Global Compassion Coalition founder and president Rick Hanson spoke with Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi on the topic of “The Strong Heart: Compassion Amidst Grievances, Vengeance, and War,” on November 16, 2023. Watch the recording on YouTube.
By BGR Staff
Even as many of us gather with loved ones to celebrate this season of light, the world can seem a dark place indeed. While the world’s richest people live more comfortable, healthier lives than ever before in history, billions of others struggle to earn enough to feed their families. The political will to interrupt the global slide toward climate disaster seems ever out of reach. The cruelties of war continue unabated. We may ask: As economic, technological, and scientific resources multiply worldwide, why do the benefits never seem to reach those who most need them?
The Global Compassion Coalition (GCC) was founded in 2022 as a response to the economic and political systems that reinforce the concentration of wealth and power while neglecting the common good. GCC founder Rick Hanson, a psychologist, author, and senior fellow at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center began the GCC with a mission to “restore compassion and justice at the foundation of every society.”
A practicing Buddhist since 1974, Hanson sought to harness the collective strength of some of the thousands of organizations and millions of individuals who already share a vision of a world healed through the work of compassion and social justice.
By harnessing the strength, wisdom and courage fueled by compassion, the GCC aims to inspire individuals, organizations, and governments to act from a place of compassionate attunement, to attend to suffering and to build communities of care and belonging.
As an organization grounded in the teachings of the Dharma, Buddhist Global Relief was founded in service of just such a vision of a compassionate world, and this year, BGR joined the GCC as a founding partner organization.
In alignment with GCC’s goal of fostering collaboration among individuals and organizations to “promote the study, education, application, and advocacy of compassion,” our two organizations have already begun work together. This fall, Hanson was a featured speaker at BGR’s 2023 Buddhist Action to Feed the Hungry online gathering, during which he spoke of the hierarchical, resource-hoarding cultural systems of the last 10,000 years as in fact “a complete aberration from our fundamental nature.” In contradiction to the commonly held idea that humans are by nature greedy and power-hungry, he explained, for the majority of the history of humanity, “we evolved biologically ‘to care and to share’; compassion and justice were at the foundation of the social life of our species for 97 percent of the time we’ve walked this Earth distinct from other primates.”
The following month, Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi joined Hanson for a GCC-sponsored conversation on the topic of “The Strong Heart: Compassion Amidst Grievances, Vengeance, and War.” In the course of this conversation, Bhante offered a teaching on the meaning of compassion in the Buddhist Pali canon as well as on the modern practice of what he calls conscientious compassion, which he described as
a union of that primordial compassion that we have articulated in the Buddhist tradition with a sense of conscience, in the sense of the willingness to take responsibility for the well-being, for the fate of others, in a world in which we face so much suffering, especially suffering that’s inflicted by social, political, and economic forces. … I also say that through the sense of conscience, it means that we are willing to take personal responsibility for the well-being of others, to do something to transform the conditions of their lives, to take action that will actually help to rescue them from the abyss of suffering and to secure their well-being, their safety, and to give them the opportunity to live lives that are secure at the material level, and also to unfold their own inner capacities and potentials.
In the coming year, the GCC plans to continue to expand its coalition and to disseminate research and narratives about how compassion is making the world a better, more livable place for all people. New initiatives are under way to publicly honor individuals and groups doing compassionate work; to provide grants underwriting compassion education courses in underserved communities; and to bring people together through a Compassion Connector program providing free training and support to people serving compassionately in their home communities around the world.
To learn more about the GCC, please visit their website at globalcompassioncoalition.org.
