137: Compassion and Passion

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Com-Passion
Practice compassion —
a worthy aspiration.
But it’s not like that.

I sometimes ask the producer of the UnMind podcast whether there is any subject he would like me to address, that he thinks is timely, and that others might find to be of interest. He sent me the following note:

I was re-reading notes I've made in a Brad Warner book (“It Came From Beyond Zen”) and he made two points that are hitting me today. He interpreted Dogen's chapter “Kannon” and then commented on the interpretation:

To me the basic idea of this whole essay is that compassion is intuitive. You can assess a given situation and think about how to deal with it compassionately. And you might even come up with the right answer that way. But in actual moment-by-moment interactions, compassion isn’t a matter decided by thought. You have to be able to see your instantaneous intuitive response and then do it. This is hard. One of the reasons we practice meditation is to help us see our intuitive responses more clearly.

Then:

A little further along I have Dogen say, “You give yourself to yourself, and you give everyone else to everyone else.” That’s pretty close to the original. This is important. If you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of anyone else. There’s no great merit in burning yourself out for the sake of others, since you’ll only end up becoming a burden to those who’ll have to take care of you after you wreck yourself in the process.

Brad is a relatively younger and relatively famous Zen friend who has visited Atlanta from time to time; he and I once led a retreat together in Nashville, if memory serves. I agree with his point that compassion is basically intuitive, rather than entirely analytical. We speak of “practicing” compassion, and it is true that we can train ourselves to respond to individuals and situations more compassionately — that is, by seeing their side of the story, et cetera — but we should probably differentiate between practicing compassion and actually experiencing it. The word literally means “suffer with”: the prefix “com” meaning “with”; while “passion” is interchangeable with “suffering” as in “the passion of Christ.” Passion also means feeling strongly about something, as in “my passion is art” or music.

But back to the idea of experiential compassion, of which I have written before. When we realize that we are the recipient of compassion in the sense of suffering as allowing, as in “suffer the little children to come unto me” as attributed to Christ, we recognize that we exist by virtue of the universe allowing us to exist — in that “goldilocks zone” in space and time where our home planet is far enough from, and close enough to, the sun that it can support life as we know it. The determinative parameters apparently do not have to be off by much to eliminate the possibility of sentient life on Earth.

So in some sense, the planet is willing to suffer with us, until we become insufferable, which threshold we may have already transgressed, what with climate change and all. Religious belief systems aside, we may be hanging by a thread that is ready to snap.

Ergo, we exist by dint of the compassion of the universe in its willingness to support life. Now, when we attribute “willingness” to the unconscious universe, eyebrows will be raised. The root word of willingness is “will,” and if we attribute will to the impersonal world in which we live, the next question will be, “Whose will?” It is counterintuitive to attribute will, unless it is to a “who.” But we can also look at will — the will to survive, the will to exist, and the will to propagate the species, for example — as disembodied will. Associated with will is the notion of intent — on both conscious and unconscious levels.

Is it our intent to exist? Did we “will” ourselves into existence? Is there such a thing as “free will?” Or do all willful acts come with a price tag? Are we delusional in imagining that we are exerting free will in coming and going in this universe?

As students at the Institute of Design, Illinois Tech, we would occasionally attend a movie series offered at the University of Chicago, in which they screened foreign films that would not be readily available in commercial theaters. After the feature they would show a short film or a series, one of which was entitled “The Lost Planet Ergro” if memory serves. These were in the category of “so bad they are good.” One of the leading characters in the script, when hearing some far-fetched explanation of the latest sci-fi phenomenon shown in the film would solemnly declare, “That’s too deep for me.” After so many repetitions following so many scenes, it became unbearably funny.

This is the way I feel about the speculations mentioned above. Apparently, Buddha did not exactly suffer fools gladly, and rejected flights of fancy from the practical standpoint of whether of not they addressed the problem at hand, that of the daily suffering in life. His experience in meditation apparently resolved many of the conflicts and conundrums we face in our lives, compounded, as they are by, complications of modern civilization.

The story goes that, in the face of irreconcilable differences between the way he wished things might be, and the way that things really were, and still are, he resorted to meditation. He sat down, in all humility, and faced the fact that, with all of his intelligence, education, and privileged position in the caste system of his time, he did not really know what he most desperately needed to know.

The story continues that he resolved to sit there and die, if need be, to settle once and for all the dilemma of his estrangement from the world, owing to the seemingly needless suffering he witnessed on a daily basis. He learned — and we should resolve — to “suffer with” the true causes and conditions of our existence, as he articulated them: aging, sickness, and death, to begin with; along with social dimensions of being away from our loved ones, and/or being with people we do not like.

The depth and breadth of his insight still resonates today, in the validation of the Four Noble Truths and Noble Eightfold Path as being as relevant to our times as to his. Although, as I mention in earlier episodes, the complexity of our context has multiplied geometrically.

If we take Buddha’s example and message to heart, we can see that the compassionate thing to do is to embrace karmic causality, and the causes and conditions within our personal, social, natural and universal spheres of action and influence. The atrocities we witness around the globe, which manifest as the opposite of compassion, and the quintessential nature of ignorance, do not lobby against the veracity of Buddha’s insight, but indeed confirm it in the most depressing manner imaginable. We do not have to imagine it because it is real, and has real karmic consequences.

The native American tribes had a unique take on this hypothesis, as expressed by one of their chiefs during the genocidal advent of the white European settlers. It went something like this: The tribal members who had been slaughtered in the conquest — men, women and children — would be reborn as future generations of the children of the invaders. The perfect retribution, big-time karmic consequence.

Whether or not you choose to honor or even consider this possibility, if those waging war on others, cavalierly bombing and otherwise laying waste to noncombatant civilians, were to believe that, like chopping down weeds after they had gone to seed, their very efforts are simply multiplying the future ranks of the perceived enemy, it might give them pause. If the “final solution” is genocide, wiping out the entire “other,” but it turns out not to work, but in fact simply kicks the can down the road a generation or two, the futility of the warring endeavor might finally come crashing home.

This conclusion will never be drawn in the context of theistic beliefs in the eternal soul, of course. Unless they allow for some version of rebirth or reincarnation. Buddhism does not hold out this possibility in order to debate or refute contrary ideas. But what if it is true? Wouldn’t the intrinsic irresolution, itself, perhaps contribute to a more moderate, compassionate approach to — if not loving thine enemies — at least recognizing that they may prevail, in spite of, or as a direct result of, our best efforts to eliminate them? As Master Dogen reminds us:

Yet in attachment, blossoms fall
In aversion, weeds spread

And as one of our members reminded us when we were weeding the parking lot of the prior Zen center: “Weeds are flowers we don’t want; flowers are weeds we do want.” But the herbicides that we spew over the land, in order to eradicate those flowers we identify as weeds in the patch, ultimately blow back our way, often taking our favorite blossoms with it. We are all, like it or not, forced to experience compassion, “suffering with,” suffering the ignorance of our fellow human beings. Suffering fools, if not gladly, as the saying goes. Karma and its consequences are not individuated; they come bundled with the species.