Standards of Perfect Human Nature (Ⅴ)

Xuefeng

Ⅴ. Be sympathetic and compassionate---love

Be sympathetic and compassionate---love is the supreme level of human nature, it is the definite bridge and path to the Buddha.

Compassion is to show sympathy to the fate of human misery; sympathy is to take pity on the tragic result of each individual.

It is a sad and stirring image when you review at the history of mankind. Although there are a few images appeared to be smooth on the surface, yet under the seemingly calm picture, there is another open and secret struggle and a distressed view. Let's leave the flood Noah era and the black plague in modern Europe, and the Second World War aside. We are shocked to witness the wars between tribes, race, religion, political parties, and the interest disputes between groups and all these make us lose our confidence in life. Where is the wisdom of Human? Where is the Way out? Was the brutal struggle the optimum power to drive human history forward? We cannot but help to be grieved and be sympathetic on that account.

Okay, let's narrow the top from the entire human kind to the perspective of individual. Look at the dead, and the dying, and the thousands of millions who are going to die, how many of them have acquired a perfect life? Hunger, disease, anxiety, fear, worry, death has lodged everyone's mind and body, who can live a life as unrestrained as whishes? the temporary happiness of the poets and artists, musicians cannot conceal their long time suffering of their minds; The momentous glory of hero, millionaire, emperor cannot block their long time hesitation; The seemingly power and prestige of the Presidents does not mean their mind is more peaceful and clam than the ordinary people; the daily increasing wealth of the businessmen cannot erase their inward anxiety, let alone the helpless ordinary civilians. After thousands years exploration, man still cannot find a good way of living. Isn't that sympathetic?

Be sympathetic and compassionate will submate our personality. Without sympathy and compassion, we have no difference with plants and we will be the same as wild with beasts. Be sympathetic and compassionate will make us clever, intelligent and reasonable.

Yet we have to be cautious that for the people who are strongly self-respected, showing sympathetic and compassionate feeling is regarded as a humiliation. So we cannot easily show compassion and mercy either expression or in action. If anyone is hungry, but if he doesn't appeal to you, don't go to help him; if someone suddenly comes to harm, but if he doesn't appeal to you, don't go to help him.

Some people are unreasonable, with undistinguished love and hate, capricious, biting the hand that feeding them, if you sympathize with him and have mercy on him, and he will bring you endless troubles. Like the fable of "The farmer and the snake," the farmer showed sympathy and pity on the snake, yet was finally was bitten to death by the poisonous snake. Another example is about marriage, if you get married not because you love and fond of each other, but out of sympathy and pity, then when the days come, you will not find real happiness, and you would become the object of sympathy and compassion.