Kisa Gotami, a young woman, married a man who loved her very much. In time, she gave birth to a son. She and her husband were exquisitely joyful and lived together quite happily. Sadly, two years after their son was born, the child became quite ill and died very quickly. Kisa Gotami was devastated; her heart was broken. She was so stricken with grief that she refused to admit that her son had died. She carried his small corpse around, asking everyone she met for medicine to make her boy well again. Kisa Gotami went to the Buddha and asked him if he could please cure her son. The Buddha looked at Kisa Gotami with deep love. He said, ‘Yes, I will help you, but first I need a handful of mustard seed.' When the mother in her joy promised to collect the seed immediately, the Buddha added, ‘But the mustard seed must be taken from a house in which no one has lost a child, husband, wife, parent or friend. Each seed must come from a house that has not known death.'
Kisa Gotami went from house to house asking for the mustard seed, and always the response was the same: ‘Yes, we will gladly give you some mustard seed. But alas, the living are few and the dead are many.' Each had lost a father or mother, husband or wife, son or daughter. She visited one home after another, and every home told the same story. By the time she got to the end of the village, her eyes were opened, and she saw the universality of sorrow, Everyone had experienced some great loss, each had felt tremendous grief. Kisa Gotami realized she was not alone in her suffering; her sorrow had given birth to a compassion for the larger human family. Thus, Kisa Gotami was finally able to grieve the death of her son and bury him, and she returned to the Buddha to thank him and receive his teachings.
Compassion isn't sympathy and compassion isn't empathy. Although all three words stem from the same Greek root, pathos, which means one's experience, particularly what one has suffered, their different prefixes give them different meanings. Empathy has the prefix en, which means in, so combined with pathos empathy means to have an inner state of emotion, to suffer within. Empathy is knowing another's suffering inside yourself, maybe because you've been there before. Empathy both validates and understands our suffering. This is one reason why specialized support groups are so effective. There's often something healing in being with people who were, or are, in the same boat. A person who has mourned the loss of a love can usually understand our broken heart and offer empathy. A cancer survivor can offer empathetic courage to one newly diagnosed. Those who have shared painful circumstances know about these circumstances in a way that an "outsider" never can. That shared knowledge and feeling makes empathy possible. Its understanding of the pain is so powerful.
Sympathy is the prefix sun, which means along with, in company with. Symphony, for instance, is the coming together of sound. Sympathy is coming together, standing beside someone in their suffering. Not necessarily sharing it, but coming together because of it. We offer people our sympathy. It's a way of saying I'm sorry you're in pain. Let my caring about you comfort you. Sympathy is healing because when others reach out to us we don't feel so alone in our sorrow. We can't and don't always feel empathy because our life experiences differ. We may, though, extend our sympathy even if we haven't a clue about what it feels like in another person's shoes. Sympathy recognizes suffering with kindness. It recognizes it, acknowledges it, and offers goodwill. That is powerful.
Compassion is the Latin prefix cum plus pathos. Cum also means, like sun, with, but contains a shade of difference. A companion, is one who shares bread with you, cum plus panos, bread. Compassion is to share suffering. What would it mean to share suffering? Think of yourself carrying a heavy load. You arms ache, your legs ache, you think you cannot go another step when someone steps forward and shoulders a part of the burden. In bearing some weight, they make it easier for you, even though you still carry the larger part. Sharing suffering means to lighten its load. If loving-kindness, the first of the four immeasurable minds, indicates the intention and the capacity to offer happiness to oneself and others, then compassion, the second of the four immeasurable minds, is the intention and the capacity to relieve and transform suffering. Compassion is the intention and the capacity to relieve suffering, and in the relieving, transform it. It does this by sharing suffering. When we care about one another's suffering and want to lessen it, we are doing the work of peace and justice. As loving-kindness is the foundation for justice and peace in the world, so is compassion. Compassion is far more than simply feeling good. When we help to carry one another's burdens, we get to understand them and our view widens. Such understanding, coupled with caring and generosity of spirit, motivates us to an ethic of justice.
The desire to let go of our own suffering and the desire to lighten the load of others is the beginning. Wanting this and resolving to attempt it is the intention. This is the first step. Intention alone does not make anything happen, but it does put us on a path because our intention indicates a conscious choice.
Many of us have known suffering. We've had hard lives or we have experienced tragedy, loss, betrayal, violence. Perhaps we've participated in these also. The tragedies of our lives help to define us, both who we are now and who we were then. Even tragedy that affects whole groups serves to define those groups. Most of us can remember where we were on September 11, 2001. We know the effect of that tragedy on our self-identity as a people and our subsequent behavior in the world. Personal tragedy marks our lives the way a bookmark holds the page of a book. When I was five years old my mother contracted tuberculosis and went away to live in a sanitarium for eighteen months or more. I was five and I didn't understand where she was going, or why. Or if she'd ever come back. I was in kindergarten when my mother left and finishing second grade when she returned. A defining time of suffering in my life? Absolutely. In a painful way tragedies touch our deepest parts and we are forever changed.
So when we talk about an intention to relieve and transform suffering we have to recognize that it can be very hard to let go of our suffering because on an important level, our suffering is our individuality, or so we think. It's ours. Who would we be without it? What, then, could my intention be around that childhood tragedy of losing a mother for almost two years? Letting go of that suffering does not mean I forget it. It does not mean I pretend it didn't affect me. An intention to relieve and transform my own suffering means, for me, that I don't want to live in the grip of it. I don't want to remain caught up in those painful feelings. Maybe most important, I don't want to think of myself as a victim of my mother's tuberculosis. I don't want to present myself to others as a victim, but rather as a strong and resilient person who came through a difficult time. I want to know, and to show, the fear, sorrow and helplessness of that little five year old transformed into courage and competence. Relieving my own suffering transforms me and thus my intention lightens my own load.
Compassion, though, is both the intention and the capacity to relieve suffering. We may very well think it good to lessen the amount of suffering in the world, but can we do it? What would it take? How do we relieve another's troubles? What helps you? The first night Matthew, my son, and I took Darwin, my former husband, to the emergency room of the hospital in California was also the last night of the General Assembly of our denomination, the conference that brought us to California in the first place. By chance, we met in the emergency room three UU ministers: Rosemary Bray McNatt, from 4th Universalist in Manhattan, Mary Harrington from Massachusetts, and Rebecca Parker, President of Starr King School for the Ministry, one of our seminaries. Rebecca had fallen and broken some ribs. I was worried for Darwin and for Matthew, but Rosemary recognized that I needed some attention too. Often in times of trouble we ask one another what we can do to help. Makes sense. Some of us can even say what we need. But many of us cannot and so we say, as I said to Rosemary, "No, I don't need anything, I'm fine." Truth was, I didn't know what I needed at that moment, so I couldn't give Rosemary a chance to help. But she was perceptive enough to know that and she made two practical offers: to bring me dinner and to call the UU minister in Long Beach, where we were. I didn't want the food, but I did appreciate the contact.
How do we relieve one another's suffering? In four main ways. We relieve suffering by accepting one another exactly where we are. No saying, "What are you so upset about that for?" No saying, "What! You should be over this by now." Just acceptance and recognition, without judgment. We relieve suffering by listening carefully, taking note of what is said and focusing upon the other person. No outdoing one another in troubles. "You think you had a heart attack? I had a heart attack and required bypass surgery. Want to see my scar?" "Your dog died? Well, my dog got this rare disease and . . . " You know how someone ostensibly wants to comfort you and ends up dominating the conversation with his/her own troubles? We relieve suffering by offering our observations, but not our advice unless specifically asked, or unless it's a clear question of morality. Once my wallet was stolen out of my backpack. That was upsetting and I felt a little violated. I went home and told someone in my family about it and she said, "Well, why do you go around with your wallet in a backpack? You should put it in your pocket instead." Probably great advice, but I wasn't ready to hear it and it did not relieve my suffering. Actually, it added to it. Finally, we relieve suffering with practical help. When you're with someone who is experiencing a lot of grief or pain or anything that causes them to suffer, they can't always tell you what would help them. This is what happened with Rosemary and me. Assess the situation and offer one or two practical and relatively easy things you could do. Don't overdo it or you'll overwhelm the person you want to help, but coming up with one or two ideas may go far in lightening their load.
Why does compassion relieve suffering? Because, as you probably know yourself, when we give each other the gift of acceptance, we start to feel better. When we listen to one another, we allow a person to release feelings and thoughts and start to calm down. When we offer our observations, without judgment, we help each other understand more clearly what's going on. When we offer practical help, we make life easier and pave the way for necessary action. Compassion breaks our isolation, soothes our pain, provides support, offers insight and gives help. How wonderful the world is when people want to relieve one another's suffering and have the skills and the capacity to do so.
The capacity to show compassion requires paying attention to suffering, our own and that of others, and not becoming overwhelmed by suffering, our own or that of others. Many of us respond to someone in obvious pain by trying to make it better. If we can, great. If we can't, their pain becomes our pain. It's hard to live a life of compassion if we're a paper towel soaking up everybody's suffering. Paper towels get saturated pretty quickly, lose their usefulness and end up in the garbage. How do we have compassion and not get used up?
Compassion is the intention and the capacity to relieve suffering. Not to end suffering, but to lessen it. We can accept, we can listen, we can observe, we can help; our very presence is healing. But we can't take it away. How do we not become saturated? We keep our balance. We learn not to expect that we will make suffering go away. We learn not to expect that we will fix it, or make it all better. Many of us, out of the generosity of our compassion, or out of an inability to deal with pain, want to fix people and their problems, or we want to kiss the boo-boo and make it all better. Two approaches with a similar intent. It's what we were taught. I want to suggest that the fix-it/kiss-it approach undermines our compassion. If we think that our role is to take responsibility for everyone else's happiness, we will find failure and frustration over and over again because we cannot fix one another's pain. We can help to make it less but we cannot take it away and if we expect ourselves to, we'll begin to hate each other. Relieving suffering means helping to carry the load, not shouldering the whole thing ourselves. This is a hard lesson – to care without being tied to a good outcome. But compassion means to be with suffering, not to expect that we can make it disappear. Can we do that? Can we be with one another in pain and just be? Just listen? Just observe? Just offer a little help? We are not b ad people, or bad partners, or bad parents or bad friends if we cannot kiss the boo-boo and make it all better. Ultimately, the healing part belongs to the person who suffers. Healers may help the process along, but the body and the spirit do the healing work.
If we are not going to end one another's suffering, but rather share it without drowning in it, we have to learn to take care of ourselves and our own suffering. Most of us do not choose to feel pain and we do everything we can not to. But pain and suffering seem to creep in anyway. What then? Do we deny them, push them away? Can we show compassion to ourselves by acknowledging and accepting where we are, listening to the murmurs of our hearts and minds, looking deeply by asking ourselves what this is about? Have we been here before? What's the core issue? Why is this so important? If we can find answers to those questions, our understanding of our own suffering will grow and we will become more clear as to its root causes and what we need to do about them. If we can show such compassion to ourselves, we will cultivate our own calmness and strength. We will take care of our own suffering, and so help to relieve that of others. In the story I told you earlier, Kisa Gotami wanted to get rid of her suffering by having someone else make everything better. In her quest for mustard seed, she learned acceptance of her grief through understanding that death comes to every household. She learned to take care of her own suffering, and recognizing that others suffer also, she learned how to lighten, not only her own pain, but that of other people too. Imagine a world in which we treated ourselves, and we treated one another, that way. Do you know that studies of the workplace from the University of Michigan have shown "convincing evidence of the large effects of seemingly small interpersonal acts such as lending an ear, extending a hand, or being present to someone in pain." Such actions create an upward spiral that improve the way people see themselves and the company they work for and even increase job satisfaction. Imagine a world in which we treated ourselves, and we treated one another, with compassion. Here is a compassion meditation for us all.
May we be free from suffering. May our pain be resolved. We care deeply about ourselves. We hold ourselves with softness and care.Compassion is a practice. Like loving-kindness, it is a practice that leads to a more loving, more peaceful, more equitable world. Compassion gives us strength and calmness, understanding and useful actions. May compassion fill our lives. May it be so.May others be free from suffering. May the pain of others be resolved. We care deeply about one another. We hold one another with softness and care.
May all beings be free from suffering. May the pain of all beings be resolved. We care deeply about all beings. We hold all beings with softness and care.
May the hungry be fed, may the unloved be loved, may the imprisoned be freed. May all beings be free from suffering.
Closing words from May Sarton (adapted),Song
Now let us honor with violin and flute A (being) set so deeply in devotion That three times blasted to the root Still she grew green and poured strength out. Still (he) stood fair, providing the cool shade, Compassion, the thousand leaves of mercy, The cherishing green hope. Still like a tree she stood, Clear comfort in the town and in all the neighborhood.Pure as the tree is pure, young As the tree is forever young, magnanimous And natural, sweetly serving: for her the song, For (him) the flute sound and the violin be strung. For her all love, all praise, All honor, as for trees In the hot summer days.