Photo courtesy of BGR partner Community Relief and Development Action (COREDA)
By Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi
Buddhist Global Relief’s formal mission, as stated on our website, is to assist communities afflicted by poverty and chronic hunger. A crucial task in pursuing this aim is to shine a spotlight on the everyday lives of the people we support, people whose very existence is usually obscured by the shadows. It is this focus on people in distress that brings our work into alignment with the Buddhist ethical framework grounded in the twin virtues of loving-kindness and compassion. Compassion gains in force when it is directed toward its recipients not as members of an abstract multitude, not as mere statistics, but as individuals possessing intrinsic dignity.
The billions of people who share this planet with us usually linger on the margins of our consciousness as a nameless and faceless mass, without distinct individuation. The beam of public attention—on television and the internet—shines on the famous, the affluent, and the powerful. The poor enter the range of our vision only rarely, usually when disaster strikes. They may show up as the victims of an earthquake, a flood, or a famine, or as casualties in a far-off war. After a fleeting appearance that lasts a day or two, they vanish from sight, as the spotlight again turns to those at the top of the political, social, and cultural pyramids.
Yet if we do direct our attention to those anonymous billions, we realize that they too have names and faces. They fall in love and marry, they bring up children, they struggle with worry and stress. In most parts of the world they work without holidays or vacations, patiently endure debilitating illness, and face the harsh blows of natural disasters, often with stoic strength. Many struggle just to obtain a substantial meal each day and to ensure that their families are safe. Far too many cannot overcome the odds against them and succumb to an early death.
Although the circumstances of their lives may be far different from our own, we are all united by a common humanity. We all breathe the same air, see the same stars at night, and drink water that falls from the same clouds. While oceans and land masses may physically separate us, our lives are intertwined with everyone on this planet, joined into a single community by a network of invisible bonds. Actions in one place reverberate elsewhere and can even have repercussions on the other side of the world. The flashing neon lights in our major cities may unleash heat waves and flash floods in India or Bangladesh. The millions of cars on our expressways may mean a drought for farmers in Kenya whose fields are thirsty for rain. Our appetite for meat may raze tropical forests in Brazil and drive their long-time residents from their ancestral homes into overcrowded cities.
Though we may seldom realize it, the entire world economy rests on the backs of these invisible multitudes. Without them, everything we take for granted would vanish. They are the ones who grow the food we eat, make the clothes we wear, produce the furniture in our homes, and manufacture the computers, cell phones, and other electronic goods that connect us across vast distances. While toiling from the break of dawn until late at night, they often receive, as compensation for their work, the bare minimal requisites of physical survival.
By widening the reach of our minds, we can come to recognize that each of these individuals lost in the invisible multitudes is actually a distinct person. No one is just a nameless entity merged in a nebulous mass; no one is just a number in the labyrinth of statistics. Each person has a name and a face—a face on which is written their hopes, worries, struggles, and fears. And if we look closely at these faces, we can see in them reflections of ourselves. Each person on this planet, no matter how remote from us, is literally a distant relative—a long-forgotten cousin who shares our deep biological ancestry. Though expressed in a different language and framed with a different syntax, their desires, aspirations, and fears correspond closely to our own. At the base of their being each person aspires to be free from suffering. Each yearns to find true and lasting happiness, to live in a safe and secure environment, to support their loved ones and provide their children with the life-enhancing benefits that they themselves, through the hard hand of fate, have struggled to achieve for themselves.
It is from this recognition of our shared humanity, of our common status as beings endowed with thought and sentience, that there can arise empathy: the solidarity that transcends all differences, the bond that bridges all distances. Yet this expanded vision also brings into view the immense weight of suffering that bears down on the lives of people throughout the world: the suffering of poverty, of hunger and malnutrition, of illness and oppression. Empathy allows us to feel with them the blows of natural disasters, the devastation of war and ethnic conflict, and the indignity of having their voices quashed by autocratic regimes. Empathy teaches us that what affects anyone affects us all.
We fail to recognize the plight of our long-lost cousins because our vision is obscured by the mist of complacency that envelops our everyday lives. When we dispel this mist and look deeply into the dark fate that hangs over the heads of our fellow human beings, we create a space in our hearts for compassion to swell up and thrive. The Buddhist classic, the Visuddhimagga, defines compassion as “the quality that makes the hearts of good people tremble with the suffering of others.” To experience compassion is to feel the suffering of others as if it were our own; but even more, to experience compassion is to be moved to act to remove that suffering. True compassion cannot remain passive.
In actual practice, compassion means different things for different people. It might mean food for the hungry, a home for the homeless, education for the young, and competent medical care for the sick. It can mean peace for those ravaged by war and freedom from violent attacks by those blinded by hate. But despite its diversity of expressions, compassion must be conjoined with a commitment to justice, driven by a conscientious concern to ensure that everyone is provided with the resources they need to realize their fullest potentials. The job of compassion is to protect, affirm, and uplift, to point to a refuge from oppression, violence, and fear.
To begin the work of compassion we first must shine a light into the darkness, to make visible the invisible suffering that haunts the lives of our fellow beings. We can’t let ourselves be lulled to sleep by the humdrum routines of our everyday lives and the gossip of social media. We must pull away the veil of apathy and look deeply into the faces of the billions who dwell at the edge of an abyss. Then, moved by compassion, we must act in the knowledge that, with a little help, each person has the potential to blossom and flourish like a magnificent flower in the sun.
Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi is the founder and chair of Buddhist Global Relief.
