If you want to discuss compassion you have to see it in the framework of the earlier stages of the path. That’s why this analogy that the bird needs two wings, I just love it – it’s so powerful! A bird needs two wings: wisdom and compassion.
Of course wisdom is confusing to us. It sounds like, “What’s that got to do with the price of fish, you know, wisdom?” But it really just means, from the Buddhist perspective, the first stages of the practice: the first and second scopes of the lamrim, which are the practices that we share with the Hinayana path – that’s how they put it.
If you were in Burma or Thailand you’d learn about karma, and then you’d abide by the laws of karma, you’d take refuge, you’d control your body, speech, and mind, you’d learn about your mind, you’d get renunciation, and you’d get rid of attachment, you know? That’s the wisdom wing.
First of all, why is it called wisdom? The final wisdom is when you’ve cut the root of all the nonsense and you’ve realized emptiness. This is a Hinayana teaching – emptiness is actually a Hinayana teaching – but on the Mahayana path you learn it as one of the perfections of the bodhisattva.
But the wisdom component, in a simple and broader sense, is not complicated and begins in the first stages of the path. We can see, you know, if you are caught up in attachment and anger and depression and jealousy, the tools to help that are in the first stages.
The reason behind the practice of controlling your body and your speech and then your mind – the explicit instruction – is to refrain from harming others. Why? Because harming others harms you.
But when we start to understand our mind, we’re going to realize that being caught up in attachment and anger and jealousy causes one thing, which is unhappiness – that’s why they’re called “disturbing emotions” – but the other thing is that those disturbing emotions have this delusional component.
We’ve discussed this many times, the delusional component: when you’re angry, it exaggerates the ugliness of the person, when you’re attached, it exaggerates the deliciousness of something. These are emotional problems, but they have this added component: because they’re misconceptions, they “misrepresent the world back to us,” as Lama Zopa says.
When you’re caught up in your own misery, we can see this: you’re isolated, you’re locked into yourself, and you’re totally involved in I, so you can’t see past your own nose. Therefore, you don’t have much wisdom, and that means you really just are driven by your own neuroses, driven by your own misery. You’re not in touch with things – it’s very clear, you know that.
If someone’s really depressed, the whole world is seen as this horrible depressing place. And if you’re angry, the whole world is seen as this horrible place: you’re paranoid and see conspiracy theories everywhere, you know?
That literally means you haven’t got much clarity, you’re not in touch with how things are. And that’s a curious concept for us: not being in touch with how things are. But that’s Buddha’s thing, that’s his thing.
That’s in his Four Noble Truths, where we started: the first cause of suffering is the result of the actions we do that harm others, but the main cause of suffering is the neuroses in the mind that drive us to do those actions, which cut us off from others, which means we’re not seeing others clearly – we have no wisdom!
One of the biggest obstacles for us with compassion is that because we’ve still got attachment, we can’t see clearly what’s going on, and, because there’s so much emotion, we’re pulled from pillar to post, you know?
It’s a very good point. The real thing that Buddha’s saying is as you develop your mind you get less and less suffering, but you also get more and more wisdom, more and more clarity. And literally as you develop and get single-pointed concentration, you get the wisdom of having clairvoyance.
Now, that’s a very hippie-trippy idea to us in our culture. You don’t go to your doctor and ask for methods to get clairvoyance, you don’t go to your therapist and ask for that – they’ll think you’re crazy! But that is absolutely one of the consequences of Buddhist practice. It’s all there in the teachings, you know, the technique is completely extant: this amazing technique invented by these Hindus, it’s fundamental to the Buddhist development of your mind.
As you start to get less and less suffering, more and more discipline, less and less suffering, more and more happiness, you’re also going to get more and more wisdom, there’s no question. Even just becoming less attached and less angry, you’re going to get more wisdom because you’re not so involved in your own little bubble, you know?
It’s a really main point – it’s not some strange idea. And once you get clairvoyance, and then you realize emptiness, you’re really getting wisdom then, you’re really getting wisdom.
And why do you need wisdom? Because that informs your ability to know how to help others. The compassion wing, if you like, is the wish to help others. But – this is the crucial point – the wish to help is not what enables you to help others. It’s wisdom. That’s really vital: it’s wisdom that enables us to help others.
In a simple sense, in an ordinary sense, simple worldly one, it’s obvious: if you don’t even know how to put a band-aid on, you can’t do much. You can have as much compassion as you like for someone who’s broken their leg – compassion’s helpful – but if you don’t have the wisdom to know how to help them, you’re useless. That’s the idea, you know, in spiritual terms, that’s the idea.
It’s not just compassion we need – that’s not nearly enough. This compassion has to be informed by wisdom, and that’s part of the development of your mind: you become more and more clear.
Because you’ve worked on your own mind, you understand yourself, you’ve got the wisdom that knows how to stop suffering – that’s the wisdom you’re getting – and then that informs your ability to help others. That’s the really important point, you know?