Originally posted by AndrewPKYap:
You need to explain WHY "suffering motivates everything we
do"
and WHY "compassion motivates everything we do"
....As stated earlier, a
helpful concept here is compassion, a heart aspect of the practice
and reality related to kindness. You see, wherever there is
desire there is suffering, and wherever there is suffering there is
compassion, the desire for the end of suffering. You can
actually experience this. So obviously there is some really close
relationship between suffering, desire and compassion. This is
heavy but good stuff and worth investigating.
We might conceive of this as compassion having gotten caught in a
loop, the loop of the illusion of duality. This is sort of like a
dogs tail chasing itself. Pain and pleasure, suffering and
satisfaction always seem to be over there. Thus, when pleasant
sensations arise, there is a constant, compassionate, deluded
attempt to get over there to the other side of the imagined split.
This is fundamental attraction. You would think that we would just
stop imagining there is a split, but somehow that is not what
happens. We keep perpetuating the sense of a split even as we try
to bridge it, and so we suffer. When unpleasant sensations arise,
there is an attempt to get away from over there, to widen the
imagined split. This will never work, because it doesnt actually
exist, but the way we hold our minds as we try to get away from
that side is painful. When boring or unpleasant sensations arise,
there is the attempt to tune out all together and forget the whole
thing, to try to pretend that the sensations on the other side of
the split are not there. This is fundamental ignorance and it
perpetuates the process, as it is by ignoring aspects of our
sensate reality that the illusion of a split is created in the
first place....
--- Dharma Dan.
The description of dualistic 'compassion', i.e Desire.
You need to explain in terms of Buddhist philosophy of Emptiness
and Karma
Why Karma=>Interdependence leads to Compassion/Love
Karma is interdependent origination because that's the truth of
all things -- conditioned arising, interdependent
origination.
As I quoted:
"Karma just means that everything has a cause and
condition. The cause and condition of everything is what we call
karma. Karma is emptiness because it's nothing more than cause and
condition. Karma cause, karma result, karma condition. When we
really look into the study of the karma, there are, if I remember
correctly, six causes, four conditions, and five results. That's
how karma is explained. The karmic cause, condition and result are
all interrelated. That is the definition of
emptiness."
- Tai Situ Rinpoche
As for how karma leads to compassion, Karma does
not lead to compassion and love. As long as one is
caught up in causes and effects of karma, and creating new karma,
not liberated from it, there will be endless sufferings.
However, when one becomes aware of the interdependence, and does
not act unwisely/contrary to the truth of interdependence, then
there is compassion and does not create any negative unwholesome
karma. There is compassion that motives what we do, based on the
understanding of interdependence, causes and conditions. They are
not filtered by the process of self-identification/ego, and hence
no dualistic attraction nor aversion.
