Did I tell you I got a MySpace page? Well I do. I resisted it for a long time. But it’s actually kind of fun.

Anyway, here’s a question I got from one of the people who reads my stuff there:

What do you do when you treat others in a caring, giving, compassionate way...always thinking of others, But it is never appreciated and you are treated really shitty?

Compassion is a big buzzword among Buddhists in America. Everybody’s all like, “Compassion, compassion, compassion….” It’s so fucking annoying I just want to slap them. Be compassionate to me and shut the fuck up about compassion, why don’t you? Why doesn’t anybody ask me about fun stuff like that mummified dinosaur they just found? I shoulda become a paleontologist like I wanted to when I was six instead of a fucking Buddhist monk.

Sorry. Where was I? Oh. Compassion. OK. Compassion is funny stuff. It’s very important to be compassionate. But at the same time you can’t try to be compassionate. Cuz when you try to be compassionate you just screw everything up. Real compassion doesn’t have anything at all to do with your attempts to be compassionate.

Dogen said that compassion is like a hand reaching back to adjust a pillow in the night. That is an example of perfectly selfless and compassionate action. A problem arises and you fix it without ever even being aware of having done anything at all. It doesn’t matter that the person who performs the action and the person who receives its benefit are the same.

The problem for my MySpace friend was that she was trying real hard to be compassionate and that she expected some kind of reward as a result. It’s not necessary to worry too much about the results of what you do. And don't worry too much about deliberately trying to be caring, giving and compassionate. Sometimes when you try too hard at that, you end up doing more than what's actually necessary. Sometimes it's OK to let people suffer a bit. Sometimes it's what they need to go thru and if you interfere with that you're not really helping.

When you see someone suffering it’s sometimes really hard to accept that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Of course I’m not talking here about a situation like if you’re driving through the desert and you come across a Volkswagen bug on its back on fire with twelve screaming orphans inside. You don’t just drive by that and go, “I guess they need to suffer.”

The problem is when you react to every problem you come across the way you’d react to seeing twelve screaming orphans in a burning VW bug. You feel like, “Oh my God! I need to go fix that NOW!” And you end up just being an interfering busybody and making everybody resent you for it.

I see people who are into Buddhism getting into this kind of stuff all the time. They hear that the Bodhisattva vow says, “Beings are numberless, I vow to save them all.” And they think they gotta run around pretending to be Wonder Woman or something just saving everybody from everything. It doesn’t work like that. Wonder Woman is a cartoon character. You aren’t.

So how do you know when what you’re feeling is real compassion and when it’s just the desire to meddle in things that don’t need your meddling in them? The only way is to cultivate the same state of mind you have when you’re reaching back to adjust a pillow in the night. You have to be very, very quiet and listen to your intuition.

Real compassion is never emotional. It’s not the kind of messy, fuzzy wuzzy feeling like you get from watching this video:



God that kitty cat is so fucking cute and precious I wanna go to Japan and just crush the life out of him with my bare hands!!!

Sorry. Where was I again?

Oh yeah. True compassion is never that heated feeling of “I gotta fix that!” It’s very spontaneous and clear. Sometimes it’s not what you think of as being nice either. Sometimes real compassionate action looks like just the opposite.

This time of year we’re all spending way too much time with our families. Often the most difficult relationships we have are the ones that are closest. It’s sometimes nigh on impossible to know how to be truly compassionate towards your no-good alcoholic dad or your conniving manipulative mom or your slutty sister or your bonehead brother. We all get into these family get-together situations and think we’re the only sane person in the room. It’s sobering to remember that every single person there is thinking the same thing about him or herself too.

With families the problems are compounded because everyone seems to be needing, expecting, even demanding that you act in whatever way they expect a compassionate and caring person to act. This is especially true if they know you’re a Buddhist and they’ve seen Richard Gere or Lisa Simpson or somebody say something about Buddhism on TV once and figure they therefore know all there is to know about how Buddhists are supposed to behave. But most times they’re dead wrong. Most people don’t have the slightest clue what real compassion is.

The best thing to do is to act carefully without too much haste or urgency and without any expectation of reward or even recognition. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me intellectually, but I’ve noticed that the Universe has a way of working things out. Even if your mom is too bombed on prescription painkillers to notice all the things you did to keep her house from going to hell the week you were there, someone, somewhere, someday will notice and things will balance themselves. It takes a bit of faith to be able to let go and fall backwards into this. But if you do it just seems to work out. It’s useless to speculate why.

Real compassion isn’t about trying to be compassionate. Real caring isn’t about attempting to measure up to some phony image of what a caring person is supposed to look like. Real giving isn’t about handing over everything you have just so everyone knows how giving you can be. Just be very, very quiet and see what needs doing then do it and be finished with it.

And the next time you see me, don’t ask me about compassion. Ask me about the new KISS DVD instead. That’s true compassion.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.