It is foolish for me to believe that I can understand what it is to be black in America today. As one commentator put it, there is Team Black and Team White, but if you are on Team White, you don't even realize you are on a team, it's just Normal. The only slight taste I get of the constant fear and loathing black people experience, the reflexive sense of caution and suspicion that Team White most often imposes on them, is the feeling of tension I sense in the parents of children I don't know but speak to in public. Because I am a man, the assumption is that I could possibly be a pedophile. Even in those I love, when I comment on how cute a little girl is, I can feel just a hint of the assumption that it might be a bit creepy for me to say that. They know me, they know I have no such predilections, but there is the blanket assumption that Male=Potential Creep that sneaks into every interaction, no matter how innocent. If asked, these people would say they are not sexist or prejudiced, they are just being cautious. Uh huh.
I can only imagine (I can truly only imagine) how dreadful this same sort of suspicion must be for Team Black in America. People cross the street. They wonder what you are doing in their neighborhood. It crosses the white mind to wonder if you truly belong in this place or that, or if you might have some nefarious purpose. I have never had the experience (literally never) of being stopped by a police officer unjustly, nor have the majority of my pale companions. But it is the rare person of color who has not had this experience (just ask them).
My point is this: I wish to consider myself a compassionate person. Compassion quite literally means "feeling with", what we might also call empathy. But because I really don't know how it feels to be a black American, there are limits to how deeply my compassion can run.
I celebrated the victory in the Supreme Court for gay marriage, but I realize that there, too, I have a very limited ability to understand the depth of meaning this has for those whose lives and loves have been further validated and enshrined in law by the highest court in the land. I can rejoice, but I can't join in. I have, after all, been able to marry for the past 41 years, and have availed myself of this privilege three times (to two people with only one divorce—it's a long story).
I can't know what it is like to be a woman. A woman who has never given birth to a child can't know what it is like to do so. We can do our best to "feel with", but there are limits. We can imagine what it is like to be another gender, but can't really know. If we have felt pain or sorrow or sadness, we can imagine what it is to be in chronic pain or deep grief or intractable depression, but this will miss the mark by light years because the very chronicity of the experience is its most salient feature. By its very nature, the pain most of us feel is short-lived and that is what makes it both tolerable and an entirely different experience from those states that seems as if they may never cease, which in fact they may not, except (one would hope) in death.
In Buddhist terms, compassion is one of the translations of the word "bodhicitta". To define things further, there are two types of bodhicitta, the relative and the absolute. It is relative bodhicitta which is sometimes spoken of as compassion. But absolute bodhicitta is emptiness or openness, and it is in this concept that we can see the truly limitless nature of compassion. While it is true that I cannot appreciate the specifics of your experience (unless you happen to be a middle-class, middle-aged, straight, white, married, male nurse), nor you mine, what I can do is strive to break down the barriers between us that make this so impossible. To put it another way, if I am so hung up on the specifics of my experience and how it is different (and therefore better, worse, superior, or more painful) from yours, then I make it impossible for us to find the common ground of feeling that opens the whole world for us to experience and share.
I understand, at least to the best of my ability, the need many people feel to separate their experience from that of the rest of the world. To do otherwise must seem like a betrayal of that experience and those who share it, whether that be the experience of color, gender, sexual orientation, poverty, politics, profession, religion, disability, parental status, education, ability, preferences, choices, needs, or what have you. But to deny the possibility of the transcendence of these categories of experience is to also deny the possibility of the end of suffering. We must never forget that the Buddha did not preach a higher moral order or a religious understanding of the world. What he taught was the definition of suffering and the real possibility of its end. By striving for the greater goal of absolute bodhicitta, we open the gate to the road of such a complete openness that we cannot divide our experience from the experience of all beings. Such divisions are artificial in any case and the reinforcement of them is the precise cause of all suffering in our lives and in the world.
In the conventional sense, compassion has nothing but limitations. But in the larger sense, the absolute nature of compassion is not a mere feeling with, but a being at One with all that is. If we can get there (if only somewhat, for it is a continuum), how can we do other than love all that is and all that can be? To live our lives there is what Joy would feel like.
My point is this: I wish to consider myself a compassionate person. Compassion quite literally means "feeling with", what we might also call empathy. But because I really don't know how it feels to be a black American, there are limits to how deeply my compassion can run.
I celebrated the victory in the Supreme Court for gay marriage, but I realize that there, too, I have a very limited ability to understand the depth of meaning this has for those whose lives and loves have been further validated and enshrined in law by the highest court in the land. I can rejoice, but I can't join in. I have, after all, been able to marry for the past 41 years, and have availed myself of this privilege three times (to two people with only one divorce—it's a long story).I can't know what it is like to be a woman. A woman who has never given birth to a child can't know what it is like to do so. We can do our best to "feel with", but there are limits. We can imagine what it is like to be another gender, but can't really know. If we have felt pain or sorrow or sadness, we can imagine what it is to be in chronic pain or deep grief or intractable depression, but this will miss the mark by light years because the very chronicity of the experience is its most salient feature. By its very nature, the pain most of us feel is short-lived and that is what makes it both tolerable and an entirely different experience from those states that seems as if they may never cease, which in fact they may not, except (one would hope) in death.
I understand, at least to the best of my ability, the need many people feel to separate their experience from that of the rest of the world. To do otherwise must seem like a betrayal of that experience and those who share it, whether that be the experience of color, gender, sexual orientation, poverty, politics, profession, religion, disability, parental status, education, ability, preferences, choices, needs, or what have you. But to deny the possibility of the transcendence of these categories of experience is to also deny the possibility of the end of suffering. We must never forget that the Buddha did not preach a higher moral order or a religious understanding of the world. What he taught was the definition of suffering and the real possibility of its end. By striving for the greater goal of absolute bodhicitta, we open the gate to the road of such a complete openness that we cannot divide our experience from the experience of all beings. Such divisions are artificial in any case and the reinforcement of them is the precise cause of all suffering in our lives and in the world.
In the conventional sense, compassion has nothing but limitations. But in the larger sense, the absolute nature of compassion is not a mere feeling with, but a being at One with all that is. If we can get there (if only somewhat, for it is a continuum), how can we do other than love all that is and all that can be? To live our lives there is what Joy would feel like.
