Compassion is Natural. So Why is It So Hard For Us? | Big Think

Compassion is Natural. So Why is It So Hard For Us?

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To paraphrase a common proverb: Show me a mean and callous person and I'll show you someone whose prior compassion got mistaken for weakness.

If we understand compassion to be the natural sense of concern that arises when we encounter someone in need of help, then the main inhibitor of our natural compassionate instinct is fear. Author Thupten Jinpa, who is perhaps most well-known as the long-time translator for the Dalai Lama, explains in this video interview that social fears and pressure often lead us to repress our compassionate inclinations. Among these fears is the feeling that someone will exploit your kindness, as well as the worry that compassion is most often linked to emotion and therefore leads to irrational thinking.

"It’s very unfortunate," says Jinpa, "that these various forms of culturally acquired fear really undermine the expression of what is really natural to us as human beings, which is the ability to connect with someone and the ability to relate to that person at a deeper level and have a much more open-hearted kind of interaction."

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THUPTEN JINPA:

Thupten Jinpa Langri has been a principal English translator to the Dalai Lama since 1985. He has translated and edited more than ten books by the Dalai Lama including The World of Tibetan Buddhism (Wisdom Publications, 1993), A Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus (Wisdom Publications, 1996), and the New York Times bestseller Ethics for the New Millennium (Riverhead, 1999).

Thupten Jinpa Langri was born in Tibet in 1958. He received his early education and training as a monk at Zongkar Choede Monastery in Hunsur near Mysore, Karnataka, South India and later joined the Shartse College of Ganden monastic university, in Mundgod, Karnataka, South India, where he received the Geshe Lharam degree. He taught Buddhist epistemology, metaphysics, Middle Way philosophy and Buddhist psychology at Ganden for five years. Jinpa also holds a B.A. Honors degree in Western Philosophy and a Ph.D. degree in Religious Studies, both from Cambridge University, UK.

From 1996 to 1999, he was the Margaret Smith Research Fellow in Eastern Religion at Girton College, Cambridge and he has now established the Institute of Tibetan Classics where he is both president and editor-in-chief of the Institute's translation series Classics in Tibet. He is also a member of the advisory board of the Mind and Life Institute, dedicated to fostering creative dialogue between the Buddhist tradition and Western science.

He is a Visiting Research Scholar at the Stanford Institute for Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neurosciences at Stanford University.

Geshe Thupten Jinpa has written many books and articles. His latest is A Fearless Heart: How the Courage to Be Compassionate Can Transform Our Lives.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Thupten Jinpa: I would define compassion in a nutshell as a natural sense of concern that arises in us in the face of someone who is in need or someone who is in pain. And accompanied by a kind of a wishing to see the relief or end of that situation and wanting to do something about it. So compassion is not just an emotional reaction. There is also a more motivational kind of element, which makes us want to do something about the situation. One of the interesting things about our contemporary modern society is that given the highly competitive nature of society and also the way in which we bring up our children and the way in which we ourselves grew up, which involved a huge amount of evaluation and judgment and comparison with others from a very, very early age. We have kind of internalized a certain kind of way of being in the world and perceiving our relationship with others. And that dynamic has created a certain kind of, you know, inhibitions against our natural compassionate instinct. So and these inhibitions really take primarily in the form of fear. So for example many people worry and are afraid that if they are too kind and too compassionate that other people will take advantage of them. They will see them as pushover or weak or losers. So that’s one type of fear that we bring.

Another type of fear that we bring is that, you know, because in popular understanding of compassion it’s so dominated by compassion as an emotion,......

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