Lines of Thinking (cont.)
Compassion
Finally, recently, I’ve had three reminders from very different quarters that compassion is the defining spiritual quality. The first was prompted by Brian Victoria’s Zen at War, in which he describes how a number of highly regarded Zen masters unambiguously supported the Japanese war effort in WWII. I was left with the question, “What enables a person to see through the projections of his or her own culture, even without leaving it?” The answer I came to was compassion, because compassion enables you to see suffering wherever it occurs.
The second was Karen Armstrong’s book mentioned above, in which she rightly identifies that the point at which fundamentalism ceases to be a spiritual movement is when it becomes an ideology, because at that point it loses its relationship with compassion and seeks to impose its beliefs on others.
A third was a conversation with an old friend a few months ago in which he related something one of his teachers had said to him: the point of understanding emptiness is to be able to act freely. This implies that emptiness is a means to an end. The end is to be an on-going response to the struggles of people to be happy. To do so, one needs to be free of attachment to any sense of identity, which is the outcome of emptiness. To put it another way, emptiness is what enables one to rest, compassion defines how one acts.
From this perspective, one can infer a pattern in institutional religions, that is, at some point, they all veer away from fully embodying the ethic of compassion. Christianity, for instance, tends to veer into devotion to Christ, Hinduism into the pursuit of bliss states, Buddhism into an overemphasis on insight and emptiness, and Judaism into a fascination with The Law. These subtle shifts indirectly remind me of both the importance and the difficulty in living compassion.
