From Daily Buddhist Verses
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http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=95256138
The Buddhist Path and Social Responsibility
JACK KORNFIELD
One of the most important questions we come to in spiritual
practice is how to reconcile service and responsible action with a
meditative life based on nonattachment, letting go, and coming to
understand the ultimate emptiness of all conditioned things. Do the
values that lead us to actively give, serve, and care for one
another differ from the values that lead us deep within ourselves
on a journey of liberation and awakening? To consider this
question, we must first learn to distinguish among four qualities
central to spiritual practice -love, compassion, sympathetic joy,
and equanimity -- and what might be called their "near enemies."
Near enemies may seem to be very close to these qualities and may
even be mistaken for them, but they are not fundamentally
alike.
The near enemy of love is attachment. Attachment masquerades as
love. It says, "I love this person as long as he or she doesn't
change. I'll love you if you'll love me back. I'll love that if it
will be the way I want it." This isn't love at all -- it is
attachment-and attachment is very different from love. Love allows,
honors, and appreciates; attachment grasps, demands, needs, and
aims to possess. Attachment offers love only to certain people; it
is exclusive. Love, in the sense that the Buddha used the word
metta is a universal, nondiscriminating feeling of caring and
connectedness, even toward those whom we may not approve of or
like. We may not condone their behavior, but we cultivate
forgiveness. Love is a powerful tool that transforms any situation.
It is not passive acquiescence. As the Buddha said, "Hatred never
ceases through hatred. Hatred only ceases through love." Love
embraces all beings without exception, and discards ill will.
One near enemy of compassion is pity. Instead of feeling
the openness of compassion, pity says, "Oh, that poor person is
suffering!" Pity sets up a separation between oneself and others, a
sense of distance and remoteness from the suffering of others that
is affirming and gratifying to the ego. Compassion, on the other
hand, recognizes the suffering of another as a reflection of one's
own pain: "I understand that; I suffer in the same way. It's a part
of life." Compassion is shared suffering.
Another near enemy of compassion is grief. Compassion is not grief.
It is not an immersion in or identification with the suffering of
others that leads to an anguished reaction. Compassion is the
tender readiness of the heart to respond to one's own or another's
pain without grief or resentment or aversion. It is the wish to
dissipate suffering. Compassion embraces those experiencing sorrow,
and eliminates cruelty from the mind.
The third quality, sympathetic joy, is the ability to feel joy in
the happiness of others. The near enemy of equanimity is
unintelligent indifference or callousness. We appear serene if we
say, "I'm not attached. I don't care what happens anyway because
it's all transitory." We feel a certain peaceful relief because we
withdraw from experience and from the energies of life. But true
equanimity is not a withdrawal; it is a balanced engagement with
all aspects of life. It is opening to the whole of life with
composure and with balance of mind, seeing the nature of all
things. Equanimity embraces the loved and the unloved, the
agreeable and the disagreeable, and pleasure and pain; it
eliminates clinging and aversion.
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http://buddhism.kalachakranet.org/immeasurables_love_compassion_equanimity_rejoicing.html
COMPASSION
The definition is: wanting others to be free from suffering.
This compassion happens when one feels sorry with someone, and one
feels an urge to help.
The near enemy is pity, which keeps other at a distance, and does
not urge one to help.
The opposite is wanting others to suffer, or cruelty.
A result which one needs to avoid is sentimentality.
Compassion thus refers to an unselfish, de-tached emotion which
gives one a sense of urgency in wanting to help others. From a
Buddhist perspective, helping others to reduce their physical or
mental suffering is very good, but the ultimate goal is to
extinguish all suffering by stopping the process of rebirth and the
suffering that automatically comes with living
(enlightenment).
The attitude of a so-called Bodhisattva is Bodhicitta: this is the
ultimate compassionate motivation: the wish to liberate all
sentient beings from the sufferings of cyclic existence and to
become a fully enlightened Buddha oneself in order to act as the
perfect guide for them.
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http://www.brahmaviharas.org/BVwriting4.htm
Pity is the near enemy to compassion for it has a hidden quality of
aversion. The delusion of pity comes, in part, from the belief that
if we hold ourselves as separate that we are protecting ourselves
in some way. Karuna dissolves the boundaries divide our hearts in
two. With growing compassion we are less apt to look away - to
withdraw our attention - to abandon or be abandoned.
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