On a beautiful first day of summer, on the return-home leg of a long, pleasant bike ride, I decided to pass through the Mascoma Lake public park to get closer to the water. As I rode past the slightly sloped, cobblestone walkway to the small beach, I saw a heavy-set women with a walker slowly navigating down it. In my sideways glance, I saw her stumble. Her companions, another woman and two teenage kids, turned back towards her. As I stopped and offered to help, parked my bike, and moved quickly towards them, the woman fell onto her knees within the structure of the walker. She was trapped in a painful pose––with the folded walker seat pressing into her back. Her raised arms were squeezed between the handles, her badly scraped knees continued to slide against the hot pavement, and her splayed lower legs were being cut into, slowly punctured by the wheels of the walker. She began to wail.
When I got to the injured woman, her friend explained to me that the situation was being made worse and complicated by the fact that the woman who had just fallen had cystic fibrosis. Most often she uses a motorized wheel chair. She doesn’t move well in even the best circumstances; but she had wanted to get down to the beach.
Two men, also bystanders, soon came to offer help. Even though one of the men seemed especially strong and fit, there was no obvious, immediate way for us to free her from the walker. At the same time, we all understood that we could help her. We could alter the situation. We offered her water to drink and then splashed some on her face and back. The men stood over her to create shade. As she lay bare-armed and bare-legged in full sun, her friend and I spoke to her calmly, using her name and reassuring her. No one turned away.
We also reached out for additional help. The older teenager quickly followed his mother’s instructions in calling and talking with 911. They kept him on the phone, keeping connection with us, until more help came. A policeman was the first responder to arrive. He had a light blanket in his squad car. We covered the distressed woman, and we all stayed on, waiting––reassuring her in words and in action that she was not alone. When the ambulance arrived with an EMT and his assistant, I could feel all our hearts lifting. Now we knew that our friend on the ground could and would be freed from the tangle of her suffering.
Clearly, the EMT himself had no doubts about this. He stepped from the vehicle, unleashed a stretcher from the back, and joined our group. He instructed us, using all of us as a team, seamlessly, accessing our strengths and weaknesses, to accomplish a miracle. With minimal additional pain, the woman was transitioned to the stretcher. She was balanced enough to be able to communicate clearly and calmly, and finally, she was taken directly by ambulance to the emergency room at Dartmouth Hitchcock.
As quickly as it formed, our team dissolved. The two men, strangers to one another, wished us well and walked back to their respective families. The two teenagers headed down to the beach. The fallen women’s friend and I hugged a couple of times. She wept a bit, and with heartfelt appreciation and awe, she spoke of the power of the kindness offered by us strangers. I spoke about the wonder of having trained professionals in the community––ready and accessible––to help out. We said good-bye. She followed her kids to the beach, and I got on my bike and headed for home.
Unraveling the Tangle of Suffering
In the Insight tradition of Early Buddhism, compassion is understood as essential to the healing, well-being, and awakening of us all. It is cultivated in two areas of our experience. The first area works at the level of wise thought and wise intention. It involves the meditative practices of compassion called karuna. We do these practices as part of our mental and heart contemplative trainings. Using Brahmavihara practices regularly, we develop kindness, compassion, shared joy, and even-heartedness. We develop a freedom, ethically, from the grip of cruelty as we attune and habituate our thoughts to the pleasant feelings associated with kindness.
Another facet of compassion is called anukampa; it refers to compassion in daily life. Often the word is translated as “caring.” It literally means something akin to “to travel along with.” We bring mindful awareness to our acts of kindness, small and large, in this world; we attune to those initiated by ourselves and those initiated by others. We learn, viscerally and intellectually, that it feels good to help. And thus, we establish anukampa as a norm.
Compassion in its maturity is described as having four active, component parts: 1) knowing that suffering/pain is happening; 2) realizing that something can be done to affect––and improve––this situation; 3) feeling an impulse to improve things; 4) acting upon this caring impulse.
“Without mindfulness, there is no choice.”
–– Subha Srinivasan
The noble eightfold path leads us to the end of sorrow and lamentation, the end of stress and discontent. The first path factor, wise understanding, encourages us to establish an ongoing experiential knowing of the workings of the mind, especially in regard to its effect on the arising and the ending of stress and suffering in our lives. The second path factor, wise intention, flows out of and into the first. This is the first level of acting in the world: taking responsibility for the volitional direction of our minds. Classically, the three wise intentions are framed as restraints: non-greed; non-ill will; and non-cruelty. I think the phrasing of these wise intentions as negative states can be helpful as we navigate our minds and the world. When we recognize greed, ill will, or cruelty in our hearts and minds, we want to pause––to stop for a reset. Mindful awareness is invaluable in this process.
It also serves us well to enlist mindfulness to recognize, appreciate and cultivate the positive, pro-social intentions that are being pointed to through these negations. The opposite of greed could be felt as contentment. When there is not ill will, there may be kindness. When cruelty is released from the heart, compassion automatically arises. It is so very important for us to pause––and to notice what it feels like in our body, heart, and mind when compassion is present. We can also attune to when it is present in others and when it is not. We need to recognize the presence or absence of these in our relational field as well. We are reminded in the basic teachings on mindfulness that we best develop mindfulness “internally, externally, and both internally and externally.”
Probably for all of us reading this essay, a commitment to these wise intentions is not a new idea nor a new endeavor. These are values we hold close and dear; and yet we live in a world where these wise intentions are being challenged in almost every moment: by bombings; wars that go far beyond reason and become senseless slaughter; cruel and theatrical deportations; cruel and senseless firings; unattended climate change-related destruction and disruption, along with the simultaneous reduction of collectively supported help; hunger and homeless services threatened; incompetence and intentional mismanagement. It can be hard to keep our balance––and hard, also, not to hate and wish ill of those who seem responsible for all of this. Yet it is essential that we do not succumb to thoughts of cruelty and hatred.
Hatred is contagious, just as love in all its many guises is. Keep calmly and steadily inclining the mind towards karuna and anukampa. We really all are in this together, and what we do in this world has an effect in this world.
“Those who are contentious have forgotten that we all must die.
For those who remember this, quarrels end.”
–– Dhammapada
Interestingly, in my search for a particular sutta simile with which to close this essay, one which Analayo has used to describe compassion, I found it embedded in a sutta called “Getting Rid of Resentment,” in the Numbered Discourses 5.16217 (Resentment 2nd). I include it at the end of the essay.
The discourse gives five examples of ways to work with your resentment and ill will toward challenging people. This particular simile is describing a contemplative karuna practice, the first part of which seems close to my team’s actual experience in helping the woman who fell and became trapped in her walker. But as you will understand from the section which begins with, “In the same way,” the story is one that you might use when working to let go of any resentment or ill will that you may find in your heart towards those who appear to be acting out of intentions of greed, resentment, and cruelty. And finally, please remember that stabilizing wise intentions in our hearts is the practice of a lifetime, not something we are expected to perfect all at once.
Here is the suggested reflection:
Suppose a person was traveling along a road, and they were sick, suffering, gravely ill. And it was a long way to a village, whether ahead or behind. And they didn’t have any suitable food or medicine, or a competent carer, or someone to bring them within a village. Another person traveling along the road might see them, and think of them with nothing but compassion, kindness, and sympathy: ‘Oh, may this person get suitable food or medicine, or a competent carer, or someone to bring them within a village. Why is that? So that they don’t come to ruin right here.’ In the same way, at that time you should ignore that person’s impure behavior by way of speech and body, and the fact that they don’t get an openness and clarity of heart from time to time, and think of them with nothing but compassion, kindness, and sympathy: ‘Oh, may this person give up bad conduct by way of body, speech, and mind, and develop good conduct by way of body, speech, and mind. Why is that? So that, when their body breaks up, after death, they’re not reborn in a place of loss, a bad place, the underworld, hell.’ That’s how to get rid of resentment for that person.
And so, we keep calmly leaning, sloping, inclining our intentions in the direction of compassion.