Cultivating Compassion
The process of honing a mental quality, often via contemplative practice, is conveyed through the term "cultivation," which stems from the Sanskrit and Pāli bhāvanā, "bringing into being."
Such "bring into being" is similar to the birthing process or germination, but occurs in association with the mind. Citta-bhāvanā, literally "cultivating the mind," is the bringing-into-being of previously unarisen, perhaps latent qualities such as compassion. In the process of cultivation, such qualities, whether compassion or otherwise, are brought forth and made sustainable.
In a similar vein, bodhi (बोधि), which stands for awakening, is sometimes likened to a seed.
The mind of awakening, bodhicitta, is carefully and intentionally cultivated as one would cultivate a garden. Building upon our discussion of extinguishing the fires of selfish intention, we here till the soil of the mind in preparation for cultivating the seed of bodhi.
As an outgrowth of our recent discussion of the bodhisattva's path of practice through cultivation of bodhicitta, the mind of awakening, we delve into some of the nuances of such cultivation, with an emphasis on planting the roots of compassion, thereby treading lightly on earth with intention and care.
Blossoming of the Mind
While its Latin roots convey the meaning "to suffer together," compassion does no further damage, only healing damage already done. Rather than subject oneself to suffering for the sake of suffering or sacrificing one's well-being, a bodhicitta-informed compassion facilitates the recognition that the suffering of one is the suffering of all.
Such compassion is by no means an indulgence in additional suffering, subjecting oneself to another's suffering or taking a burden upon oneself that wasn't already there, but an admission of the inter-relationality already underlying all phenomena. Fires raging in the seeming distance, violence in far-off lands, are all much closer to home than we often wish to acknowledge. The reverberations resound in all directions, and although they may be felt at different times and in different degrees, they ultimately spare no one.
Tracing the roots of compassion to its seedling, we find a realistic and accessible path of practice unfold. In cultivating compassion, one brings the mind into full bloom — out of the closed-off, dark, cobweb-covered corner of its otherwise narrow frame of reference and into the open, into the light, into an expansive mode of relationality. Consider the following clarification for the meaning of bodhicitta in Tibetan.
The word for bodhicitta in Tibetan is sem kye. This literally means “the opening or blossoming of the mind.” It is the opposite of small mind, of self-preoccupation, self-contraction, and narrowness.
— Nyoshül Khenpo Rinpoche
This mind is the very ground one cultivates into an abundant garden, bursting into bloom as bodhicitta (बोधिचित्त), sem kye (སེམས་བསྐྱེད). The process of cultivating compassion unfolds in blossoming splendor, even among previously wilted flowers, lands and oceans marked with scars, communities torn asunder by conflict, so long as the seed of bodhicitta, the mind of awakening, is sustained.
Cultivating such bodhicitta is a radical undertaking, as the course of events has consistently pushed against it. In this sense, cultivating bodhicitta requires swimming against the current.
In order to change the course of collapse, whether in the climate, economy, or political structures that are in the process of collapsing, we need to change the course of our psychology and interrelational ecology, both the mindscape and the systems in which it is embedded, receiving and leaving imprints in cyclic fashion.
Roots Which Intertwine
For a future to be possible, there must be a mass reorientation from the unconscious mode of separation to conscious unification.
The mindset that perceives an individuated existence separate and cut off from its roots, this mindset that has uprooted its source of strength and thus dug itself into a barren ditch, cannot be the mindset that reverses the process.
Such a mindset itself must be reversed through bodhicitta, so that the hole that was dug is re-filled with soil and roots of compassion are regenerated. Such roots, which intertwine rhizomatically across all supposed boundaries, extend deep.
How, exactly, is bodhicitta cultivated? How is compassion to be sustained?
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