Compassion Without Clinging

There’s a story in the Canon of a woman who lost her son. She’s crying in the charnel ground, and the Buddha comes along to give her some advice on how to think: “Before he was born, did you know where he came from?” “No.” “Now that he’s gone, do you know where he’s gone?” “No.” “Where is this person you’re grieving for?”

He’s advising her to develop some equanimity, to get some wisdom around the fact that she’s lost this unknown person who was, for a while, her son.

I was teaching this story one time to a group in Canada. Someone in the group complained, “Why is the Buddha imposing these shoulds on this poor woman who’s suffering?” As I told the person who asked that question, the Buddha isn’t imposing any shoulds on anybody. He’s giving some advice on what the woman can do so that she doesn’t have to suffer.

That’s how we have to take all of his advice: He’s not imposing shoulds to make us feel guilty. After all, who is he to be telling us what to do? He’s not our creator. He’s not our father. But he is an expert in knowing how not to suffer. There are people who don’t want to suffer. His advice is for them.

As in the case with ordinary everyday life: We live in families. There’s bound to be love and compassion for the other members of the family. We also know that the Buddha taught that clinging is suffering, and there’s a lot of clinging in our love, clinging in our compassion. So his advice would be that you continue to have compassion but learn how not to feed on the relationship to whatever extent you can. And to find another source for your happiness, a source that’s inside, so that when the inevitable parting comes, you’ll have something else to feed on.

Affection is something that’s normal. In fact, he actually encourages it in the monkhood. The younger monks are to regard their preceptor and their teachers as their fathers; the teachers and preceptors are to regard the younger monks as their sons. The younger monks are supposed to have a son’s normal affection for the father for the teacher, and the teacher is supposed to have the father’s normal affection for the son for the younger monk. That’s because it’s in the context of affection that the Dhamma is best transmitted, best taught. When there’s affection, then there’s a sense that when there’s criticism, it’s well-meaning. That way, both sides can learn.

That’s a good example to try in the family. As long as your affection is clear, then it’s a lot easier to train the child to have a sense of right and wrong, and to teach lessons that the child might not otherwise want to accept.

As in the Buddha’s teaching on how to develop a sense of fellowship: This is, of course, outside of the family as well, but it’s needed within the family, too.

 You’re generous with one another.

 You speak kindly to one another, which means that when you do have criticism, you try to give the criticism with respect. Think of the other person, how they would feel if the criticism was stated in front of somebody else, as opposed to just one-on-one. Do it one-on-one when you can. And make sure that even though you’re criticizing the other person, you’re doing it out of respect.

 The third quality is to help one another in ways that give genuine aid. In other words, you’re not just doing it to make points or to look good. You’re trying to figure out: “What does the other person really need? What can I provide that the other person really needs?” That kind of help goes to the heart.

 Finally, you treat one another consistent with your relative positions. In other words, there are certain duties that children have to their parents. They have to give special consideration to their parents that they don’t have to give to other adults—or anybody else, for that matter. And the parents should give special consideration to their children.

It’s in the context of this set of teachings that you want to think about your compassion and love for one another. And watch out for the pitfalls of love. Often, the word metta is translated as love, or loving kindness. But they have another word in Pali for love, pema. Metta means goodwill, a general wish for happiness. When you think about where happiness comes from, it comes from within. It comes from each person’s actions. So a parent’s duty to a child is to teach the child how to find happiness within him- or herself. That’s something you can do for anybody.

Of course, there are a lot of people out there who won’t accept your advice. They’ll actively resist it. Those are cases where you have to have equanimity. But goodwill is something that can be universal. This is why it’s a Brahma attitude, a brahmavihara. Brahmas have goodwill for everybody. Compassion for everybody. Empathetic joy for everybody. But also equanimity for everybody, when it’s called for.

Now, love is something else. Love is partial, as the Buddha points out. If there’s somebody you love, and person A comes along and mistreats the person you love, you’re going to hate person A. If person B comes along and treats the person you love well, then you’re going to love person B. This can be pretty arbitrary. If there’s somebody you hate, and person A comes along and mistreats that other person you hate, you’re going to like person A. Even though they’re mistreating somebody else, you’re going to like them. As for people who are good to the people you hate, you’re going to hate them. Again, that’s pretty arbitrary. Which means that love is unreliable, in the sense that it’s partial.

There’s some confusion around this matter because of that image in the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta about the mother caring for her child. Sometimes it’s translated that you should cherish all beings in the same way that a mother would cherish her only child. That’s not what the sutta is actually saying. It says you should protect your goodwill in the same way a mother would protect her only child.

Now, protecting your goodwill means that even in cases where people are misbehaving in really horrible ways, you still have to have goodwill for them. In a case like that, it doesn’t mean, “May they be happy, doing whatever they’re doing.” It means, “May they see the error of their ways and be willing to change.” That changes your relationship to them and changes your attitude about what you should be doing to them.

The Buddha gives the example of the bandits who’ve pinned you down. They’ve got a two-handled saw and they’re cutting you up into little pieces. He said that, in a case like that, if you have ill will for them, you’re not following his teachings. Again, he’s not imposing that attitude on you as a duty. But if you don’t want to suffer, you have to have goodwill for them. Why? Because if you have ill will, then when you die from being cut up into little pieces, you’re going to be seeking revenge. A life dedicated to revenge is not a good life. When you have goodwill, though, you lift the level of your mind. You save yourself. You don’t have any animosity to tie you down.

So the Buddha is basically giving us advice—in this world in which we live, where there are people we love and people we really dislike—on how not to suffer from our loves, how not to suffer from our dislikes—or at the very least, how to minimize our suffering. After all, it’s natural in the human realm that you’re going to like some people and not like others, but our loving and liking and disliking can really be a source of suffering if we don’t develop an independent source of happiness inside. When we do have this independent source—and this is what we’re working on as we meditate—then it’s easier to have compassion without feeding off the other person for whom we feel compassion.

There was a Dharma teacher one time who said that he didn’t want to ever live in a world where there weren’t people who were suffering because he wouldn’t be able to exercise his compassion. That’s compassion with a lot of ego and a lot of clinging. You’re clinging to your compassion. You’re clinging to your sense of yourself as the good person who has compassion for others. It’s not an act of kindness.

So you want to be clear about your independent source of happiness inside, so that you don’t have to feed on feelings like this. You don’t have to feed on your likes. You don’t have to feed on your dislikes. You don’t have to feed on your love. You don’t have to feed on your goodwill, your empathetic joy, your compassion. When you’ve got the mind independent like that, that’s a mind you can trust. And that’s a mind that doesn’t have to suffer.

So when you think about the Buddha’s shoulds, remember they’re not imposed on us. They’re ways in which the Buddha opens opportunities for us to live in this world of our likes and dislikes, where people are behaving well and other people are not behaving so well, where sometimes one person can go back and forth between behavior that you like, behavior you dislike: You can live in this world without having to suffer. That’s the Buddha’s gift to us.

So see his shoulds as a gift. After all, he said that that was the duty of a teacher, to give you a clear sense of what should and should not be done, for your own good. So take his advice in the spirit in which it’s offered.