We hear so much about compassion these days and having practiced in the Buddhist tradition for so many years I’ve been steeped in it. However my perspective on what compassion is and what it means to practice it has changed dramatically as I’ve walked my path. I think its very important to be clear on what we mean by the term compassion because after all its just a word and like many words much misused with all sorts of meanings for different people. For most of my time on the Buddhist path what I thought was compassion was really pity and my own self-importance and that’s what most of what passes for compassion out there is in my view. One of my Buddhist teachers called that idiot compassion. A good deal of people’s efforts to help others (including my own) is not really compassionate but manipulative assuming we know what someone else needs or whats best for them or helping them because the state they are in makes us uncomfortable and we really want them to be different. Suffering people remind us of our own suffering even if its just under the surface so is helping them a way to make them stop reminding us of our own pain? This made me question compassion altogether feeling that maybe its all bullshit and we can’t really be concerned with others at all without in some way manipulating them. I’ve become pretty wary of people who are out there to ‘help’ others.
(more…)