Compassion--The Diamond Sutra

In Chapter 23 of The Diamond Sutra, the Buddha nicely summarizes what I’ve been trying to say in my last two posts about self and other—namely, that there is no distinction between self and other, and that in order to love ourselves and be happy, we must love our neighbors and love our enemies. I’ll let the words speak for themselves:

“When someone is selflessly charitable, they remember that there is no distinction between one’s self and the selfhood of others. Thus one practices charity by giving not only gifts, but through kindness and sympathy. Practice kindness and sympathy and charity without attachment—that is, without recognizing distinction between self and other—and you can become fully enlightened.”

Charter for Compassion

Of course Jesus wasn’t born on December 25^th, but the symbolism of the date shouldn’t be lost on us. The celebration of Christmas is tied to the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. Or, alternatively, the longest night of the year, when darkness envelops the earth, when there is more darkness then light, when darkness threatens to conquer light. On this darkest of all days, we celebrate Light coming into the world to conquer darkness, to take back the day.

And how can we as individuals inject light into the world? How can we combat darkness? To paraphrase the Dalai Lama: “Find hope in the darkest of days—practice compassion.” It will bring others happiness—and you too.

Along these lines, I want to help spread the word about the Charter for Compassion, the project of one of my favorite authors on world religions, Karen Armstrong. It brings together all the world’s great religions in a dialogue on compassion. Check it out, sign the charter, spread the word, and most of all, practice compassion.

Charter for Compassion

And, just for a more global perspective, I might add that only half the world is experiencing this darkest of all days right now. Our sisters and brothers in the southern hemisphere are experiencing the summer solstice—the longest day of the year, when light is in fact conquering darkness. If Christianity had originally found it roots in the southern hemisphere, we’d probably be celebrating Christmas on June 25^th. So mark your calendars now. When June 25^th gets here, and we’re bathed in light, let’s share that with some of our fellow beings that suffer under the weight of darkness.

Compassion--Loving Enemies as Self

Love your enemies

Do good to those who hate you

Bless those who curse you

Pray for those who abuse you

(Luke 6:27)

If loving your neighbor as yourself seems radical, loving your enemy seems downright fringe—perhaps mentally unstable in the sense of wholesale abandonment of self, even nihilistic in the sense of complete destruction of ego and identification with that which seeks to destroy you. So what gives? Why would Jesus ask us to do this?

In my last post I spoke of the passage “love your neighbor as yourself,” and quoted Cynthia Bourgeault who explains that passage as one that requires viewing your neighbor as an extension of self. I said,

Until we realize that we are all in this together, we will not realize that love of others is love of self and, perhaps more importantly, harm to others is harm to self. Understood in this way, Jesus’s admonition to “love your enemies” is easier to understand and live out—enemies are an extension of self just as neighbors are. We—self, other, neighbor, enemy—are all one, reflections of the same light.

The same light is this: all of us, every living being, seeks happiness and avoids suffering. And that’s true of our enemies too. Sure, some of us pursue happiness through very misguided means, but attainment of happiness and avoidance of suffering is what we are all striving for. I believe I have a right to be happy, and if it’s worthwhile for me to be happy, then it’s worthwhile for my enemy to be happy too. If I can view my enemy that way—as an extension of me, seeking happiness and avoiding suffering—I can connect with my enemy on a human level and, as Jesus instructs, perhaps even love, pray for, bless, and do and wish good for my enemy. If enemies, like neighbors, are an extension of self, then wishing (or worse, doing) ill to enemies harms self, and extending good to enemies is extending good to self.

Jeffrey Hopkins provides a Buddhist perspective on this. A professor of Tibetan studies and one-time interpreter for the Dalai Lama, Hopkins writes:

If your own best friend went mad and came at you with a knife to kill you, what would you do? You would seek to disarm your friend, but then you would not proceed to beat the person, would you? You would disarm the attacker in whatever way you could—you might even have to hit the person in order to disarm him, but once you have managed to disarm him, you would not go on to hurt him. Why? Because he is close to you.

If you felt that everyone in the whole universe was in the same relationship to you as your very best friend, and if you saw anyone who attacked you as your best friend gone mad, you would not respond with hatred. You would respond with behavior that was appropriate, but you would not be seeking to retaliate and harm the person out of hatred. He would be too dear to you.

You can read the entire article, Everyone as a Friend, by clicking here.

The real life version of this is the Christmas Truce of 1914. Many perhaps have heard the story of the break in fighting during World War I along the British/German front on Christmas Eve in Ypres, Belgium. Cold and shivering in the trenches, having experienced unimagined bloodshed and slaughter, each side fighting against an unseen enemy that propagandists had labeled a monster, the spirit of Christmas, of common humanity, took hold. The German side began singing Silent Night, and the English side responded across the trenches with carols. Soon, they were meeting in the No Man’s Land between the trenches, exchanging cigarettes and brandy, playing a soccer game, and sharing pictures of families back home. Within a day or so, however, each side’s commanders overruled the ad hoc truce, and fighting and bloodshed resumed.

So what would cause warring enemies to suddenly become chummy for a day? Well, simply, they each saw the other’s humanity and saw an extension of self. These were men just like them: cold, hungry, with wives and children at home, who sang the same hymns at Christmas. The enemy was no longer unseen. The enemy’s mask had been removed and, frighteningly, the enemy was me.

Tear off your enemy’s mask and you’ll find yourself—that’s when you realize that harm to others is harm to self.

So, when someone hurts you, resist the initial urge to lash out. If you can, catch yourself before reacting and take a deep breath. Remind yourself that the person’s actions really aren’t about you—they’re about them: they’re just trying to find happiness and avoid suffering, just like you are. And, true, they’ve hurt you, but it's probably just as true that you have hurt someone else who extended you the kindness of not lashing out at you. So acknowledge the favor and pay if forward.

Compassion--Loving Others as Self

Love your neighbor as yourself

Cynthia Bourgeault has a wonderful book called The Wisdom Jesus. She devotes a portion of a chapter to this “great commandment” (Leviticus 19:18; Matthew 22:39; Mark 12:31; Luke 10:27). I want to quote extensively what she says because I think it gets to the heart of compassion—that when we see clearly we have no choice but to love others as self because self is other and other is self. Until we realize that we are all in this together, we will not realize that love of others is love of self and, perhaps more importantly, harm to others is harm to self. Understood in this way, Jesus’s admonition to “love your enemies” is easier to understand and live out—enemies are an extension of self just as neighbors are. We—self, other, neighbor, enemy—are all one, reflections of the same light.

Here’s how Bourgeault says it. Beginning with the recognition that there is no separation between human and divine (as Jesus says “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you”), she continues:

No separation between human and human is an equally powerful notion—and equally challenging. One of the most familiar of Jesus’s teachings is “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But we almost always hear that wrong. We hear “love your neighbor as much as yourself.” (And of course, the next logical question then becomes, “But I have to love me first, don’t I, before I can love my neighbor?”) If you listen closely to Jesus’s teaching, however, there is no “as much as” in there. It’s just “Love your neighbor as yourself”—as a continuation of your very own being. It’s a complete seeing that your neighbor is you. There are not two individuals out there, one seeking to better herself at the price of the other, or to extend charity to the other; there are simply two cells of one great Life. Each of them is equally precious and necessary. And as these two cells flow into one another, experiencing that one Life from the inside, they discover that “laying down one’s life for another” is not a loss of one’s self but a vast expansion of it—because the indivisible reality of love is the only True Self.

These are the key points of a very radical teaching—not only light years ahead of its time but way ahead of our own as well. . . .

In a similar spirit, the Buddha in the Metta Sutta (Discourse on Loving-Kindness), says:

Even as a mother protects with her life

Her child, her only child,

So with a boundless heart

Should one cultivate limitless love for all living beings.

The mother-child imagery here is critical because the child is, literally-physically, an extension of self—part of mother, same as mother, is mother. Buddha and Jesus both say that we must love others because they are we, you are I, I am you. To do otherwise only harms self.

The 20th century Jewish theologian-philosopher Martin Buber conveyed a similar message in his seminal work I and Thou. Buber says that are two ways for self to relate to other: I-Thou and I-it. With I-it, the self relates to other as subject-object, but with I-Thou the self relates to other as subject-subject. I-Thou is a relationship rooted in unity of being, while I-it is rooted in separateness, detachment, and division.

I-Thou is how The Divine relates to The Human. And if we, as self, can relate to other as I-Thou, then we can touch the Divine—The Kingdom of Heaven will indeed reside within us.

Tzedakah—A Jewish Perspective on Compassion

Admittedly, I plug this blog as the intersection between Christianity and Buddhism. But today I depart and look to our Jewish sisters and brothers for inspiration on this topic of compassion. While in the last couple posts I’ve wanted to be transparent about what I spend on myself and how I can tie this to attempting to do good for others, I realize that transparency could be misconstrued—perhaps as false piety, or worse, hypocrisy, pride or hubris. The following comes to mind:

Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness before others, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward. When you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Those who give in secret will be rewarded. (Matthew 6:1-4).

So, I want to be clear that I’m not searching for kudos or rewards for my feeble attempts to reach out to those in need. Rather, I want to be transparent to hold myself accountable to myself and to others.

I’ve been reading portions of the Mishkan T’Filah, the new prayer book of Reformed Judaism. One of the selections for morning prayer speaks to this.

There are eight degrees in the giving of tzedakah (charity or justice), each one higher than the one before:

1. to give grudgingly, reluctantly, or with regret;

2. to give less than one should, but with grace;

3. to give what one should, but only after being asked;

4. to give before being asked;

5. to give without knowing who will receive it, although the recipient knows the identity of the giver;

6. to give without making known one’s identity;

7. to give so that neither giver nor receiver knows the identity of the other;

8. to help another to become self-supporting, by means of a gift, a loan, or by finding employment for the one in need.

This was written by Maimonides, the medieval Jewish philosopher and rabbi. I think generally I’m at level 2 (giving less than one should, but with some measure of grace and sincere intent). Thus, I have a great opportunity for growth.

How do you rank?

Record of Account

What we do for ourselves benefits no one. What we do for others benefits all humanity.

One of my friends sent me an email this week wondering why I had not recently posted an update. Thank you, Bob, for prompting me to get this done.

On my last post (click here) I committed to tying personal consumption to helping others in need. I laid out a simple plan where I choose several charities that were tied to achieving the Millennium Development Goals and every time I spent money on myself I committed donating money to one of these charities.

I also promised to be transparent, so here goes. In the last couple weeks, we have gone out to dinner with friends four times, bought wine from two of our favorite wineries, and bought a new laptop. It seems pretty extravagant. The laptop was in some ways a necessity since both the home laptop and home desktop both died within a week of each other. Nevertheless, a laptop is a purchase on ourselves.

Because of Bob’s email, this morning I took stock of these expenditures from the last couple weeks. I have prepared a spreadsheet (hey, I’m a tax attorney by training—I never met a spreadsheet I didn’t love). I’m calling the spreadsheet my Record of Account—as in being accountable to my conscience and to the needs of others. I’m listing every expenditure on myself (eating out, clothes, grocery shopping, electronics, etc.) and keeping a running tally of what I spend. When I give to each of these charities, I keep a running tally of what I give. There’s a column that calculates what I give as a percentage of what I spend. I’m starting out with a target giving of 10%. It may seem low but it’s in addition to our other giving, and it’s a place to start. At the top of my Record of Account is the above quotation to always remind me to put my spending in perspective. (It’s a paraphrase of this Albert Pike quotation: What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.)

Because we bought a laptop, we gave a laptop at www.laptop.org. This is a nonprofit organization (One Laptop Per Child) that provides durable, energy-efficient laptops to children in the third world to help educate them and bring them out of the cycle of poverty. Check out the website, it’s a fascinating organization started by an MIT professor with a grand vision that every child in the world have a laptop. We have a laptop now, and so does one more child.

Because we indulged in food and wine, we gave to several of the other charities I mentioned in my last post. We gave a Flock of Hope at Heifer International. This provides chickens, ducklings, and goslings to a third world family to provide the beginnings of a flock that can provide eggs for consumption by the family as well as sales of eggs for income production. This flock can grow and produce more food and more income. We also gave to the Health Fund at Episcopal Relief and Development which provides for the health needs of individuals in the third world. We made two micro-loans to women entrepreneurs in Peru at www.kiva.org. If you want to view the details on the loans and loan recipients, click here and view our personal page lending page. Finally, since this week was the week I had to fill out my United Way forms at work, I designated the other two charities I mentioned in my last post as my recipients (Operation Breakthrough and Episcopal Community Services Community Kitchen). These serve the needs of children and the hungry right here in our own neighborhood.

Happy spending, but more importantly happy giving.

Compassion Requires Action--What We Can Do

Awhile back (July 26th to be exact) I said that I would start blogging about compassion but that it could take months to collect all my thoughts and get them posted. Six weeks into this I’m reminded at how slowly my thoughts evolve. That being said, I’ve had this post more or less written for several weeks now. Most of the delay was wondering whether I had the courage to live up to what I was going to say. But two events yesterday spurred me to take the plunge and put this out there.

The first event was choral evensong at our church. My parish (St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church) offers Evensong the first Sunday of each month at 4 pm. My close friend Bede Mudge, an Episcopal monk, describes Evensong as the Anglican Church’s gift to humanity. (Visit Bede’s monastery, Holy Cross Monastery, and his blog, The Prior's Column.) If you have never heard Evensong and you live in Kansas City, come to St. Michaels on first Sundays. If you don’t live in Kansas City, visit the website for St. Thomas Church (on Fifth Avenue in NYC). Other than the great cathedrals of England, where this ancient rite found its fullest and grandest expression, St. Thomas offers one of the most profound and sublime experiences of this service in the United States—and if you can’t visit in person you can listen every week online at their website.

But, admittedly, as great as Evensong was, it was the dinner afterwards that put the final touches on getting this post out the door. We had dinner at our Aunt Diana and Uncle Jeff’s house with Gail, our priest, and Ken, our organist who was the architect of the beautiful Evensong. We had a spirited discussion covering many topics but the discussion of the Millennium Development Goals and how to help achieve them (and the various websites I post below) put the finishing touches on this post—not to mention Aunt Diana saying she gets up every morning to see if I have a new post only to be disappointed most mornings. Given to hyperbole, the Grande Dame and Matriarch of the family did guilt me into this.

The second event was church yesterday morning and the New Testament reading from James 2:14-18:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have belief but do not have action? Can beliefs save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not give them clothes or food, what good is that? Belief by itself, if it has no action, is dead. Your actions will show your beliefs.

This ties nicely to my last post (Compassion Requires Action) and the various sayings from contemporary Buddhists and ancient Jesus about testing our beliefs in the crucible of action. But, in the spirit of James, enough about words—even words by such venerable Buddhist monks and Jesus himself. What about action?

Well, here’s my three-step action plan on what we can do to change the world.

Step One: Personally embrace one or more of the Millennium Development Goals (learn more about the MDGs here, here, and here):

· Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

· Achieve universal primary education

· Promote gender equality and empower women

· Reduce child mortality

· Improve maternal health

· Combat HIV/AIDs, malaria and other diseases

· Ensure environmental stability

· Develop a global partnership for developing countries.

Step Two: Pick a favorite charity (either local, national or international) that directly achieves one of these goals (soup kitchens, homeless shelters, HIV/AIDs clinics, battered women and children shelters).

Step Three: Whenever we spend money on ourselves (going shopping, going to the store, eating out) let’s also give something to the charity (or charities) selected in Step Two. Maybe it’s dollar for dollar, maybe it’s 50 cents on the dollar, maybe it’s 10 cents on the dollar. The amount doesn’t matter, the action does. By tying our own personal desires (shopping, eating out, buying groceries) to the needs of others, we can take one step towards transforming the world. Five dollars here, $100 there, pretty soon we’re talking about serious money, serious change, and serious transformation (for us individually, as well as the world). Sure, we all give to our favorite charities on a regular or infrequent basis, but tying a gift to improve humanity to every moment we spend money on ourselves, I think, serves as a powerful springboard for personal and global transformation.

Here’s my personal plan:

Locally in Kansas City, I’m choosing Operation Breakthrough (an organization helping children living in poverty) and Episcopal Community Services Community Kitchen (which feeds the hungry). Globally, I’m choosing three organizations working to achieve the MDGs in third world countries Episcopal Relief and Development, The Heifer Project, and Kiva (Kiva allows you to make microloans to third world entrepreneurs so that they can become self-sustaining).

Every time I buy groceries, go out to eat, or buy something for myself that is not a basic necessity (which pretty much describes everything I buy), I’m going to give something to one of these charities. I don’t know how much yet, but I promise to be transparent and keep you posted about how much.

I hope you join me in the 3-Step Plan.