Compassion

Compassion differs slightly from love. Love wants others to be happy, while compassion wants them to not have pain, problems or unhappiness. Love comes from appreciating others’ kindness, or just respecting them as fellow beings, whereas compassion comes from realizing that they suffer.

Our own experiences of suffering are the basis for compassion. We know what it’s like to be sick or in pain, to be lonely or have our feelings hurt by an unkind remark, to fear the unknown or mourn the death of a loved one. When we then see or hear of others experiencing these things, our heart opens with a feeling of empathy and a wish to help.

Compassion is a quality desperately needed in the world today. If there could be more compassion in people’s hearts and live, if more people could develop the awareness that: “Just as I do not like being hurt, others also do not like being hurt, so we should stop hurting each other," then there would be far fewer stories in the news about war, terrorism and violent crimes. All the cruel things human beings do to one another are due to a lack of compassion. It is compassion that keeps us from harming others, imagine what the world would be like if we were all to develop such compassion.

Compassion is something that already exists in each and every one of us. It is a matter of learning how to get in touch with it and how to expand it so that we can feel it more often and for more people.

Extracted from Awakening A Kind Heart by Ven. Sangye Khadro