On Compassion

 

 

Kuan Yin is the shortened form of Guan Shi Yin, which means "Observing the Sounds of the World."

 

I keep in my office a white porcelain statue of Kuan Yin, the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion, the goddess of mercy. When I was a child my mother often placed this same statue beside one of her spare and elegant flower arrangements on our dining room table. In my memoir and in my life going forward I attribute the essence of Kuan Yin’s mercy to the final peace brokered between my mother and me, though through my childhood and even into my adult years she and I were both short on compassion for each other. Now, long since her passing, my empathy for the challenges she faced as a woman, as a mother and as a human being lives on.

 

The dictionary defines compassion as "the deep feeling of sharing the suffering of another in the inclination to give aid or support, or show mercy." Rooted in the latin com, with, and pati, to suffer, along with the root pei, to hurt, compassion shares its origins with the words passion, possible, passive, and patient. Compassion implies a submission to co-suffering. It evokes strong feeling and hope.

 

In Kuan Yin we feel the feminine element, the archetypal good mother attending to the sufferings of her child. This goddess embraces the spirit of the lotus, the flowering of enlightenment that emerges from the mud.

From The Teaching of Buddha; A Compendium of Many Scriptures Translated from the Japanese I read “The spirit of Buddha is a great compassion and love to save all people by any and all means. ‘Your suffering is my suffering and your happiness is my happiness,’ said Buddha, and he does not forget that spirit for a single moment, for it is the self-nature of Buddhahood to be compassionate.”

 

Compassion is a relational concept. Self compassion, compassion directed toward a part or parts of oneself, is subjectively interactive. Within each of us are those sufferers and witnesses who share in our sufferings and seek to alleviate them.

 

Flowery and obvious words. What human heart turns away from another's suffering without sympathy and a desire to help? Is not compassion one of the pillars of the psychotherapy profession?

Our compassion is challenged when the sufferer is our torturer, where meekness and forgiveness pave the road to understanding.

Though you don't see much written about compassion in Jungian psychology, is it not the Self, that experience of Christ-consciousness or the Buddha-nature, that intangible knowledge of wholeness in individuation that extends this spirit of mercy to all?

Observing the sounds of the world, what kind of listening is that?