Compassion

 

Having studied Buddhism since childhood, I know well what the Buddha's compassion is. However, people live by the mindset that one must possess compassion to give to others.

Compassion is a wondrous effect that arises when I let go of everything. But is that easy for a human being? Letting go of myself is no different from knowing myself, yet how many people dare to claim to live knowing themselves?

How can people who have lived their entire lives with the mindset of "let me survive first" possibly understand the word "compassion"? Even as the offerings stored in their storehouses for the future rot away without receiving light, their insatiable greed only leads them to expand their storehouses further. Is this not human nature?

 

I have seen something like this before. It was when I was young. At a restaurant.

 

It seemed to be a gukbap (rice soup) restaurant in some remote village in Korea. I was traveling and looking for a good place to eat, but I was so hungry that I had stepped into a local house. Two men in shabby clothes walked in. They didn't look like they were anything special. Yet, despite there being only two of them, they ordered a single bowl of gukbap and shared it. And what the man who paid said struck a chord in my heart.

"I don't have it either, but you have even less. When you have nothing, just share!"

How desperate must these people be for them to share a bowl of rice soup?

However, the wisdom I gained from that one remark is worth a million times the price of a bowl of soup.

 

Mercy is not something you give only when you have it.

Compassion is a donation of the heart.

 

It is giving your heart for the sake of others' situations, not your own. It is a heart that can share 50 cents if you have $1.

However, in the world we live in today, the word "mercy" is hidden away and cannot be found. "I come first, so why share? You are poor because you are lacking!" This is the reality.

In this harsh reality, I feel like a fool for giving away my work here and there, thinking it was an act of mercy.

 

Mercy? I'll only give it if there is one!

 

At the foundation of humanity lies the great ideology of the mind. It is about giving the mind.

Everything is contained within the mind.