Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Diana Taylor, a Buddhist nun and psychotherapist, explores how to integrate rational thinking and compassion in this 46-minute introduction to a weekend retreat workshop. Drawing on her dual background, she examines the destructive and positive aspects of both emotion and rationality, arguing that wisdom and compassion—not emotionality—are the Buddhist goals. She walks through five Buddhist wisdoms (emptiness, discriminating wisdom, mirror-like awareness, equality, and all-accomplishing wisdom), compares them with psychological approaches to self and ego, and distinguishes self-confidence from self-grasping. She then outlines practical methods for development: the six powers (hearing, thinking, mindfulness, introspection, effort, familiarity) and meditation as tools for training the mind toward compassion rather than destructive emotion. Pitched at a general audience with interest in both psychology and Buddhism.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 Ret..mp3
UUID: 9a0b2902-6f44-403e-b7a9-996758b658cf
Teacher: Diana Taylor
Collection: Retreat (Diana Taylor)
Date: 1997 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.8 minutes
Words: ~6,539
Psychology, do some research. She completed her PhD about the time when she was introduced to Buddhism and she has been working as a psychologist for a number of years now. She has got three children and a number of grandchildren and so she brings a life of rich and varied experience to her Buddhist studies. She’s been ordained as a nun for two years after having been interested in Buddhism for about twenty years. She’s going to give a weekend workshop this Saturday and Sunday at Buddha House.
And if anybody’s interested in doing that you can still register at the end of this talk. If you are new to Buddha House you might also want to take a copy of the newsletter that’s available at the back. And you can put your name down on the list and you will get a free copy of the newsletter for a few months. I’d also just like to bring your attention to a fundraising evening which is a showing of the film ‘Kundun’. You can buy tickets for that if you wish.
And the other thing that I would like to do just as a bit of research about our publicity at Buddha House is to find out how you came to know about this talk tonight. So if you wouldn’t mind just indicate if you found out about this talk through the Buddha House newsletter or Buddha House. Did anybody find out about it through a poster? In the Messenger? Did anybody else see it in the Messenger?
Or the Advertiser? Or just through a friend? Thank you very much for that. Okay so I would like to hand over to Diana.
That’s better, isn’t it? So just to say what I was saying before, I’d like to welcome you all here this evening and to say thank you to the people at Buddha House for inviting me back. I lived in Adelaide for five years as a child, so it’s always a little bit like a homecoming to me to come back to Adelaide and to enjoy the friendships that I’ve developed here. Tonight, I want to make some sort of attempt to integrate my background as a psychotherapist with my background as a Buddhist nun. So I’m going to ask you to do some hard thinking in this.
But before I get you into that, I want to point out that when we do the workshop on Saturday and Sunday, that design is a workshop for people who need to have a good rest for the weekend and to rejuvenate themselves. So if you work hard tonight, then be assured you can get a rest on Saturday and Sunday. The topic integrating the rational and the compassionate minds, I realized when I was talking to Judy before that maybe the topic has arisen from my own background because when I was in my forties, science was the big thing. And the atomic bomb was this wonderful thing which scientific thinking and mankind’s power had put together. And we simply didn’t realize at the time, we, being the general public, simply didn’t realize the incredible destructive repercussions which were going to come from unleashing nuclear energy in that way.
And in my own life, of course, I’ve had to look at this rational mind, which was so predominant in myself back then, and integrate it with something a bit softer. And this is also true of us as a society, that very strong rational scientific model which was around in the late fifties is something which has been gradually modified by different theoretical backgrounds. The emphasis on rationality has come through from our education and is still present in terms of things like economic rationalism. And again, with economic rationalism, we can see very clearly that the absence of compassion leads us to a point where the rationalism becomes self-destructive and destroys its own agenda in the long run. So we do need something to develop compassion within our lives.
But the difficulty with developing compassion has been an attitude about emotion and emotionality, which has been a derogatory attitude. That is that if you are an emotional person, then you’re wishy-washy with your thinking, and you can’t see clearly, and you don’t know what you’re doing, and you’re probably a woman into the bargain. So we need to look at all these terms and say, alright, what is it that’s going on here? Because there is a quality of emotionality which certainly is destructive, and anybody who’s worked in the helping professions will know how destructive emotions can be. So there’s something which is destructive about emotions. There’s something which is positive about emotions. And what I’m trying to do this evening is to say, right, how do we move from one to the other? This is also true of rationality. There is something which is destructive about it, which is quite evident as soon as we start to look at it.
But there is also something which is very powerful and strong. So when we look at the powerful and strong aspect of rationality, then we tend to use the word wisdom. And when we look at the powerful and strong aspect of emotionality, then we tend to use the word compassion. And of course, wisdom and compassion are the fundamental aspects of the Buddhist teaching. So then how do we move from the one to the other?
To know this, first of all, we need to know what it is that we’re moving towards. So then we have to ask what is wisdom? So I was down at my home, which is down at Wilson’s Promontory in South Gippsland, and my son, who’s twenty-six, and his girlfriend were there. So I said, okay. What’s wisdom?
And his girlfriend thought, and she said, well, it’s something to do with age. When you’re older, you get wise. And I thought, that’s my gray hair. But I said, well, you don’t necessarily get wise with age. She said, no. It’s something to do with integrating your experience. Well, that’s fair enough. She was trying hard. So I looked at my son, and he said, wisdom is what I am. So I said, no. I wouldn’t accept that one. So he came up to me the next day and said, I’ve got a definition for wisdom. I said, okay. What is it? He said, well, wisdom means that if you’re wise, you don’t have to ask the question, what is wisdom?
That’s not the Buddhist definition of wisdom. You’ll be glad to know. The Buddhist definition of wisdom is that it is the ability to discriminate, specifically to discriminate dharmas. But if we take out the jargon a little bit, it simply means the ability to discriminate. But when we’re looking at this power of discrimination, we’re looking at something which we assume to be valid.
And we’re looking at that discrimination which does not exclude aspects of our experience that we find are a bit uncomfortable or throw our theories off the way and turn them upside down. So when we’re looking at wisdom from the Buddhist side, if I look at it from the tantric point of view, there are five different types of wisdom. And these different types of wisdom are quite important. And it’s very helpful to see these different aspects of wisdom and to think of them also in terms of psychotherapy. What is it that we’re trying to help people move towards in the process of therapy?
So the first of these is the wisdom realizing emptiness. This is starting at the top and moving down in this case. I’m not going into the teachings on emptiness. I haven’t experienced it yet. I doubt if I will in this lifetime at the rate I’m going, but maybe in some future lifetime.
But I’ll leave the lamas to explain that one some more. The second one is the discriminating wisdom that I’ve already mentioned, which is this ability to separate things out in our mind and to see how things work and how things function. So it’s very similar, in fact, to scientific thought. The third one is the mirror-like wisdom. Mirror-like wisdom is that quality of things being freed from our assumptions about them.
It’s the ability to simply sit and be aware if you like. It’s that wisdom which arises from being mindful is another way to put it, that very simple mindfulness. So when you’re doing meditations where you’re simply being aware of your breath, then that is—there is no emotion involved in this mirror-like wisdom. It’s a very simple awareness, which is not making any judgments whatsoever. So it’s quite different from discriminating wisdom.
Then there is the wisdom of equality, which is that wisdom which doesn’t put one thing over and above another thing. And this is particularly important when we’re looking at our relationships with people. So we’re looking particularly at the equality of people, not equality in the sense of everybody being the same in their characteristics, but everybody being the same in the sense that we all want relief from suffering, and we’re all seeking happiness. In that sense, we’re all the same. And the wisdom of equality is the ability to see how each person that we come into contact with, how every sentient being that we come into contact with has the same need, same desire to be relieved from suffering, the same desire to have some sort of quality of permanent happiness.
The wisdom of equality. And the fifth one is the all-accomplishing wisdom, which is the ability to act from the basis of those other wisdoms. The ability to see what is going to be appropriate for each individual person so that they are relieved from their suffering so they do achieve happiness. And the ideal therapist, of course, has this all-accomplishing wisdom. But it’s not so easy to get.
You have to be a very high Bodhisattva to get there or a Buddha. But it’s an ideal that we can move towards. And it’s certainly very different from the attitudes that you see in most writings about psychotherapy, where there’s a stepping back from making definitive statements about this is what the purpose of therapy is and this is where it’s going, into the therapist being a co-walker, if you like, somebody who walks with the client. So here from a Buddhist perspective, I’m now starting to say, okay, there are certain specific things which we need to move towards in terms of therapy. On the other hand, the movement within therapy to walk with the client also has something which is very valid.
There’s a few nodding heads there so people know what I’m talking about. The reason we need to walk with our clients in that particular sense is because we haven’t developed yet these five wisdoms. We’re in the process of developing them. And sometimes our clients have developed one of these to a greater extent than we have. In that sense, we need to walk with our clients and see what it is that’s unfolding.
But if we have no perspective about where we’re going, then we’re stuck as the clients are in that sense. So one of the things I want to point out tonight in terms of this relationship between Buddhism and psychotherapy, that Buddhism is quite specific about the therapeutic direction. We certainly need as psychotherapists to step away from utilizing theories, which are not necessarily valid in the first place, but utilizing them in a way which does not take the individuality of the client into account. If we had this all-accomplishing wisdom, we wouldn’t do that in any case. But in the process of developing towards these sorts of wisdoms, then we have some sort of insight as to where this path that we are walking with a person, which direction this path is trying to go, where it is trying to take us.
If I go back to these definitions of wisdom, none of them say anything about emotion, nor do they actually specifically say anything about compassion. We have the wisdom realizing emptiness. We have discriminating wisdom, which in itself is not compassion. Mirror-like wisdom, the wisdom of equality, and the all-accomplishing wisdom. The all-accomplishing wisdom is the action of compassion, but it’s not a compassionate mind.
And certainly, none of those five wisdoms have any sense of emotionality that goes with them. So there is something which happens with our emotions which is destructive. There’s something which happens with our emotions which leads us towards compassion. There’s something within our rationality which is destructive. There’s something within our rationality which leads us towards wisdom.
So always the question is, what is it that takes us from the one which is destructive into the other which is positive? This is where we start getting into the basics of the Buddhist Dharma teachings. Compassion is the intention to relieve people from suffering. That’s the definition of compassion. Compassion in itself is not an emotion.
It might arise from an emotion, but it’s not in itself an emotion. It’s an intention. It’s a motivation. And the motivation is to relieve people from suffering. So again, we’ve got this separation out of the compassion on the one side and the emotions on the other side.
And so it begins to look as though emotions again have absolutely nothing to do with Buddhism at all, which a lot of people think that it’s a philosophy and a religion which is very cold and which is very distant. So we then need to say, right, what is it that we’re talking about when we talk about emotions? We need to clarify this and to come to some sort of definition. It was interesting that when I looked up my philosophy dictionary, my psychology dictionaries when I was preparing this, they had definitions for emotions, but they didn’t have any definition for wisdom either of them. Emotion is normally defined as a visceral or a bodily response to a particular state of mind.
So an emotion has this quality of having a bodily reaction, but it’s also a state of mind. If we look at Freud’s definition of an emotion, he defined it as something which was instinctual. In other words, it’s something which is inevitable and which is generated externally by a conflict. The conflict is in the mind, but the generation of the conflict is something external. So within psychoanalysis, the conflict arises from society wanting something other than what is good for the self.
And since these emotions are instinctual, and he said they’re instinctual because they had a biological basis, therefore, they absolutely must be expressed. And if they’re not expressed, then people are dammed up and neurotic and their minds are distorted and so on and so forth. And this has had a very profound impact on a lot of psychological work since then, that there’s this idea that emotions absolutely must be expressed, and if they’re not expressed, then something has gone wrong. On the other hand, here I’m talking about Buddhism and saying the end result of Buddhism is something which doesn’t have emotion, and not even compassion has emotion. So again, we’ve got a discrepancy between the one and the other.
If I go to Karen Horney, who was one of the post-Freudian analysts who did a lot of very useful work in human behavior and the theories behind human behavior and softened up a lot of what Freud said. She said that emotions arise from conflict between an idealized self and a real self. So the idealized self is something that we want to be, and the real self is something else. So what Karen Horney did was to take the conflict instead of being outside between self and society, it now became something which is more internalized between one part of the self and another part of the self. So we have this battle between the two parts of the self.
But again, the implication is that these emotions must be expressed. Otherwise, the battle continues. So from looking at the history of psychology, we have these conflicts coming through, which are either external causes or internal causes. If I look at something as simple as the rational emotive therapies, which some of you know what I’m talking about there, where it’s just a matter of getting a person to look at their thinking and seeing what is illogical about it. Even in RET, they talk about bad emotions which block goals, and good emotions which further goals.
So the emotions, again, are taken as something absolute and something fundamental and not questioned. But at least with RET, we have a differentiation between good emotions and bad emotions. So bad emotions are blocking the goals, good emotions are furthering the goals, but the question about what those goals are is not dealt with. What the goals are is left up to the therapist and or the client to determine. So there’s no absolute statement made about the goals.
As soon as we have some sort of goals, with that, we then have a value judgment. There’s good and bad. There are good goals and there are bad goals. There’s a value judgment involved. When there’s a value judgment involved, then we start to get an emotional response.
And the emotional response goes along the lines, this is a good goal, therefore I want it. Therefore, if I’m getting it, I feel good. That’s where we get our good feelings from. It’s Freud’s pleasure principle. If I’m not getting what I want, then I feel bad.
That’s the pain principle. So as soon as we start differentiating between good and bad without having some sort of concept about what this good and bad is, we start creating value judgments, and these value judgments in themselves create emotions. And that was Jung’s definition of emotion, simply the outcome of a value judgment. So we’re getting a little bit further, but then we need to say, alright, well, what are these goals that we’re moving towards?
And most of these goals are defined in terms of the self, and in terms of self-esteem, strong self-identity. Those sorts of words. And on the other side we have the Buddhist idea of altruism and the concept of attachment. So here again, we’re getting apparent discrepancies coming through. So on the one hand, psychotherapy is trying to move towards strengthening the self and developing a strong ego identity.
On the other hand, we’re trying to build up a sense of egolessness, of altruism, and of the notion of non-attachment. Attachment is very important because from the Buddhist perspective, attachment is the fundamental basis for our suffering. If as psychotherapists, we’re generating more attachment in people, then what we’re doing is, in fact, creating more suffering. And consequently, if we’ve got any ethical awareness at all, then we have to stop and say, right, what’s this about? So what is a good goal and what is a bad goal?
What is attachment? And what is this sense of identity that we keep talking about within psychotherapy? Now that sense of identity has had powerful positive aspects for people, both for therapists working with their clients and for the clients themselves. This idea of working with an ego identity and developing and strengthening the identity has been very important and very fruitful. So it’s not that that is wrong in itself, but that we have to stop and say, okay, what is important for a particular person at a particular point of time?
That’s part of the question. The other one is understanding the difference between having self-confidence and having self-grasping. So if we’re trying to move towards having a strong self-identity, a strong self-esteem is the other word. Self-esteem is really popular these days. If we want a strong self-esteem, then we’re actually looking at developing a quality of self-confidence.
So then we say, okay. So what’s this quality of self-confidence about? Self-confidence is simply knowing oneself. That’s all it is. It’s simply knowing oneself.
If we know ourselves and we know then what our skills are and we know clearly what our limitations are, then we act with a quality of confidence. We can say, okay, well I feel comfortable about sitting up here. I know I can talk. I’ll probably talk too long in any case, someone can hold me down if I do that.
I’m skilled at that. I have confidence in that. And I feel good when I do it. But if you ask me to play the piano, which I can do to some extent but to play in front of a group of people like this, I’d just go to pieces. I don’t have confidence in that and it’s not something I’m strongly skilled at either.
So by knowing myself, having self-awareness, then I have confidence in what I’m able to do. I know where I am limited and so if I sat down and tried to play a Chopin Nocturne for you and stuffed it up, I would simply laugh at myself. But that comes from self-awareness. When we’re talking about self-identity as therapists, we have to be very careful about this. When we’re talking about self-esteem, we have to be very careful about this.
That we’re looking at developing this quality of self-confidence and self-awareness in the people that we’re working with. Or if we’re in a state of chaos within our own lives and we’re trying to develop some sort of quality of self-esteem because we’ve read all the self-help books and this is the word they use. What is it that we’re trying to find? We’re trying to know ourselves and know how and where we can act. And we’re trying to know ourselves and know how and where we can’t act.
That’s all it is that we’re trying to do. If we’re trying to grasp at some idea of a real self, which is the words that Karen Horney actually used and it’s still very commonly used within psychology, that there’s this notion of a real self. And if I know this real self, then I’ll have my psychological balance. That’s a Jungian term. Jung said therapy is about helping a person to identify their psychological balance.
This psychological balance is similar to this idea of a real self. If we’re moving towards that, then we’re stuck. And therapy goes round and round in circles, and our search for happiness also goes round and round in circles because the more we try to find this real self, the more it disappears from us. And we say, okay, well, maybe I was meant to be an artist and not a scientist. So you go off and do art courses and that’s fine for the time being, but then you don’t become famous overnight in any case.
And you think, maybe I should be in the helping professions or doing something else or maybe I should be an engineer. So we move around and around trying to search for happiness because maybe I should be something. But it does go round and round in circles. And in a sense, that fruitless search which can sometimes result in therapy going on for years and years and not really getting anywhere except the therapist gets wealthy. It’s one way in which we’re investigating where is this self, which is what again, one of the basic aspects of Buddhism is saying, what is this self?
The self actually has no concrete reality. It is simply a construction of the mind. There is no self. So we go round and round in circles looking for that. There isn’t a real self.
So what are we looking for? We’re looking to know ourselves. To know ourselves, then we go back to these qualities of having things like the mirror-like wisdom, the wisdom of equality. These are the wisdoms which when we direct them towards ourselves, we begin to see who we are at this particular moment of time or who we are in the face of this particular relationship. It’s no longer a real self that we’re looking at, but the process and the movement within my own mind.
And where that movement happens to be going at this particular time. It’s not set in concrete anymore. But we use these wisdoms to identify that. And if we do that with a lot of emotional involvement, then we start to lose it. If I’m trying to be aware of myself, I need to sit very quietly with myself.
I need to simply observe the rising and the falling of the thoughts which are going on in my own mind. I need to observe how my mind is changing in a particular relationship. So a lot of the time when I’m doing ongoing work with people, it’s along these sorts of lines. Over and over again saying, what happened in this particular—let’s say somebody’s coming because their marriage is falling apart. What is it that happened as you were talking to your partner this week?
What happened to your mind as your partner reacted in this way? So simple observation, simple self-awareness. And as soon as the person gets angry because their partner was so irrational, whether or not the partner was irrational doesn’t matter. What does matter is the anger then takes that person away from that very simple self-awareness. And you know from your own experience, as soon as you start getting emotionally involved like that, you lose that awareness of yourself and therefore you lose the awareness of the other person.
So whether we’re talking about relationships in the sense of relationships with our friends and our partners and our parents and our children or whether we’re talking in a therapeutic relationship. We don’t need emotion in that sense. We do need what Carl Rogers called unconditional positive regard, which is a terrible term, which really means love. But it has the advantage of bringing out this sense of unconditionality, of feeling positive towards the person. The unconditionality is this mirror-like wisdom and the positive regard is this wisdom of equanimity. So as we begin to understand Buddhism, we can also begin to see how it fits into things which we sense from our own lives and from our own experience have a quality of wisdom in them.
So this unconditional positive regard, we’re talking about these types of wisdom. So I’ve diverted from what I’ve got here. I’ve got pages and pages of it. So the next thing I want to move on to is looking at how do we go about moving from the point of emotionality to the point of compassion, from the point of rationality to the point of wisdom. So first of all, I want to look at the methods which are available.
First of all, in terms of what’s called the six powers. Now these six powers are usually taught in the sense of developing single-pointed concentration. But it’s very interesting to go through them and look at them in terms of the way in which we begin to understand ourselves more effectively. First one of these is hearing. So that we begin to understand more about ourselves by reading books, by listening to lectures, by listening to what people tell us whether we like it or not.
So a lot of our self-awareness comes from this hearing. Second one is thinking, which is pretty self-evident. Third one is mindfulness, keeping one’s mind on the subject involved. Fourth one is introspection. Now what more important thing can you think of for self-awareness than introspection?
So these again are the qualities which we need to help our clients develop when we’re working within the helping professions. We need to develop them within our own minds as therapists. We need to develop them within our own minds just as ordinary people, let alone as therapists. You can see their profound common sense, good basic psychology. And considering it’s come from two and a half thousand years ago, I think that’s even more amazing.
So I’m up to hearing, thinking, mindfulness, introspection. The next one is effort and the last one is familiarity. Familiarity of course implies that something has been gone over and over and over again to develop this familiarity. And a lot of the process in therapy involves precisely that, over and over and over the same sort of behavior, the same sort of topic. Developing familiarity with the way the mind gets caught up in its various traps and then gradually disentangling the mind from those traps.
It’s very obvious if you’re trying to work with a phobic response and using a deconditioning process. Most of our behavior in fact is phobic responses but that’s another story. If you look at the deconditioning of a phobia where you help a person to look at the—my phobia is spiders, so I was talking—look at the spider up on the wall and you hear and think about this spider not so much as an object for all your anxieties but as a creature that simply wants to exist and is not likely to suddenly jump on you and kill you instantly. Developing mindfulness of this sudden upsurge of emotion which comes in a phobic response.
Developing introspection, developing awareness of when this is starting to come up so that you can start to deal with it before it becomes overwhelming. Using effort to work with it over and over again and finally developing this familiarity with the whole process so that you become familiar with the spider, become familiar with your own reaction to it. You can then have some control over the reaction and do something about it. It’s also very similar to the creative process. If you read the literature on creativity, where one way of describing creative processes in terms of four stages.
The first one is preparation. The second one is incubation, which is the introspection. So the preparation we can think of as hearing, thinking, and mindfulness. The illumination, which is the moment of insight, which comes with introspection, comes with familiarity. And then the last one is verification, which is also related to this familiarity aspect.
So the mind is the mind. It works in these sorts of ways. And we utilize them, and we might use different words within different frameworks. But it is the same mind and the methods therefore work, and they worked two thousand five hundred years ago, they work now. They worked for Western psychology. They worked within Buddhist psychology. So by going through this process, then the accumulation of facts, which is one aspect of developing knowledge, but it’s not wisdom. We accumulate the facts but with the introspection and with the effort and with the familiarity, then it does become wisdom. We are able to have more control. We are more discriminating.
Through the hearing, we learn to understand reality in more and more effective ways. And therefore, the basis on which we’re making our logical judgments becomes more profound. Then what was I up to? Bringing in the concept of meditation. Within meditation, again, here we have another method for dealing with the world, another method for developing more of this introspection, more of the sense of familiarity.
Meditation itself has two aspects to it. One is the aspect of—sorry, two requirements is what I wanted to say. One is developing a situation where there’s relaxation and quietness and peace so that the mind is not disturbed. And then on the other hand, there is that quality of giving some sort of direction to the mind. So that when we’re looking at developing the familiarity, developing the introspection and so on and so forth, we need to have a quality of quietness which is there and we need to have a direction there also.
So when we’re looking at dealing with the emotions and taking them out of being emotion and into being compassion, we need to have something which is quiet, which relaxes the mind, which gives a quality of peacefulness to the mind. And then we need to give a direction to the awareness which arises out of that. Now the need to express emotions, the positive aspect to that is related to these things which arise from a mind which has allowed itself to relax and to become calm and peaceful for a time. And then something arises up within that mind. So if you’ve sat down and tried to meditate, one of the first things that happens is that you start to become aware of all these thoughts running through your mind.
And you think that you’re absolutely hopeless at meditation because there’s so much running through your mind. In fact, it means that you’ve actually started on the meditation process at that particular point because you’re now aware of these things which arise in your mind. The process of being aware of what arises in your mind, you become aware of when you fall into these emotional responses. So meditation gives you the ability to do that. But also meditation practice, because it is founded within a whole Buddhist framework, gives a direction to the mind because it’s saying what we’re trying to do with meditation is to develop this wisdom and this compassion.
We’re trying to move out of the rationality into wisdom, out of the emotion into the compassion. So meditation is both a learning tool and a method for developing wisdom and compassion. The other thing that we need for developing compassion is to have our mind opened towards the thought of compassion. This is one of the key aspects. You can develop single-pointed concentration.
You can enter into a state of nirvana, but that doesn’t mean to say that you’ve developed compassion. And there are many stories about yogis who’ve been able to develop single-pointed concentration, who understand something about this notion of emptiness, who go into meditation states for very, very long periods of time, and when they wake up, they think, well, what have I done? What have I achieved all this time? Certainly, they’ve kept their minds still, but something is missing from that. So we need to have our minds opened by this quality of compassion.
You can read about this in the Lotus Sūtra, which is the Buddha’s teachings that the mind has to be open towards this notion of compassion. First, he taught the aspect of single-pointed concentration. Then, when the monks and the lay people had developed that, then he started to teach about compassion. He had to open their minds to this concept of compassion. What is compassion?
It’s about seeing that other creatures are suffering and wanting to do something to assist their suffering. So in the end, we can’t attain enlightenment, full enlightenment, unless we’ve developed this mind of compassion. The seeing of suffering and the seeing of joy is something where we do have an emotional response. This is where the emotional response is something which is powerful and which is positive. Emotional response is powerful and positive when it allows us to open our minds to the concept of compassion and to the motivation of compassion.
That’s when that becomes a good emotion. We need to be aware of all our emotions. I’m not saying that because the others are not good emotions that we shouldn’t be aware of. We certainly need to be aware of them, but we don’t want to keep on regenerating them. What we want to generate are those emotions which allow us to be fully aware of the suffering of another person and to be fully with them in their joy when they’re happy.
And sometimes when I look at my grandchildren, I think I could destroy these children very easily. And I could destroy them by simply not taking joy in what they’re delighted in. So if my seven-year-old granddaughter comes up with a painting that she’s brought home from school and I just said, that’s rubbish, take it away. You can imagine, you can feel how a little heart would crumple in the process. But if I take joy with her in that, I say, oh, Christie, that’s fantastic.
You must have loved doing that. Then she lights up. And so there is an intimacy which develops between herself and myself at that particular moment of taking joy in what has made her happy. Or when we’re with somebody who’s grieving, and you can see their pain and you can feel their pain and you’re there with them in their pain, not in that quality of emotion where you’re dragged down by it, but in that sense of being deeply aware of that person’s pain, of being with them at that particular moment. That is a very profound form of intimacy as well.
So the emotions that we want are those emotions which allow us to be with a person in their suffering, and to want to bring them out of their suffering. And those emotions which allow us to be with a person at their moment of joy. Those are the emotions which develop compassion. How do we develop that? To develop that, then we need the six perfections.
Six perfections—Buddhism is good at the sixes and the tens of that, and there’s all sorts of things that I’ve always got to write them down so I don’t forget them. The first one is simply morality. And that only means making sure that what we do doesn’t harm other people. So we develop compassion by trying not to harm. Second one is generosity.
That’s pretty self-evident too. That we develop this mind of compassion by actively giving. Whether we’re giving in the sense of material goods, whether we’re giving in the sense of sharing what wisdom we have acquired, or whether we’re giving in the sense of simply being with a person and giving our time.