Can Compassion Be Harmful?

Compassion is a hot topic these days. What was once relegated to conversations between saints and sadhus is now promoted in various secular arenas, including mindfulness meditation. Compassion has also been a large part of the growing conversations around racial and social justice in the United States and beyond. 

This is all good news, and it brings me joy to hear of compassion being proposed as a possible solution to complex world problems. Still, the variety and breadth of defining and implementing compassion can broaden. Moreover, when divorced from skillful understanding and wisdom, compassionate action is incomplete and may have unintended and possibly harmful consequences. 

Compassion can have various meanings; I will define it here based on the Buddhist practice of boundless compassion. Boundless compassion is expressed within the aspiration that all beings (including oneself) may be free from suffering and its causes. This aspiration is further supported and based on the practice of boundless equanimity. 

Boundless equanimity is the practice and cultivation of a genuinely unbiased attitude. Rather than valuing some over others or embodying a cold indifference, boundless equanimity aims to hold all others warmly and equally valuable to one another, whether they appear as friend, enemy, or stranger. 

Boundless equanimity is said to be indispensable as a preliminary for developing boundless compassion, as boundless compassion wishes all beings, regardless of status or personality, freedom from suffering and its causes. 

Upon reflection, we can see that, for the most part, we do not view others with such a vast and unbiased appreciation. Without deliberately developing boundless equanimity and compassion, most of us will default to preferring some over others. This automatically limits our compassion and leaves others more vulnerable. Worst case, our compassionate action devoid of equanimity has the potential to be harmful to those we've excluded from our compassionate scope. 

A classic example is killing a fish to feed a dog. We might see a hungry dog, which might arouse our natural compassion to relieve the dog of its hunger. But when equanimity is lacking in our hearts, we might be willing to cause suffering to the fish to ease the dog's hunger. 

If we reflect on this, we can see that these kinds of situations happen around us all of the time in big and small ways. We think we are doing the "right" thing, but the results only propagate the suffering circle. This is why cultivating a broader understanding of the causes of suffering is necessary to relieve it for ourselves and others effectively.

Buddhism does not hide or try to make light of suffering and its causes. This is similar to a doctor that has a genuine compassion for her patient and wishes to relieve the patient of his illness through diagnosing the problem and pointing out its causes so that they can be addressed swiftly. 

Buddhism follows this same methodical process but on a much grander scale. Here suffering is caused by birth, and birth is caused by karma (actions) accumulated while under afflictive emotions. So we first aim to reduce and then eliminate our afflictive emotions, the root affliction being the mistaken belief that our bodies, emotions, and thoughts represent an inherently fixed sense of self. 

Although momentarily this may seem far from the scope of our current beliefs and world views, nonetheless, through study, reflection, and meditation, we can begin to see the deeper mechanisms (and develop the wish to be free from them) that bind us to suffering. Moreover, from this more profound recognition, we can also develop genuine boundless equanimity and compassion for all beings, similarly tied to the same cycle of misperception and suffering. 

So in a way, we are not just talking about developing and acting on compassion, but wise compassion. This is a heart and mind that is warm, open to others, and yet understands the underlying causes of suffering for ourselves and others. In that way, one's actions can have a much broader impact.

So where to start? Within Buddhist philosophy, compassion is innate; it is something we are naturally born with. Therefore it is something we can train in and develop further. It all starts with cultivating a warm heart, growing a sense of tenderness, appreciation, and confidence in the basic goodness of ourselves and others. From there, we can begin to reflect that everyone wants happiness and wants to avoid suffering. This helps us to cultivate equanimity to those we find agreeable, disagreeable, and are indifferent towards. Then, through reflecting deeply on the mechanisms that bind us to our forms of dissatisfaction and suffering and seeing that we have the potential to be free from them, we can start to wish the same freedom for others.

Thus, we can refine our hearts, minds, and conduct. We can begin to put our time and energy into compassionate action based on the wisdom that takes the long view, seeking to relieve both suffering and its underlying causes.