Buddhism’s First Noble Truth declares the truth of suffering. Buddha’s enlightenment revealed an eight-fold path that we can follow to end our suffering, our own suffering, that is, but not the suffering of others. Everyone must do the work for themselves. And so, as suffering persists, for others and ourselves as well, we are called to compassion

            We are looking at spiritual foundations this year.

            We first looked at several theological issues in the realm of faith that has to do with beliefs.  Beliefs about free will, human nature, sin, life after death.  But faith is more than just beliefs.  And spiritual foundations include more than just theology.  Last week, I introduced the idea that a complete faith is our beliefs, plus our values, plus our actions.

If you tell someone you are religious or go to church, they will probably ask you, what do you believe?  Or, what does your church believe?  This is an awkward question for Unitarian Universalists because our faith isn’t defined by a set of shared beliefs, but by a set of shared values.  A more relevant question for a Unitarian Universalist is, “What is important to you?”

            A complete faith begins with beliefs, but encompasses more than just beliefs.  Beliefs are our description of reality.  Theological beliefs about God and the afterlife and so on.  But beliefs about the more mundane corners of reality, too.  When you observe the world around you, what do you see?  What are the contents of reality, as you see it?  What is your worldview?

            What do you believe about the age of the universe, for instance.  What do you believe about the origins of life?  Some beliefs are available to scientific observation and experimentation.  Other beliefs we explore using reason and logic.  And still other beliefs cannot be proven or disproven objectively, so we rely on subjective experience and hunches.  Beliefs are our description of reality.  Beliefs are our worldview, everything that the world contains.

            But beliefs are only the beginning of faith.

            We don’t observe the world neutrally.  When we look at the world, we make judgements:  good or bad, more of this please, I wish it weren’t that way.  Those are faith statement not describing the content of reality, but about our feelings about it. Because I see the world the way I do, because I believe certain things to be true about reality, I’m then moved to value corresponding qualities.  

            A strictly scientific description of reality would be value neutral:  the universe simply is the way it is, and the job of science is simply to describe it accurately.  An earth teeming with life is no better or worse than a lifeless planet.  Even the scientific pursuit of knowledge stems from a value judgement that knowledge is better than ignorance even though science itself can have no opinion about better or worse.  But scientists, when they’re not doing science, just like everyone else, have feelings about the world.  Values like diversity, equality, justice, freedom define our UU faith.  We want life to flourish.  We want joy.  We want beauty.  

            And finally, faith is completed, when you act in the world in line with your beliefs and values.  What you do in life is the active expression of your faith.  How you treat your neighbor.  Which candidate you vote for.  What work satisfies you.  What you do for fun.  A hypocrite acts against their stated beliefs and values.  A spiritually healthy person aligns their beliefs, values, and actions in a single mutually affirming faith.

            So last week we looked at the value of temperance as one of the foundations of faith:  the virtue of restraint, of taking what we need but no more, of knowing when we’ve had enough. 

Today, I want to look at the foundational value of compassion.

I’ve chosen compassion as the topic for today because it aligns with a couple of calendar events.

            Compassion is a foundational spiritual value in the Buddhist tradition.  Along with loving-kindness, sympathetic joy, and equanimity, compassion is one of the four supreme emotions or mental states, also called the “divine abodes” that lead to health and joy for ourselves, for each other, and the worlds we share.

            Loving-kindness, which is wishing others well, avoiding agression

Sympathetic joy, which is celebrating the joy of others avoiding jealousy or envy

Equanimity, which is aceepting what is, avoiding attachment or greed

And compassion, which we’ll look at this morning.

In many Buddhist traditions, the day that the Buddha achieved enlightenment is celebrated as Bodhi Day.  Traditionally, the Buddha’s enlightenment came on the eighth day of the twelfth month.  But that’s on the lunar calendar.  Celebrating Bodhi Day on December 8 is an accommodation to the western calendar, but it’s probably as good as any other day.  And then I moved the observance up a week further in my preaching schedule so that a Buddhist-themed sermon wouldn’t interrupt Christmas themes, which are coming quickly.

            Today’s date, December 1 is also a day meaningful to me, to talk about compassion, because December 1 is World AIDS Day.

            World AIDS Day was founded in 1988, at the height of the AIDS crisis in the United States.  I worked at the AIDS Project Los Angeles from the time I got out of college in 1985 until I went to seminary in 1995.  Much of what I learned of compassion, I learned during those years.

            On the evening that the Buddha achieved enlightenment, he described the process as occurring in three phases.

            First, the Buddha had a mystical experience in which he observed all of his past lives:  In the cycle of rebirth, the Buddha saw how all sentient life is connected.  We are all life.

            In the second phase, the Buddha understood the law of karma.  He saw that the experiences we have during life affect future experiences of life.  We can add the weight of negative actions, which increase suffering and delay liberation, or we can act in ways that decrease suffering and facilitate liberation for ourselves and others.  

            And in the final part of the night, the third phase of the Buddha’s achievement of enlightenment, the Buddha named the Four Noble Truths.

            The first Noble Truth is suffering.  Suffering is an innate part of existence.  All living things suffer.

The second Noble Truth explains why this is so.  We suffer because we have attachments, cravings, and desires for the contents of transient existence, including beloved objects, and loved ones, and ourselves.  But it is the nature of transient things to come and go, so we will inevitably experience the loss of the things we love, which is painful, so we will suffer.

 The Third Noble Truth is the Buddha’s realization that it is possible to give up our habit of unhealthy attachment to the transient world.

And the Fourth Noble Truth is that the path to non-attachment, and therefore the end to suffering, is an eightfold path of personal behavior following principles of right understanding, thought, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration.

And so, because the Buddha’s first observation, the first Noble Truth, is that all existence this side of enlightenment entails suffering, then that truth should awaken our compassion.  Compassion for the suffering of others.  Compassion for our own suffering as well.

And thus the Buddhist prayer of Thich Nhat Hanh, that we read as our Call to Worship this morning:  “Evoking the presence of the Great Compassion, let us fill our hearts with our own compassion–towards ourselves and towards all living beings.”

But does compassion mean that we should simply feel bad or feel sorry about the suffering around us?  Compassion is more than that.  See where Thich Nhat Hanh goes with that thought in the next line of his prayer:  “Let us pray that we ourselves cease to be the cause of suffering to each other.”

Compassion, in the Buddhist conception of that word, is a motivating feeling that compels us to act not just to feelsuffering, but to act to end suffering, to the extent we are capable.

So Thich Nhat Hanh ends his prayer with the line, “With humility, with awareness of the existence of life, and of the sufferings that are going on around us, let us practice the establishment of peace in our hearts and on earth.”

            Our English words for the feeling of compassion are not as precise as is the Buddhist use.  We have three words and their meanings slip around and into each other:  sympathy, empathy, and compassion.

            So let’s clarify their different meanings.

            Sympathy is the feeling when we understand someone’s suffering.  “I get it” we might say.  “I had a similar thing happen to me.”  With sympathy we care, but the primary response is intellectual and abstract.  Sympathy is not wrong.  A sympathetic ear may be just what a suffering person needs.  But sympathy keeps the feeling at arm’s length.  I understand your suffering.  I’m sorry for you pain.

            Empathy is, “I feel your pain.”  It’s also, I feel your joy, or whatever other feeling you’re having.  Empathy is mirroring the feelings of the other person with our own emotions.

            You can see then why empathy can be dangerous.  An empathetic response to suffering means suffering yourself, without doing anything to end the suffering of the other person.  Empathy doubles suffering rather than relieving it.

            Again, it’s not wrong to feel empathy.  But compassion asks us to go further, for ourselves and others.

            If we understand the suffering of another, which is sympathy, and then we feel the true pain of their suffering, which is empathy, we may then feel compassion, which is the motivation to do what we can to relieve suffering.

            The words of William Blake, which we sang in our Opening Hymn, illustrate this movement from empathy to compassion.  In the first line we sang, “Can I see another’s woe, and not be in sorrow too?”  That’s empathy.  In the second line we sang, “Can I see another’s grief, and not seek for kind relief?”  That’s compassion.

            On December first in 1988, when the first World AIDS Day was organized, the suffering of persons affected by AIDS was horrendous.

            The Buddhist lessons of transience, love, attachment, loss, and the suffering that comes as a consequence of living amid those realities was obvious.

            Many different ways to recognize World AIDS Day were organized.  Several art institutions organized a “day without art.”  AIDS had taken the lives of so many artists and performers and creative people of all types.  To illustrate the loss many art museums closed for the day and posted signs asking visitors to mediate on a world in which there were no artists.  Even more powerfully, I thought, were the museums that stayed open but covered several of their pieces with black cloths.

            World AIDS Day was conceived to develop sympathy among world leaders, and politicians, and medical care practitioners and pharmaceutical industries.  Let’s talk about the suffering that’s going on.  Let’s see it, if you haven’t already seen it.  Through conferences, and press releases, and stories, let’s understand the suffering going on.

            The Day Without Art activities took the mission one step further, from sympathy to empathy.  To stand in a museum gallery, after having planned to enjoy a pleasant outing with your family, and seeing every third painting and sculpture hidden under black cloth, lost to you at least for that afternoon, was designed to make you feel what people affected by AIDS felt.

            But people affected by AIDS don’t want us just to feel bad with them.  People affected with AIDS want us to do something to relieve their suffering.  They want our compassion.

            Part of the horror of AIDS during that first decade was how little we could do.  There was no cure.  There was not much even in the way of treatment.  Seemingly healthy people moved from diagnosis to death swiftly in the most disfiguring and painful ways.  In the first years before the virus was identified we didn’t know how it was transmitted or how to protect ourselves.  By 1988 the cumulative fear and loss was devastating, and the helplessness was overwhelming.

            But here is the lesson I learned of compassion during that time.

            It became very clear that the thought, “there’s nothing I can do” was not only disempowering; it was false.  We could not cure HIV infection, or treat many HIV-related diseases effectively during those first years, but there was much we could do.  We could found a public health institution like AIDS Project Los Angeles.  We could create programs of advocacy and education.  We could connect people with services for housing, medical care, mental health.  We could offer companionship, spiritual care, and arts programs to deal with feelings and help people tell their stories.  We could inaugurate an event like World AIDS Day.

            Sometimes in the face of the world’s suffering we stop with sympathy, because feeling the feelings of the world’s suffering, which is empathy, while telling ourselves there’s nothing I can do about it, is too much to bear.  So we protect ourselves, naturally.  We hold ourselves back.  We turn away.

            But I learned even then, in the midst of that crisis, if I was willing to extend myself, there always was something I could do. “I can do something” was the lesson I learned of compassion during those years.  I could volunteer and eventually get a paying job on staff.  I couldn’t deveop a cure or provide medical care, but I could work in ways that matched my resources and abilities.  I could do something that would contribute to the relief of suffering.

            The final line of Thich Nhat Hanh’s prayer is so important to this lesson.  He has us pray, “With humility, with awareness of the existence of life, and of the sufferings that are going on around us, let us practice the establishment of peace in our hearts and on earth.”

            “With humility” means admitting without judgement that there are limits to our ability to help.  But with that confession we then go on, we don’t stop.  Humility is compassion for ourselves, we are relieved of the feeling of responsibility to do more than we can do, but not of the responsibility to do what we can.

            Humility is the key.  It is humble to admit, I cannot do everything.  But it is not humble to say, I can do nothing.  That’s a lie.  That’s a false humility that comes from a strange sort of pride and arrogance.  See how special I am that out of all the help big and small that could be offered, I can offer nothing.  Nothing?  Really?

Confronted with the great suffering of the world:  the homeless man on the sidewalk, the mentally ill woman on the bus, poverty, hunger, violence; it is tempting to nurture a sense of “I can do nothing”.  That lets us feel the moral righteousness of sympathy, while keeping the suffering away from us.  But compassion is not asking you to suffer the sufferings of the world, that’s empathy.  Compassion is asking you to relieve suffering, your own, as well as others.

“When I breathe in, I’ll breathe in peace.
When I breathe out, I’ll breathe out love.”

            Even before the instances of great suffering, Thich Nhat Hanh, reminds us that there is a Great Compassion whose presence we can evoke and align ourselves with.  We can do something.  We can make a compassionate response.  We can choose compassion.

“Let us practice the establishment of peace in our hearts and on earth.”