The 14th Dalai Lama on Compassion

His Holiness the Dalai Lama on: 

“The Value and Benefits of Compassion” from chapter 7 of The Art of Happiness. The Lama feels the development of compassion as “warmth and affections, a means of improving our relationship with others” (113). He defines compassion as “a state of mind that is nonviolent, non-harming, and non-agressive. It is a mental attitude based on the wish for others to be free of their suffering and is associated with a sense of commitment, responsibility and respect towards the other.”

It must begin with self-compassion, a “natural feeling towards oneself…[we] cultivate, enhance…and extend…out to include and embrace others.” This feeling is to wish oneself, then others, to be free of our suffering (114). 

Two types of compassion: 

1. Compassion with Attatchment

2. This kind sees the lover attatchning themselves to the love of the beloved, a “feeling of controlling someone, or loving someone so that person will love you back.” The Lama describes it in the words “ordinary…partial…biased…unstable…[it] may lead [to a] feeling of closeness.” This love is volatile, easily turned into hate and the friendship into estrangement (114). 

3. Genuine Compassion is a universal compassion founded on the recognition of equality in the inherent and natural right of sentient and living beings to “overcome suffering” and have the desire to achieve this aim. When we relate to others with this in heart compassion for others no longer hangs in the balance of your status as “friend or enemy.” This right is distinct of our “own mental projection” (115). In sharing another’s suffering we develop compassion for them, whether we see a dog limping on the side of the road, or hearing about the suffering of others around global communities. Thats a really wide and tall order huh? The Lama assures that the profundity, stability and reliability of this character of heart “is much more sound, and more durable in the long run.”

The character of suffering changes with compassion in heart, for oneself then others. The Lama contrasts them by describing our own suffering as “A feeling of being totally overwhelmed…helpers…numb.” In contrast, suffering when we take on the habitual practice of extending compassion for the suffering of other sentient beings grows your heart stronger, and more capable with time. By “voluntarily and deliberately accepting another’s suffering for a higher purpose.” Compassion connects and commits us to other people. It certainly however, requires a serious passion for the development of compassion that the Lama compares to an athlete bearing the pain of training for the love of their craft or its accomplishments. The Lama mentions two techniques to develop compassion “the seven-point cause and effect method. The ‘exchange-and-equality’ method.”

Bruce Lee's Take on the 8 fold Path

1. Right View: “You must see clearly what is wrong.”

   1. You ought to be transparent with yourself about how you’re showing up in the world and how the world is showing up inside you. Honesty with one’s self about both the acceptable and unacceptable parts of our inner and outer realities makes it easier to tend to our harmful shortcomings that continue working in the background in spite of our ignoring them. 

2. Right Purpose: “Decide to be cured.”

   1. Face the ailments of the soul, our self-created and prolonged suffering that extends past healing from an actual wound. Facing them symmetrically, the alternative and resolutory choices that accompany them and “decide consciously that you don’t wish to exist in this way anymore” (160). A feat reserved for the realization of our will’s radical freedom to choose its own fate outside constructed pathways for ourselves. A will with a purpose is a strong force. We get a lot of say on the perspective we adopt and our being in the world. 

3. Right Speech: “Speak so as to aim at being cured.”

   1. Carrying with us the long-term intent of being cured. With the correct perspective, and the correct aims in the first two steps, we ought to carry forward our natural and compassionate state in the way we speak to ourselves and others. Speak with honesty, about who you are or how you relate to the world. Talk about “the problem and the solution” with openness and “optimism”. Shannon continues “Live in the possibility of your new way of being with the words that you speak.” (160)

4. Right Action: “You must act.”

   1. Act on your solution despite the inertial force of self-destructive habits. Your rehabilitation might take weeks, months or years to settle in depending on the size of your task. Find the right tool for the right task and get out of your own way. 

5. Right Livelihood: “Your livelihood must not conflict with your therapy.”

   1. “Keep the path as clear as possible”, and remove what doesn’t serve you in your life “bad habits, toxic environments, negative relationships.” Shannon adds that your livelihood extends to “your life, your aliveness, your environment” (161).

6. Right Effort: “The therapy must go forward at the staying speed.”

   1. Don’t rush and burn yourself out, be patient, don’t sacrifice your values and authenticity, remain steadfast, incrementally growing in your “therapy.” Stay centered on living for living’s sake and passing through without getting too bogged down in the end of our journey. Move “at a pace that you can sustain” (162). 

7. Right Awareness: “You must feel it and think about it incessantly.”

   1. Keep your cure in mind and be aiming for it always.” If you stray, reorient yourself back on course, be stubborn and persistent in your therapy. 

8. Right Meditation: “Learn how to contemplate with the deep mind.”

   1. Shannon describes the deep mind as listening beyond itself, it feels, expands, and integrates “with the body and the soul.” The deep mind observes rather than dissects, alters, or compares the uniquely refreshed moment of observation. Very importantly in observing our inner life, that we experience the passage of “thought to feeling to being.” By aligning our thoughts with our actions through conviction of will the “internal and the external can unite.” Lee takes a position similar to Herder, that the mind is an extension of our life force that Lee takes to be “infinite, boundless, creative” (162).

These are from Shannon Lee's book Be Water my Friend, FlatIron Books (2020)

Afsaneh Najmabadi in Reading ‘Wiles of Women’ Stories as Fictions of Masculinity

Afsaneh Najmabadi in Reading ‘Wiles of Women’ Stories as Fictions of Masculinity provides a Freudian literary analysis of the emergence of a male gaze and desire. 

A popular theme in Islamicate cultures was the “insatiable female heterosexual desire”, driving plots of treacherous adultery or a young man’s flight from the woman. In response to similar themes in Thousand and One Nights, Adrienne Rich attributes this theme to the “fear of male redundancy” as opposed to an accurate observation of the female libido. Similarly, Najmabadi reads this theme as the fear that “women could be indifferent” to men altogether; I add that it also caters to the male fantasy of a hyper-sexual woman the man has to “perpetually escape” or commandeer for his desires. The projection of hyper-sexuality onto women’s behavior or bodies, self-deceivingly serves to justify an objectifying or sexualizing gaze. Abdelwahab Bouhidba considers this theme for its cultural equivalences to the story of Oedipus which Freud so famously appropriated. 

Najmabadi observes that although Freud’s theory was developed and modeled after Euro-American cultures, some insights of his theory are universal. Namely, that “femininity and masculunitiy are cultural productions, rather than natural attributes… that they are performances and enactments” we always fall short of and that depend on continuous reproduction and “revisitation” of the values we’re socialized to attribute to masculinity and femininity (148). Pre-19th century child-rearing practices in the Middle East bring up a generation of sons who grew up in the ‘women’s world’ while men were working the fields of wreaths or bullets. This world is a female social space that extends to “women’s festivities, to the public baths…and to the women’s section of the mosque (148). 

Sons are welcomed in these spaces until the “age of recognition…around eight or nine” when the transition into the world of men gradually commences. The boy might gaze on a woman in the public baths in the ‘wrong’ way, or touch a woman inappropriately with intent short of pure. The boy consequently experiences “repeated acts of exclusion” from the spaces he has now outgrown. Najmabadi and Boudiba mark this moment with a “sense of betrayal by other-than-mother women” who assigned to a “thoughtless gesture” a newly discovered othering of male bodies from female bodies. As Bouhdiba puts it “for a boy the hammam is the place where one discovered the anatomy of other and from which one is expelled once the discovery [of otherness] takes place” (149). Along with the ahkam-i nigah, the rules of gazing, this transition from “an exclusive ‘maternalism’ to a ‘paternalism’” displaces the mother’s world to an “idealized past enveloped in fantasies, with the infantile, the feminine, the playful…”

Entering the world of men becomes an othering by women, and by a reinforcing role of men to ensure the boy has “outgrown his originary contamination with womanliness, has ended his in-between-ness.” By disavowing femininity, the boy became a man. This traditionalist right of passage for Najmabadi is the “production of a heteronormative sexuality within the domain of homosociality” where a looming threat of homoeroticism hangs over men’s bodies. The theme then, of wileness of women, is accompanied by “flights from the female, whose existence can only threaten to destroy the harmony of a male-centered universe.” At once the woman’s incessant passes are turned down, and at once “she is also destroyed.” This is especially evident in the Salman and Absal story (151). The story goes a little like this:

There was a king once who didn’t desire women and chose instead to artificially enseminate a surrogate mother. The product of this union was Salman. After years as his wet nurse, Absal plots to make the prince fall in love with her once he hits puberty. An attempt which succeeded in Salman’s obsessive and throne-abdicating infatuation with Absal. Enraged, the king set a spell on Salman so that his desire for Absal may no longer be quenched. Salman and Absal attempt a suicidal act of loving rebellion; Hijacked by the king, only Absal dies. Najmabadi notes the masogynist femicide of the motherly figure, a burning away of “impurity” and a radical detachment from the world of the mother. Instead, Salman is instructed by his tutor the hakim to distract his distress over Absal with curiosity for the constellation Venus; the love of an earthly subject for the love of a heavenly object (153).