Compassion and Suffering

COMPASSION and suffering "In 1992, I went with a group of scientists to the Himalayas to study the effects of meditation. One of the research topics was compassion. We asked an old Tibetan monk, master of many other Yogis who lived in the mountains, on the relationship between suffering and compassion. In the Buddhist tradition says that a bodhisattva, a person constantly motivated to help sentient beings attain the spiritual awakening, look for all beings as a mother look for her children. When a child gets hurt, the mother feels compassion and suffers. Since the purpose of the Dharma is to alleviate the suffering, the neuroscientists so Yogi was asked about what is the relationship between suffering and compassion.

The old monk explained: "the empathic distress comes before compassion." The first stage of compassion is empathy. With empathy, there is suffering. But the suffering I feel empathy becomes fuel for the fire of compassion. Empathy combined to what Tibetans refer to as sem-shuk, or "power of the heart", illuminates the compassion. The power of compassion is beyond the personal suffering and is focused on solutions, on what can be done. The old Yogi explained to neuroscientists that when compassion arises, the suffering is transcended and attention turns to how to be useful. Suffering is the fuel of compassion, not its result. "

Excerpt extracted from the book "Buddhism with an attitude" by Alan Wallace.