrelations among living things, not just a feeling of wanting to give to others in a single predefined role.
   Compassion seems to require a certain kind of ability to know what others might require in a situation. Peterson cites the example of a big campaign to aid Nepal after a devastating earthquake.After criticizing the Nepalese government for delaying the delivery of goods to the Nepalese people, the government fired back by saying that the donors from other countries were providing tuna fish and mayonnaise, rather than essential grains that the people needed to rehabilitate after the earthquake (p.22). Anderson uses this example to suggest that compassion is not just wanting to help; it needs to be supplemented with some understanding of what that particular people might require. Compassion is more than a knee jerk reaction. There needs to be a calm assessment with a clear awareness.
  Miller (2018) also sites examples where contemplative practices of calming the mind (such as meditation) might aid in love and compassion (p.91). He suggests that meditation practice can allow people to attend to what's happening in the present moment, which can help them develop a calm awareness of what can or does require care. I am reminded here of situations where I have a tendency to want to fix people's problems without seeing what the deeper paradoxes are behind the problems. When someone presents me with an issue or an experience they are going through, I might think there is an "easy" way to handle it, without really reflecting on what's at stake for the other person. My action might seem to me to be helping, but it's actually not considering the parts of a person's life that need care and attention. I have to remind myself that when I suggest a quick solution, am I doing it out of an awareness of the problem, or out of a wish for the problem to just go away?
    I am also reflecting as I write this: compassion requires a certain courage to face discomfort. Just this past weekend, I attended a meditation retreat in which I had to face many kinds of discomfort, such as leg pain, spinal pain or even a sense of dullness. Rather than distracting myself from these situations, I had to use a method of practice to see them as phenomena that have a reason to exist in their own right. I think this "allowing" is needed for compassion, even though it's the most painful thing to experience. Allowing phenomena to arise without quick judgments often brings up fear that the self cannot be "comfortable" or "in control". It relates to the awareness that one needs to drop their prior 'knowing' to truly engage what is presently arising.
   Venerable Chang Hu (see previous entry) used the example of Chuang Tzu's empty boat parable, and I have to keep re-examining this one. If the boat that crashed our own boat is empty, would we be mad at it? From Chuang Tzu's perspective, getting mad at an empty, uninhabited boat is a bit pointless. And few people would really be mad in such a situation because the boat has no ability to be aware: how can it steer clear of one's own boat? If I use an example in daily life: seeing the irritation as coming from a "person" is just like thinking the boat has someone in it. In reality, my reactions are to phenomena that are just coming up in mind. Why do I need to attach a person to it? When I do, I go back to the view that what I am experiencing is phenomena that are arising through a combination of very complex conditions that are fleeting and always changing. Without that view, I am not seeing the phenomena clearly, and I am acting as though there were someone who is opposed to me. In fact, the phenomena are all co-existing; none are opposed to each other, arising from the same source.

Miller, John P. (2018) Love and Compassion: Exploring their Role in Education. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Peterson, Andrew (2017), Compassion and Education: Cultivating Compassionate Children, Schools and Communities. London: Palgrave MacMillan