Sustainable Compassion
Awakening Innate Love and Wisdom

Only our inmost goodness can sense so directly the essential purity and goodness of others. We let our buddha nature, our primordial capacity for wisdom and love know others in their buddha nature, their intrinsic worthiness and holiness. We learn to “see” beings from the depth of our heart, rather than through ego-grasping consciousness.

To connect with what others are going through we have to become vividly and newly aware of what we ourselves are going through, in all layers of our being. If we donʼt have awareness of our own layers of struggle and fear and suffering, we canʼt establish a clear connection to what others are experiencing. To truly empathize with others, we must be able to sense from within the layers of suffering we all share. Not just in terms of what we are currently feeling but also on more subtle levels: our personal struggles to hold on to what is dear, to maintain security, to avoid loss and death.

The path of enlightenment releases the mind from its constricted self-grasping to the infinite openness of its basic nature, which is pervaded by awareness and compassion like the open sky is pervaded by the rays of the sun. The path to enlightenment involves a fundamental reorientation, from identifying ourselves with the narrow, self-centered, and shifting thoughts of the moment to the all-inclusive, abiding nature of enlightened wisdom and love. This path is the opening of the mind to the vast expanse that includes all phenomena without discrimination and to the vast love that includes all beings without discrimination.

Compassion wishes beings to be free from their suffering. If we donʼt really believe that they can be free-that deep freedom, security, well-being, and joy is a real human possibility-our compassion tends to lapse into despair. Then it is not a liberating force for anyone. Compassion becomes a liberating force when we know the freedom that it wishes for beings to be real.

Wise compassion reverences the inner worth of every single person. But it also sees into the layers of their suffering, including the suffering they create for themselves and others through ego-centered thought and action. Wise compassion confirms the intrinsic dignity of persons even when it confronts the harmful ways that they think and act. Such compassion challenges people in the ego-centeredness while upholding their fundamental goodness.