This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening, everyone. Welcome. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Tenzin David Zimmerman, and I am a student and priest here at San Francisco Zen Center. And I want to welcome you to Beginner's Mind Temple on this rainy spring evening. Surprisingly rainy for May here in San Francisco, but that's very much appreciated. And anyone here at Beginner's Mind Temple for the first time? Welcome. Welcome to you all. Great. Welcome. Suzuki Roshi, the founder of San Francisco Zen Center, said that the beginner's mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless.

[01:04]

So maybe you could say that we're currently abiding in the Boundless Compassion Mind Temple. So welcome to Boundless Compassion Mind Temple, also known as Beginner's Mind Temple. And Dogen Zenji, the... 13th century founder of our particular school of Zen, Soto Zen, also constantly emphasized how important it is to resume our original boundless mind, our original nature, to be coming home and abiding that again and again. And when we can do so, we come back to our true selves. And in sympathy with all beings, we're able to take up our practice fully and completely. And when we take up our practice fully and completely, then we're able to cultivate and abide in the limitless heart-mind qualities of kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity.

[02:17]

And the Buddha taught these qualities as the manifestations of our true home. You could say our inner sacred temple, the temple of our shared being, and the abode of love itself. So welcome to the abode of love. And here at Beginner's Mind Temple, our boundless compassion mind temple. We're in the middle of a six-week practice period, an intensive study, and we are studying four aspects of the boundless heart-mind. And these aspects are known as the Brahma Viharas, though also sometimes the Brahma Vihara is translated as the divine abodes, or the heavenly abodes, or the four immeasurables. And these are limitless qualities or states of mind. Again, kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity.

[03:25]

And these are considered the Buddha's primary heart teachings, the ones that connect us most deeply with our true wish for happiness. So tonight, I want to talk about the second of the Brahmaviharas. Last week, I spoke on the first, which was metta, often translated as kindness, goodwill, friendliness, loving-kindness. And that's considered the foundation of the Brahmaviharas by many. And this week, moving to the second one, which is Karuna. And Karuna is translated generally as compassion. Although Alan Wallace, the Tibetan scholar, actually says etymologically the word Haruna actually means kindness. So I found that kind of curious to learn that. And pointing to a form of kindness that doesn't want any being to experience suffering. So may all beings be free from suffering and from the causes of suffering.

[04:34]

Passion can be basically understood as what happens when metta, again, when kindness, goodwill, friendliness, loving kindness meets suffering. When metta meets suffering. So metta and karuna go hand in hand. And compassion is often described as a quivering of the heart. A quivering of the heart in response to suffering in the world. So think of that for a moment. Feel that for a moment. When you feel compassion, what do you feel in your body? How do you know you're experiencing compassion? If you turn to your heart, do you have that kind of quivering, that resonance, a sense of vibration? A vibration that actually is maybe matching the vibration of another person in some way?

[05:41]

in response, marrying in some way. And so this compassion is a response to the inevitable adversity that all beings meet in their lives. Whether it's the pain that's embedded in the fabric of being human, which includes aging, sickness, and death. as well as psychological and emotional afflictions that debilitate the mind. And compassion is also the sober acknowledgement that not all pain can be fixed or solved. Not all pain can be fixed or solved. And so... that is the case, maybe we can study a little bit deeply how it is that we can actually still hold and meet pain, hold and meet suffering, make it more approachable and bearable through the landscape of compassion.

[06:57]

So if we study compassion closely, what we notice, if we unpack it, is that it's a multi-textured response to pain and to sorrow and anguish. And it also, compassion also includes kindness, empathy, generosity, and acceptance. And also, if we keep deconstructing it, we find strands of courage, tolerance, equanimity are all equally woven into the cloth of compassion. And above all, all compassion is the capacity to open to the reality of suffering and to aspire to its healing. The Dalai Lama once said, if you want to know what compassion is, look into the eyes of a mother or a father as they cradle their sick and fevered child.

[08:02]

So the parent's deepest wish is to alleviate their child's suffering. So there's the rising recognition of suffering, and with that is immediately a response of some nature. That is compassion. And the reality of being human is that our lives unfold in constant exposure to myriad forms of suffering, forms of loss and grief, and that our Dharma practice turns our attention towards the reality of our fragile, precious lives. And ask us, how is it that we can maintain dignity in the face of the reality of suffering? How is it that suffering can be ennobling? And this is really what the Buddha's search was itself about.

[09:12]

how to meet suffering in a way that was ennobling. So while metta is a process of sensitizing ourselves to the world we live in with all of its joy and sorrow, compassion is concerned with our response to the sorrow and the pain and illuminated through mindfulness and befriended by metta. So one of the books that we're studying this practice period is by Christina Feldman. That's the book called The Boundless Hearts. That's our main text. And in her book, On the Brahma Vihara, she writes, In the early teachings of Buddhism, compassion has two primary interdependent elements. The first of these is described in Pali as anukampa. And it is the profound empathy the trembling, quivering of the heart in the face of suffering or pain wherever it is met, inwardly or outwardly.

[10:21]

One who develops his capacity for empathy is described as one who pulsates with compassion or who can truly listen to the cries of the world. Empathy is the forerunner of the second aspect of compassion. The Pali word is Karuna, which describes the engaged dynamic of responsiveness, the translating of empathy and understanding into our thoughts, words, and action. Karuna is concerned with embodiment, the courageous engagement with all, with the small and large manifestations of pain and suffering we inevitably meet. It is the commitment to healing suffering when it can be healed, uprooting causes of suffering when they can be uprooted, and steadfastly present in the face of pain and sorrow that have no end. So again here, Christina Feldman is pointing to empathy and responsiveness coming together.

[11:31]

That is what compassion consists of. The thing is, our typical reaction whenever we experience suffering is to avert, to turn away. Compassion is an antidote to aversion. And aversion is traditionally taught as one of the three poisons, one of the causes of suffering. And so by cultivating compassion, we set the intention to care for the suffering of others and ourselves rather than pushing it away. Compassion is a request. It's a call. It's an intention to turn towards what is most difficult for us. It goes against our normal human tendency, which is, in most cases, to fight, flight, or flee. Instead it says, turn towards mitas. Be with it. Acknowledge it. Maybe even welcome it in some way.

[12:33]

In English, the word compassion derives from the Latin compassion, which means to suffer with another. Suffer with. To feel the pain or disease or whatever it is that they are feeling. So compassion refers to a deep awareness or empathetic resonance of the suffering of another coupled with their wish to relieve it. So... Empathy and responsiveness, again, is what makes compassion, compassion. And I don't know if you've ever considered, well, what is empathy for you? How do you know empathy? How would you define empathy? And one description of empathy I found was the capacity to identify one's own feelings and needs with those of another person. The capacity to identify one's own feelings and needs with those of another person. So empathy says, just as I suffer, so do all beings suffer.

[13:42]

As all beings suffer, so do I. So when we feel empathy, we vicariously enter into another person's experience and emotions. We begin to embody their particular experience in some way. I recently came across an article about a young medical doctor, and his name is Joel Salinas, and he has a condition called mirror-touch synesthesia. I have verbal dyslexia sometimes, so words don't come out, so please bear with me. Synesthesia. And so mirror touch synesthesia is a rare condition which causes individuals to experience a similar sensation in the same part of their body, such as touch, that another person feels. For example, someone with this condition were to observe someone touching their cheek, they would feel the same sensation on their own cheek.

[14:54]

And I read that people with mirror-touch synesthesia have higher levels of affective and pain empathy than no's without the condition. They have more empathy regarding pain, and they're affected by it more. However, their cognitive empathy, their ability to understand the suffering of the person, the emotional understanding of the pain, may differ from person to person. So the theory is that mirror touch synesthesia may be an exaggerated form of a process that all of our brains have, right? There's something that you might have heard of, mirror neurons. Basically, they're neurons in the way that we're wired. Sometimes they're called monkey see, monkey do neurons. You see another person and you basically do the same thing that they do. And you see this in the animal kingdom, particularly with monkeys. And so this condition is an exaggerated version of that.

[16:02]

And so when Dr. Salinas sees another person feel something, he visually feels it too. And he says that his condition actually makes him a better doctor because he literally feels what the patient feels, but he also can be more present with their experience. He can better diagnose them. and also offer them more nuanced and effective treatment protocols, right? He knows in his own body what's going on for the other person, right? That'd be pretty intense. Could you imagine walking around in your life with that particular condition where you felt everything everyone else was feeling somehow just by looking at them? So empathy has its good side, right? it opens us up beyond our self-centeredness and our limited perspective. It's not just me. So it widens our sense of reality and allows me, in this case, to consider another's point of view in some way.

[17:12]

And when I can do so, I can make deeper connections with other people. Because I'm better able to understand their needs. and I can respond to those needs in some way. But empathy can also have a downside. What could be the downside of empathy? Particularly if it's not tempered with wisdom and equanimity. For example, research suggests that empathy can lead to increased bias. This is because we tend to Identify through empathy with those who are closest to us and those who are most like us. And so in an argument, for example, we're going to take the side of the person who we feel is most like us and we're most empathetic with. And we see this in the case of, for example, religion, politics, sometimes sports teams.

[18:22]

I see this other person's perspective. This is the only perspective. It's the right perspective. And in order to make that right, we have to vilify or make other or wrong in some way the other person's perspective. We have to shut down our capacity to empathize with someone who doesn't share our particular view in some way. And what does that usually lead to? Problems of some sort, right? Conflict. So empathy without wisdom can lead to idiocy and cruelty. Now, each of the Brahmaviharas has what is called a far and a near enemy. The far enemy is the exact opposite of the heart attitude that we want to cultivate. And the near enemy is the quality which superficially resembles the heart attitude, but is in fact more subtly in opposition to it.

[19:30]

Does that make sense? So, in the case of compassion, the far enemy is cruelty, which is actively wishing another person to experience suffering. Anyone ever do that? Oh, come on, confess, right? I'm sure every night you watch the news, there's some undertone, right? So cruelty is taking the false notion of being a separate self to a devastating conclusion. I am so separate from you, I want you to disappear in some way. And Alan Wallace, again, one of the Tibetan scholars that we're reading for this practice period, describes cruelty as a deeply delusional state of mind. Because it not only causes pain, but it's painful to ourselves whenever we are cruel to others.

[20:33]

And that's something that I don't think we actually take in. When we're cruel to others, it's actually injurious to ourselves. You might want to reflect, how is that the case? Right? At times I've kind of fantasized if I was God for a day, just one day, right? I think the number one thing that I would do is basically instigate a situation where each person would feel whatever pain they cause another person. So any pain I cause another person, I would feel that myself. If I think that was the case, if that were to happen, I think the world would change overnight. We'd be an instantly kinder, more compassionate, loving, supportive planet, being, culture, society. Who knows if I will be God.

[21:40]

We'll see. The near enemy of compassion is grief. despair, sadness, and pity. So now, when we open our hearts to suffering, you go out into the world with an open heart, and you start looking around, and what are you going to see? If you walk down Market Street, what are the first things you're going to see? You're going to see some suffering, in myriad forms, some more obvious than others. We're going to see homelessness, we're going to see economic inequality, myriad forms of oppression, and we keep looking, we see hunger and war, right? And if we keep our eyes open and keep taking all this suffering in, there's going to be probably some point in which we experience great despair. What can I possibly do about all this suffering? I need a sense of hopelessness that's going to come up. But the thing is, despair is not compassion.

[22:43]

And maybe this is what actually blocks our compassion. We're afraid that if we were really to open ourselves to suffering, even the suffering of one person, even to our own suffering, maybe especially to our own suffering, we wouldn't be able to stand it. We wouldn't be able to bear it. And so we're afraid we would start feeling the things that are completely hopeless. We would feel our own helplessness in some way. And in doing so, we'd be plunged into despair and depression. I don't know if you're familiar with the story of Kisukatami. It's one of the more famous ones in Buddhism. and asked if anyone could help her bring him back to life.

[23:58]

Her sorrow was so great that many thought she had lost her mind. An old man told her to see the Buddha. And the Buddha told her that he could bring back the child, bring the child back to life, if she could find white mustard seeds from a family where no one had died. She desperately went from house to house, but to her disappointment, she could not find a house that had not suffered the death of one family member. Finally, the realization struck her that there is no house free from mortality. So she returned to the Buddha, who comforted her, and preached to her the truth of the Dharma, which included the Four Noble Truths, and the truth that all conditioned things are impermanent. Her understanding of this truth resolved her grief and gave rise instead to compassion, a compassion based on the recognition that all beings suffer.

[25:13]

And with suffering came the wish to alleviate suffering. suffering and the wish to alleviate suffering arise together. And so due to the compassions, the Buddhist compassionately sharing the Dharma with Kisukatomi, she woke up and became an arhat. Mayana Buddhism calls us to open beyond our condition-limited perspective to hear all the cries of the world. Not only the cries of those who we love and feel affinity with, but also those people to whom we have aversion. Do you think it's possible to feel the cries of those you have aversion to? This is pretty challenging. Given our particular self-centeredness and our tendency to have empathy for those we identify with,

[26:20]

But what would it look like to expand our circle of concern, to hold all beings in our hearts? Perhaps our fear is that we will then abandon what's most important to us or our values if we do so. But my experience is that this is not what's going to happen. Compassion for all beings does not render one sense of right or wrong meaningless. One can still take a stand for the sake of non-harm, for example. You can still advocate for those who suffer injustices as well as even care for those with whom we disagree with or who are the cause of harm and suffering. So empathy for those who suffer does not erase or negate compassion for those who hurt others.

[27:22]

It only widens our understanding and our capacity to be with all beings. Now, of course, this is not to say that true compassion isn't challenging. In my experience, it's actually very hard to have compassion for people I disagree with strongly. I recently came across an example in which the story about a man named Arno Michaelis who is the founder of one of the largest white supremacist groups in the world. And he admits to severely beating people because of the color of their skin. And he said that when he was called a racist, his anger, his hatred only grew. And he reacted with greater intensity, becoming even more violent. The confrontational approach failed with him again and again. But when he was met with compassion, he softened. And he tells the following story about how compassion transformed him.

[28:27]

He says, One time I was greeted by a black lady at a McDonald's cash register with a smile as warm and unconditional as the sun. When she noticed the swastika tattoo on my finger, she said, I know that's not who you are. And he described himself as powerless against such compassion. Michaelis went on to found a group called Life After Hate, which through compassionate witness, rather than harsh judgments, helps people to abandon white supremacist groups and find a healing path. So when compassion listens deeply, and looks deeply and sees beyond the surface words and representation to see the Buddha, the goodness in all beings, and calls that forth, then true transformation can happen.

[29:40]

Each of us has that capacity when we meet others to offer that. I think another near enemy of compassion is something that Chögyam Chöngpa often spoke of as idiot compassion. So while compassion is wishing that all beings be free of suffering, idiot compassion is avoiding conflict, letting people walk all over you, not challenging people when they actually need to be challenged. It's kind of compassion that's being nice or being good. idiot compassion actually lacks courage and intelligence. Because it's not informed by a discerning wisdom. Because it's not informed by wisdom, it ends up causing pain. Both for ourselves and for others. Because we truly don't understand what's needed in the moment for mutual care and respect. And I think...

[30:43]

You know, we've been trying to, at Zen Center, talk about giving each other more feedback. And I think we're a little bit feedback-averse here. We're a little afraid to give each other feedback, right? Because we think, oh, that won't be so compassionate if we tell people how their behavior is impacting us. But there's a way of doing it that actually comes from a place of wanting to connect. A place of kindness. A place that says, I want to be authentically... with you and share the experience of the impact you have on me so that we can stay connected and be able to meet each other as fully as possible. Rather than just kind of turning away and going in silence, oh, okay, whatever. So while we're encouraged to actively practice compassion towards others, In Buddhism, it's equally important to practice compassion with ourselves because to draw an artificial distinction between self and others misrepresents our essential interconnectedness.

[31:52]

Pema Chodron, many of you may know, says that in order to have compassion for others, we have to have compassion for ourselves. In particular, to care about other people who are angry, fearful, jealous, overcome by addictions of all kinds, arrogant, proud, miserly, selfish, mean, you name it. To have compassion and care for these people means not to run from the pain of finding these things in ourselves. In fact, one's whole attitude toward pain can change. Instead of fending it off and hiding from it, one can open one's heart and and allow oneself to feel that pain, feel it as something that will soften and purify us and make us far more loving and kind. Don't you just love Pema Chodron? So when I think of self-compassion, one of the things that comes up for me is self-compassion with my inner critic.

[33:02]

And I spoke last week a little bit about my inner critic and how it kind of undermines us in some way, criticizes us. And one of the things that my inner critic says to me at certain times is, you're stupid. You're stupid. And I know where this comes from. It comes from my father, and whose patent criticism of my brother and I was, don't be so stupid. And after my father died, I was actually... It was the year that I came to Zen Center. It's one of the reasons I came to Zen Center. I learned from my uncle that my father had felt deep shame because he hadn't finished the eighth grade and that he never really learned how to read. And he also had learning disabilities, which he tried to hide from others as an adult. And he actually lost the job because when they went to computers,

[34:05]

they found out that he actually couldn't read and therefore couldn't learn how to do the computers. He was a machinist, so he could learn how to handle machines watching others, but when it came to having to read the manual, he couldn't do it, and so he had to quit his job. So only when I heard this from my uncle did I understand the love on my father's shame and the causal conditions that led him to act and say the things that he said to me, right? And because I understood, I could begin to forgive him for the way he was. I could begin to actually feel real empathy and compassion for his experience. And also begin to relate to myself with greater self-compassion whenever I feel intellectually inadequate. In his book, The Essence of the Heart Sutra,

[35:05]

I think I'm focusing on a lot of Tibetan practitioners, though. It might be your fault. His Holiness the Dalai Lama wrote, According to Buddhism, compassion is an aspiration, a state of mind wanting others to be free from suffering. It's not passive. It's not empathy alone, but rather empathetic altruism that actively strives to free others from suffering. Genuine compassion must have both wisdom That is to say, one must understand the nature of suffering from which we wish to free ourselves, and one must experience deep intimacy and empathy with other sentient beings. So in other words, Buddhism is saying that we can't truly work to alleviate suffering until we understand the nature of suffering, until we understand the root of suffering. And the Buddha said that he taught suffering and the sensation of suffering.

[36:12]

That was his, many would say, his primary teaching. And the understanding at the root of compassion is the one that deeply understands what's called the three marks of existence. Impermanence, unsatisfactoriness or dukkha or dis-ease, and non-self. And it's our relationship to these three marks, to these truths or realities of existence, that determines the degree to which we suffer. If we can turn and meet these truths, then we will have less suffering. The more we resist or avert, the more suffering we're going to experience. At the heart of compassion lies the Bodhisattva vow. the vow to free all beings of suffering and to remove the causes of suffering.

[37:12]

And those of you who are familiar with the Heart Sutra, which we chant here every day, we know that Avalokiteshvara, the speaker in the Sutra, is the bodhisattva of compassion. However, it is also Avalokiteshvara who teaches us that all dharmas, all phenomenons, are marked with emptiness. So the Heart Sutra says they do not appear, they do not disappear. Both suffering and the end of suffering are empty. And this is the great secret of compassion. It's what makes a wide and deep feeling for the suffering of other people and for all of us collectively sustainable. It's how we can bear the suffering. Avalokiteshvara sees the pain of the world and hears the cries of the world. And yet she remains serene because her hearing and her vision are unimpeded by the perception of objects as limited or bound.

[38:26]

Seeing the balanced quality of all phenomenon, she knows that there are no eyes. no ears, no nose, no object of sight, no object of sound, nothing to impede the free flow of love. Even suffering does not impede it. The sutra says no suffering, no origination of suffering, no cessation of suffering, and no path to the sensation of suffering. Basically emptying the Four Noble Truths. Thus, Avalokita's heart is wide open and she feels all the suffering. But she understands that it's okay because everything is lightened by and sustained by emptiness. This is the wisdom that makes the unbearable bearable and the pain we feel love.

[39:34]

becomes an all-embracing love, a love that enables even suffering to be peace. Thus, it's the wisdom of Prajna Parapitta, the wisdom that sees there are ultimately no separate beings that suffer, that illuminates the heart of the Bodhisattva. So these Brahma Viharas that we are studying are considered... boundless states of love. And Prajna Paramita, the wisdom beyond wisdom, is the essence of true love, a love that is free of attachment and clinging and delusion. In the end, love is the only relationship to life that makes sense. It is love that resolves our sense of unease, helplessness, and separation. It's the love of everything that's beautiful and all the blessings we receive.

[40:39]

And it's a love in the face of grief and loss. It's the love that can tolerate discomfort and disagreements. It's a love that cares and responds. And it's a love that allows us to keep our hearts open even in the midst of great human suffering. In the end, it's compassion that makes suffering meaningful and ennobling. Thank you for your kind, perhaps compassionate listening. Good evening. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge. And this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[41:43]

May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[41:46]

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