The Most Compassionate Thing You Can Do
Isn’t Always the Nicest
Compassion isn’t just about being nice. It’s an act of courage.
by Joe Hunt
If you didn’t know any better, you’d think the image of Mahakala, with its three staring eyes, dagger-like fangs, and tiara of skulls, is meant to represent the Lord of Death.
And in some traditions, the Lord of Death is exactly what it is.
But in Tibetan Buddhism, Mahakala symbolizes the powerful and ferocious quality of the compassionate mind.
Compassion is often seen as a quality that’s soft, warm, and nice. Like a harmless fluffy pink bunny rabbit with big floppy ears.
Not as a scowling monster that’s more terrifying than death itself.
But without this other side, its darker, uglier side, compassion is a pale reflection of what it can truly be for inciting positive change in yourself and the world.
If we look at the origin of the word, compassion comes from the Latin root com, meaning with, and pati, meaning to suffer.
It literally means “to be with suffering.”
You won’t be able to be with suffering if you’re idea of compassion is a pink fluffy bunny.
But when you get Mahakala on your side, compassion can become an unwavering force that cuts through negative patterns, is unphased by fear and hesitation, and doesn’t let anything stand in its way.
The Common Idea of Compassion is Half-baked
Most of the advice on compassion centers around being nicer and kinder and gentler to yourself and others.
One of the top Medium articles on compassion talks about reminding yourself of life’s simple pleasures, being less self-critical about past mistakes, and writing a kind, loving letter to yourself once a week.
Such advice is no doubt beneficial. But as it is more or less the only narrative, it can paint a one-dimensional picture of compassion as being the simple and passive act of taking it a bit easier on yourself and not judging others so much.
Taken too far, this can kind of compassion can actually become a crutch that works against your true intentions.
The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche had a name for this kind of overly nice compassion: “idiot compassion”.
Idiot compassion is when you do what appears to be the nicest or kindest thing, instead of doing what actually needs to be done and what would be the most beneficial.
This happens most often when you want to do good by someone or not hurt them, or don’t want to be seen in a negative light or disliked.
It’s the nodding and agreeing with your partner that he’s right so you don’t have to have another argument. It’s not taking a stand at work because you might piss off your boss or look silly in front of your colleagues. It’s walking away from your mom instead of speaking your mind so you don’t land in her bad books.
Idiot compassion is also something you do to yourself.
It’s cutting yourself too much slack and pretending that an extra hour in bed is an act of self-love instead of going to the gym. It’s convincing yourself that the environment isn’t actually that important to avoid the effort of sorting through the recycling. It’s pretending you’re happy in your current job or career and not making the uncomfortable shift.
This type of compassion is like shooting yourself, and those around you, in the foot.
When we see compassion as only having one face, it will only ever be a way of reducing short-term discomfort and increasing feeling-good feelings.
It will never be the powerful force it is for decreasing long-term harm and suffering and moving yourself and others in a more positive direction.
Without the terrifying and powerful qualities of Mahakala, compassion won’t take a stand and face being shunned, looking bad in front of others, or enduring the grind that is necessary for life-changing work.
When its two faces come together, however, then it can provide the strength, determination, and kindness to not have to avoid or push away these more uncomfortable sides of life—but to run after them screaming for a hug.
It becomes wise compassion: the courage to fully embrace all of life’s pains, sorrows, heartaches, and disasters with an open heart, and act in a beneficial way for yourself and those around you.
Wise Compassion is the Courage to Face Discomfort
This kind of compassion takes a lot of courage.
In today’s world, it takes a lot of courage to speak up in the face of being disowned, disliked, and canceled.
It takes tremendous courage to pick yourself up and do what you know is right in the face of an infinite number of distractions, immediate pleasures, and endless easy routes out.
If you only understand compassion as a soft and passive quality, you may decide it’s not worth it. You may decide to just take it easier on yourself, to lower your expectations to the ground, to quit being so righteous, and to give in to the desire for comfort and security and approval from others.
But as you can figure, this is often extremely far from the most compassionate thing you can do for yourself, and for the rest of us.
If idiot compassion is believing the nicest and kindest thing to do is always the right thing, wise compassion is understanding that the right thing to do is often not the nicest or easiest or most pleasant thing.
And having the courage to do it anyway.
As is shown by the ferocious face of Mahakala, being compassionate does not mean being a pushover. Being compassionate does not mean living in a fantasy world where everything is all sunshine and rainbows and discomfort and conflict and haters and disagreement doesn’t exist.
It means being open and courageous enough to be with your suffering, to not close down or turn away from life’s difficulties, and to face them all head-on.
Of course, you need to remember compassion’s other side: its softer, gentler, and more patient qualities. You need to be patient when turning toward difficulty as it’s a process that doesn’t happen overnight. You need to be gentle as even when you choose the courageous act and take a stand or put in the effort, it may not always work out the way you wanted or intended it to.
But you also need to remember that compassion isn’t just a pink fluffy bunny with big floppy ears. Compassion is a massive, powerful, wise, and formidable death bunny that has everyone’s best interests at heart, but that doesn’t need to bow down to their every whim and demand to achieve them.
True, wise compassion is a force that confronts all of life’s inevitable difficulties and challenges and, instead of ignoring them or running away, stares them right in the face with its three eyes and breath of fire and gives them a big sloppy kiss right on the chops.
After all, the kindest and most courageous acts of compassion often come in the most unassuming and unexpected of forms.
Idiot Compassion and Mindfulness
by Derek Beres
Compassion is an important concept, and even more important practice to integrate into one’s life. Like all ideas, layers underlie the meaning. One of the most fascinating is what Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche termed ‘idiot compassion.’
His well-known student, Buddhist nun and author Pema Chodron, explains: It refers to something we all do a lot of and call it compassion. In some ways, it’s what’s called enabling. It’s the general tendency to give people what they want because you can’t bear to see them suffering.
Chodron exposes the danger in this: instead of offering a friend medicine, bitter though it may be when ingested, you feed them more poison—at the very least, you don’t take it away from them. This, she says, is not compassion at all. It’s selfishness, as you’re more concerned with your own feelings than attending to your friend’s actual needs.
Granted, saying uncomfortable things to someone close to you is no easy task. If they are violent or depressive, criticism could send them spiraling. Yet enabling is not good either. Stepping up and being a teacher in challenging situations requires great tact and care, and does not always work out how you intended it to.
As I’ve been exploring this concept this week in my yoga classes, I began thinking about the ways we enable ourselves as well. We are extremely good at self-deception, using bad habits as crutches for some future good we imagine is right around the corner. We trick ourselves with the ‘one more’ syndrome: one more cigarette, one more drink, one more email to the ex who refuses our pleas.
The issue is really expectation: we fear upsetting our friend, or ourselves, because we don’t want to make things uncomfortable. We choose short-term avoidance over what we perceive to be longer term suffering. Since we don’t inherently know what the future state holds, we choose what we think to be the most comfortable path, persisting in our folly without becoming wise.
The hardest part is not imagining the future. Hypothesizing is what our brains do, which is why suffering lies at the heart of Buddhism. Two things keep us locked in a perpetual state of conflict: expecting reality to conform to what we want it to be and demanding the future unravels as we hope it will. When one or both of these projections fail, we blame the situation rather than our expectations.
One powerful form of changing these habits of enabling is mindfulness meditation. As neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson has written, habitual manners of dealing with emotions are the product of both genetics and experience. Some of us are genetically inclined to be more resilient and compassionate than others, but it is our life experiences that define our outlook, and how we treat others (and ourselves). As he writes, Mindfulness retrains these habits of mind by tapping into the plasticity of the brain’s connections, creating new ones, strengthening some old ones, and weakening others.
In his research Davidson has found that mindfulness practitioners exhibit greater activity in the left prefrontal cortex—they are able to redirect thoughts and feelings while reducing anxiety and strengthening resilience and well-being. Put in Tibetan Buddhist terms, meditators are able to shift both their reactions to situations, as well as their reactions to their reactions.
Oftentimes when something happens in our lives, we say, ‘Why did that happen to me?’ as if the weight of billions of years of history has led to this moment just for you. Fortunately, meditation helps one overcome this overbearing sense of self. It loosens the grip of the brain’s ‘me center.’ You begin to view the world in terms of collectivity instead of individuality, and thus are able to process your emotions better.
When this occurs—when you are mindful of your thoughts from a third-party perspective and attain some level of control over the direction they unfold—idiot compassion becomes impossible. You no longer aim for long-term habits or short-term pleasure. Rather, you do what’s best for the present you, or the friend you’re engaging with. In that way, everyone benefits, even if it takes a little while for the medicine to kick in.