Good morning. Welcome, everyone. We've begun exploring compassion this week, part of this series on the Brahmavihāras, these heart cultivations. And if you spend much time at Mahayana Buddhist centers, like Zen Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, or a whole slew of others, inevitably you're going to end up chanting the four great Bodhisattva vows often. And these vows that one takes on, this bodhisattva vow, is beings are numberless. I vow to free them.

Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them. The Buddha way is unsurpassable. I vow to embody it. And without going into a big long contextualization of, well, what is a bodhisattva, and how does this differ from Theravāda, and so on, just to take it at face value. Like, oh, here's this major branch of Buddhism, and here's something they chant often, bringing us into a certain orientation to practice and to life, and embedded in there even just the first two.

I vow to free other beings, and I vow to put out these delusions within my own mind that create suffering. Baked in from the beginning in that is both a helping of oneself and a helping of others, a movement towards the liberation of all from the very get go. And so it's not like, okay, go do a whole bunch of meditation retreats for five years. And then after that, once you've hit a certain point, then go help out.

And it's also not like, okay, go do a bunch of service work for five years and help others. And then when you've hit a certain amount of beings you've touched, well, then go meditate. So it's all there from the beginning, from day one, have this sensibility. How do I free my own heart and mind? How do I help free others? And that beings are numberless. I vow to free them.

What we're freeing them from is suffering. This is a movement of compassion. Right at the epicenter of the tradition, there is this compassion. Something I find kind of curious or interesting is that it's not beings are numberless, I vow to do compassion meditation for them. It's beings are numberless, I vow to free them, which implies some kind of action. And of course, compassion meditation, compassion reflection, compassion reading, these can be really helpful, but ultimately it spills into some kind of action.

And this is a lot of what I've been focusing on this week so far, and I think what is some of the real specialty of Buddhism is how it can really get very precise at how you do that. How can this action happen in a natural way, a balanced way? And so what we've looked at right at the core of it is, well, firstly, to see that beings are suffering.

Like, oh, suffering is real. Like, this is a thing that happens. It happens in very overt, in-your-face ways. It also happens in very subtle, almost indistinguishable ways. And so we start just becoming sensitive to suffering, seeing it within and around us. Likewise, seeing that no one chooses to suffer. It means we're just kind of caught in it, even against our wishes. And so when we see that, we see this suffering, we start to channel and develop a sense of care.

Like, I care about your suffering. I care about my suffering. I care about the suffering of the world. And I wish different for all of us. And this caring wish for beings not to suffer, as we talked about yesterday, it's possible to do this from a very grounded and balanced place where we're not overwhelmed by it. We're just, oh, I'm here in it. And so when your heart marinates in this kind of care that sees suffering and cares, but has some kind of balance, well, when the time is right, action naturally follows.

And yet it's also helpful to train more overtly in action. Like what does action actually mean? How do we do that? So I wanted to talk a little bit about that today. Last night I was sitting with some Dharma friends, just a small group of us, kind of people sharing what was going on for them. And a couple of people mentioned some things that were really quite challenging in a very overt way.

And what felt most appropriate in that context was just to listen, to be a compassionate set of ears, compassionate, attuned body and mind. It was, hey, I'm here. I'm here to listen. I'm here to meet you, to give a container for them to actually just share, to let the tears come. And maybe if there's an appropriate moment to chip in, just something like, hey, that sounds hard.

I'm here. I hear you. I care. But it's not a moment where I'm going to go fix all their problems. Which is to say, one form of compassionate action is just about attention. Like, I grant you my attention. Without ulterior motive, I'm just here. Another form of compassion, a freedom we offer others, comes through what we don't do. And traditionally, the way this is pointed to is the five precepts.

And so when we really commit ourselves to abstaining from killing or intentionally harming beings, from stealing or taking what hasn't been given, we really commit ourselves to abstaining from sexual misconduct and harm, to abstain from false, divisive, harsh speech, to abstain from intoxicating ourselves. What these do is they offer a freedom to others, they don't need to manage, tiptoe around, or deal with our unskillfulness, our violence.

We're saying, hey, I'm giving you this gift of safety. You're free from needing to have to feel unease around me in that overt way. And so simply living our life in a wise and loving way is a form of compassionate action, even if it's not directly addressing something. When we go to more of the inner dimension of suffering, in this memory I once saw an interview with the founders of the Insight Meditation Society, this prominent Vipassanā Retreat Center in Massachusetts.

And really the focus on the surface of things is this very deep meditative practice. And in this interview, the teachers were describing their vision of the practice and what it was going for. And one of the teachers said something like, well, really what we're doing here is aiming at the deepest level of suffering, this fundamental suffering of clinging to self, the basic grasping and resisting phenomena that really underlies all forms of suffering.

And this teacher said in their view, like this is really the point of these retreats is to help people access that. And then one of the other founding teachers said, well, I see it differently. For me, the point is just to help people meet and work with whatever level of suffering is presenting. And maybe that's a panic attack. Maybe that's just a lot of self-criticism or self-blame or just the inability to sit still for five minutes.

And so that teacher was really pointing also to, hey, this psycho-emotional realm where we find some kind of safety or healing or a more easeful way to be with our affliction, even if we're not getting that to some level of fundamental suffering. This is meeting pain, and it's helping to move through it. And part of why I'm bringing this in is what I loved about that interview is even within these meditative traditions, it's not like there's one right position.

This is what it's about. Rather, it's, can we meet suffering? And there are different ways to meet suffering, different levels to meet suffering. And even in our personal lives, even if you're not giving someone Vipassanā instruction, you might notice even just taking those two positions, sometimes what a gift it is to help a family member or a friend touch into that level of, hey, you don't need to solve this problem or get rid of this thing to be okay.

I love you as you are. You're okay as you are. This moment is okay as it is. We're all right here. Yeah, there's this challenge and this difficulty. And so we can help people see that level by modeling it first and foremost. And then at other times, we might help people unkink the knots of their heart and mind. Hey, yeah, there is this real challenge. Let's work together.

Or may I support you in unkinking that knot? Both of those are ways of compassionate action. And compassion isn't just inner work. Working on a humanitarian level, helping people who are in a hard place, homeless, poor, lacking resources. This is a form of compassionate action. Maybe working on a societal level, helping nurture along through some form of activism or volunteer work, supporting healthy, sustainable food systems, tackling systems of injustice on that more activist level, societal level.

It's like, oh, that's a form of compassionate action. And so really, compassion can take so many different forms. It could just be a non-doing. It could be giving caring attention, helping people navigate their inner life, a humanitarian level, a societal level. And importantly, none of us can do all of these things. The point isn't we become this productive, capitalist, compassionate do-gooder who does everything. Rather, what the path is inviting us into is, hey, well, we do our part and we just trust that it's going to be all right.

And even embedded in that bodhisattva vow, beings are numberless. I vow to free them. It's an impossible task. You can't free a numberless amount of beings. And so if we hinge our ability to be at peace on completing the goal of perfect compassion, we're never going to get there. And so can we really sit in that paradox? It's like, oh, the point isn't to solve suffering once and for all.

It's to have at the foundation of my life this orientation of care. Care for self, care for other, care for both. And when we do that, and we tune into these practices that help us nurture that heart of care, help us nurture a long balance, we help where we can. It becomes a value and a priority. And it varies seasonally. Sometimes we have more free time. Sometimes we're invested in work or family rearing, our own health struggles.

Sometimes we have more space. It varies. It doesn't need to look a certain way. Yeah, maybe where I want to close today, just a simple compassion phrase that I really like is just, I care about your suffering. And to just sit in the energy of that, I care about being suffering. I care about my suffering. I care about your suffering. And there's a way when we sit in that, I care about your suffering.

There's a way that it doesn't have to be depressing or overwhelming or heavy or a way it doesn't have to just lunge us into restless action to fix the problems. There's a way to sit in that frequency. I care about suffering. Where, when the time is right, it naturally springs into action. Pause here. We'll see you in a little bit.