What If I Don't Feel Compassionate?

In this talk, I discuss the natural opening of the heart to the suffering of the self and others through practice. This is not a metta practice, but rather, a talk about how compassion develops naturally as we explore our own minds and bodies.

Please note: This track may include some explicit language.

Transcript

Tonight I want to talk about compassion.

About this quality that we hear so much about in Buddhism and in Zen.

That's actually one of the pillars of practice.

We think about the core teaching of Buddhism that life is suffering or in some translations unsatisfactory.

And at the same time we have this remarkable capacity to be with suffering.

To bear our own and to bear others.

And we cultivate that as a part of our awakening.

And in fact there's a whole panoply of mythical beings who are held out to us as the embodiment of compassion.

We talk about Kanzayon and another name for the Bodhisattva of compassion is Guan Yin who finds us in the dark and broken roads.

And another name is Avalokiteshvara who is the narrator of the Heart Sutra telling Shariputra about the Dharma and form and emptiness.

The Bodhisattva is an amazing idea in Buddhist practice.

You'll remember that Bodhisattvas are these beings who could leave us and go into one of the heavenly realms into permanent nirvana.

But out of their great compassion for all beings they choose to stay in the world until everyone,

Every being is saved.

And this is held out to us as a kind of ideal.

And I am keenly aware in my own life and in my own practice that I am not the Bodhisattva who saves all beings all the time,

24-7.

In fact,

I fall far short of that ideal.

Now I took a vow when I ordained as a Zen priest to serve the Sangha and not just the Sangha but all beings.

I took a vow to aspire to be one of these Bodhisattvas.

And every day I watch myself fall short.

And so I keep asking,

Is this what's expected of us?

Is this the goal?

Is this why we practice?

There's a book published just a couple of years ago called The Arts of Contemplative Care in which Buddhist chaplains are writing about the art and the practice of being with suffering,

Particularly in hospital settings,

In prison settings.

And it's actually something of a new endeavor.

There have been Christian chaplains and Jewish chaplains and Muslim chaplains for a long time but Buddhist chaplaincy is new.

And the book starts with this quote from Master Yun Men,

One of our great ancestors.

He asks the question,

What is the teaching of the Buddha's entire life?

And he answers his own question.

He says,

An appropriate response.

So when he boils it all down,

What is the Buddha's entire life about?

It's about an appropriate response.

And they start this book about how to care for others with that quote.

What are they on to?

All of us see suffering every day.

We see it certainly in ourselves but we don't have to look very far to see it.

And not just in the news,

We see it next to us on the T.

We see it at work.

We see people lose their jobs.

We see people get left by lovers.

We see people lose children.

And in my case these days I'm seeing a number of friends get really bad,

Scary medical conditions.

So the suffering is there.

And then the question that we investigate in our practice is how do we respond?

Now one of the interesting things when people come to visit us for the first time,

Visit Hank and visit Buddhist sanghas,

Is that sanghas that chant the five remembrances,

I'm of the nature to grow old and have ill health and die and I'm going to lose everybody I care about,

Some people respond by saying,

Ah,

Finally somebody is talking about what's real.

And some people run the other way as fast as they can and never come back.

And I would wager that each of us has both of those responses at different times to the suffering that we see.

And sometimes at the same time.

Both responses at once.

Tremendous aversion and a turning toward.

With compassion and with some relief.

I was practicing with this last week as I watched myself.

I got a text from someone who said that her husband,

Someone I don't know that well,

Was in the hospital.

And it was the hospital I happen to work at every day,

And she just wanted me to know.

And I thought,

Gee,

I should go see him.

And my first thought was,

My day is pretty full,

I don't know if I want to do that.

And then I thought again,

And I figured out where I could put it in my day,

And I found my way up to his hospital room.

And there he was lying in bed looking terrible.

In pain.

And there were all these beepers and machines.

I don't like hospitals.

I'm a doctor,

But I don't like hospitals.

And somebody else in the next bed was moaning.

And I sat down and what came up for me was aversion.

I didn't want to be there.

But I asked him how he was,

And he started talking,

And I started listening,

And actually it was kind of peaceful with all the sounds around us just connecting with this friend in a way that I had never connected before.

Because as I said,

I didn't know him all that well.

And I simply listened to all that he'd been through,

The sleeplessness and being awakened at 4 in the morning so someone could draw his blood that they didn't really need to draw,

And all of his pain and digestive problems.

And then we began to laugh about our digestive problems and our constipation when we both went to Sashene's,

And we laughed about how annoying it was that these routines were keeping people up all night when people were supposed to be getting rest and getting better in hospitals.

And we just sort of sat there looking at each other,

And at one point he said to me,

You know,

I never get to talk to anybody about pooping.

And here I am,

Talking to you about pooping.

We both kind of looked at each other.

I don't know that I've ever felt so close to him before.

And we just sat for a while.

And then he started telling me that they had seen something on a scan that they thought might be a tumor.

It might be a really bad tumor,

And how scared he was.

And I sat there and I found again the aversion arising,

Because that could be happening to me.

It could be happening to me now.

My thoughts started racing.

Maybe I have a tumor and don't know it.

Something silent going on.

Or maybe somebody I love.

I noticed the aversion arise and pass away,

And I asked him what it was like.

What it was like to be waiting for the next test.

Where his thoughts were going.

How he felt about it.

How his wife felt about it.

And I calmed down and he calmed down.

And then it was time for me to go.

And I hugged him.

And as I walked out I realized I really wanted to go back and see him the next day.

That from this place of aversion I had come to a place of feeling like we had really connected around some of the scariest stuff for both of us.

Which was getting older and more scared.

And I was scared.

Which was getting older and maybe getting sick and maybe losing people we cared about.

And I noticed this when I talked to people who have lost jobs.

And realized how fragile my sense of place is in my job.

Or people whose lovers have walked out on them.

All things that are so easy to turn away from.

And I noticed sometimes that I did turn away.

That I don't return the call.

Perhaps you've noticed this too.

That sometimes you have the bandwidth,

If you will to face toward somebody else's suffering.

And sometimes you don't.

I always held that Mother Teresa as the ideal.

She's a Bodhisattva.

Just saving all beings all the time.

And then I read about her dark nights.

Of the soul.

Terrible dark nights.

Where she lost her faith in God.

She lost her faith in what she was doing.

And rather than being disappointing it was such a relief.

Because here was somebody who was just as human as I was.

Made me feel less ashamed of my aversion.

Less upset about my turning away when sometimes I can't do anything but turn away.

And more accepting of my own humanness.

In this whole process of trying to meet suffering.

One of the things that they say about K'anzei about Guan Yin is that she hears the cries of the world.

Not that she fixes everything.

She is portrayed with hundreds of arms.

But she hears the cries of the world.

When she is described her activity is hearing.

Is really listening.

Facing toward the cries of the world.

And all of you have had that experience of how powerful it is simply to be listened to when you're hurting.

And to listen to somebody else when they're hurting.

And it reminds us that that's all really that is expected.

And sometimes we move beyond and sometimes we move to concrete help.

But just being there just talking about pooping and stomach pain and scans can be so relieving and so bonding between us,

Among us.

We read about K'anzei on in our chant absorbing world sounds awakens a Buddha right here.

That when we really listen to the sounds of the world to the cries of the world our Buddha nature comes up naturally.

You know there are compassion practices where you tell yourself to feel compassionate toward other people or toward yourself but Zen teaches us that compassion is a state that arises naturally.

When we sit on the cushion and we feel that knee pain the next time we see somebody on crutches we feel with which is the meaning of compassion.

That all we have to do is watch our own humanness and our own swirling changing reaction and we naturally open our hearts to other people.

So then our job,

If you will is not to force ourselves into some feeling of compassion because in fact I would argue we can't do that.

You can't make yourself feel compassionate but we can turn toward suffering and open ourselves to that suffering and watch compassion naturally arise.

Now James Ford is fond of saying that awakening is an accident and that what we do in our practice is make ourselves more accident prone through Zazen through all the things that we do the chanting and the reading and I think that compassion arises in the same way that we make ourselves prone to the arising of compassion to the accident of compassion just by watching our own humanness on the cushion and as we go through our days and watching how it resonates with everybody else.

The best lesson I had about all of this was from one of my teachers when I was training in psychiatry a wonderful man whose daughter was murdered whose daughter was in New York a young woman making it as an actress the apple of my teacher's eye and she was brutally murdered in a random murder and everybody was devastated and he was devastated and I went to her funeral but then when they invited everyone back to my teacher's home I didn't go because I thought oh I don't know if I know him well enough I'm just his student I'm not his friend and I debated whether to go or not and I didn't go and months later I was talking with him and I finally got up the courage to say I'm so sorry I didn't know what to do when it came time to decide whether to go to your home I thought I should go and I thought I would be intruding and all he said to me was you know over the years I've found that when you see someone suffering if it occurs to you to go just show up if you even think of it move in that direction and I found that that has actually been a good guidepost for me that when I find myself debating I err on the side of showing up I err on the side of facing toward of hearing the cries of the world sometimes we can't do that sometimes we don't have any room,

Any space in our lives,

In our hearts for someone else's suffering and that's all there is to it and that needs to be honored but more often in my experience it's a question of a decision in one moment to turn toward or turn away and when I can turn toward it's always been a source of enrichment not for the other person toward whom I'm turning but for me and so this is my practice and this is the way I'm working with needing suffering and I'll go back to our chant absorbing world sounds awakens a Buddha right here this Buddha the source of compassion this Buddha,

Me,

This Buddha receives only compassion Buddha,

Dharma Sangha,

Just compassion thus the pure heart always rejoices in the light,

Recall this in the dark,

Recall this moment after moment the true heart arises time after time there's nothing but this thank you so

Reviews

It was very helpful
Thank you for sharing this.