Compassion and Emptiness in Early Buddhist Meditation

My 6 highlights

• When compassionate activity meets with a careless or cold response, then perhaps the time has come to move on to equanimity.38 This requires giving up attempts to control the situation and change it for the better. Instead one allows others to take responsibility for their own actions and attitudes. In this way equanimity can indeed round off compassion, by liberating compassionate activity from the expectation of results.

• Drawing a clear distinction between the realization that others are suffering and the wish for them to be free from suffering is important, since mentally dwelling on the actual suffering would be contemplation of dukkha. Such contemplation offers a basis for the meditative cultivation of compassion. The cultivation of compassion itself, however, finds its expression in the wish for the other to be free from dukkha. In this way, the mind takes the vision of freedom from affliction as its object. Such an object can generate a positive, at times even a joyful state of mind, instead of resulting in sadness.

• the passage implicitly shows sympathetic joy to be the opposite of envy and jealousy.

• compassionate activity should ideally be based on the perspective afforded by the four noble truths. The resulting compassionate vision sees not only the actual pain and affliction of others (first truth), but also the conditions that have led to their predicament (second truth), and the conditions that can lead out of it (fourth truth). The motivating force of compassion is the wish for others to be free from pain and affliction (third truth). This is what makes compassion become thoroughly Buddhist, namely by way of being combined with the wisdom of the four noble truths.

• The Abhayarājakumāra-sutta clarifies that the Buddha will not engage in speech that is not in accordance with the truth or that is not beneficial. However, in the case of speech that is truthful and beneficial, the Buddha will at times say what is not pleasing to others. The discourse explicitly indicates that the Buddha’s speaking in these ways is an expression of his compassion.

• The Buddha himself is on record for undertaking charitable activities before his awakening, during one of his previous lives.