What We Lose Everything Without

I want to write a few lines about something that, if we have lost it, makes it irrelevant how long or how hard we search: without it, we will never find love anywhere. If we recover it, love itself will come searching for us and find us wherever we are.

Something that, if we have forgotten it somewhere along the course of life, means that not only will love lose the path to our home, but we will never experience genuine happiness and will remain forever imprisoned within a painful limitation.

Confucius once told his students: “Compassion, wisdom and courage are the three fundamental qualities of a great human being.” Of these, wisdom and courage connect our search with truth, but it is compassion that connects us along this path to other human beings, to nature and to other living creatures, and makes us one with the world.

Compassion is a deep understanding of the truth of the inner connectedness of human beings with one another and with the world. To the extent that we are emptied of it, we become more alone and more severed from the world.

Compassion is not giving to those in need. It is not a relationship between the fulfiller of needs and the needy. Compassion is not forgiveness bestowed from a position of power upon the weak or the condemned. Compassion is not even imagining oneself as the person who reduces the suffering of others and of the world. A heart filled with compassion sees itself in equality and connectedness with all human beings and with the world, not in the position of the one who knows, possesses, gives, bestows or forgives.

Some time ago I read that a group of Buddhist monks had formed a human chain in Thailand to prevent the destruction of a forest. Reading this news, it was difficult to avoid the painful question: what if priests, clerics and religious functionaries one day did the same?

Perhaps if there had not been such an ego-centred and world-severed interpretation of the human being as the noblest of creation. Perhaps if we could place compassion at the heart of our faith and make our ideal not going to heaven but making our own soul into heaven, we would understand that compassion and kindness are the path into the heaven of the human soul. Compassion is the power and courage to go beyond our own suffering in order to see and receive the suffering of others and to try to reduce the pain and affliction of the world. The person emptied of compassion never goes beyond ego and separateness.

The Persian word mehrabāni, kindness, is a distinctive word because in Persian its meaning is active rather than merely an abstract noun; its substance belongs not simply to feeling but to action. Mehrabāni is a compound built from mehr and bān. Mehr signifies both the sun and love, while bān means guarding or protecting. In Persian, kindness can therefore be understood as guarding love and the light of truth. At the foundations of this culture, the human being is that embodied light—akhui hastumand—the manifestation of divine light, shidān-shid / the Light of Lights, coming from it and moving toward it. The ideal of human presence in the world is to guard that light. In this sense, mehrabāni can be interpreted as a true meaning of human presence in the world.

Within such a vision, a kind person is not someone who merely feels sensitivity toward human beings and the world in the heart; that feeling must become action. Many people imagine that possessing a harmless nature and a gentle heart is the same as kindness. Aversion to cruelty is not the same as kindness. Living like a rabbit is not kindness, because only one who rises and acts to protect light and love in the world can be a guardian of light and love. Such a heart cannot be empty of courage and readiness to act.

Many people regard themselves as kind because they interpret their tender-heartedness and pity for others as kindness. Yet if you look deeply into this pity, you may find fear and pity for the self. That tender-heartedness is sometimes filled with a fear that begins with the thought: let me help others and give to them, so that if I too one day become vulnerable, others will help me. Such pity for oneself is nothing but a diminished form of self-centredness. If our compassion and kindness are rooted in pity for ourselves, somewhere in the depths of our being we will always carry a sense of fear and hostility. Such an understanding of compassion is not kindness.

Kindness and compassion are neither overlooking the wrongs of others nor surrendering to what we know inwardly is not right. A person who sees wrongdoing and merely passes over it is not compassionate toward the wrongdoer. Parents who, in the name of love, surrender to their child’s narrower understanding, immaturity or lack of knowledge are not being compassionate or kind to the child. There is a great difference between regarding someone as “important” and recognising “value” in them. These two are fundamentally not the same: the first is directed toward the person as they presently are; the second toward the person as they can and should become.