The Balanced Way
By Bhikkhu Bodhi
Like a bird in flight borne by its two wings, the practice of Dhamma is sustained
by two contrasting qualities whose balanced development is essential to straight
and steady progress. These two qualities are renunciation and compassion. As
a doctrine of renunciation the Dhamma points out that the path to liberation
is a personal course of training that centers on the gradual control and mastery
of desire, the root cause of suffering. As a teaching of compassion the Dhamma
bids us to avoid harming others, to act for their welfare, and to help realize
the Buddha's own great resolve to offer the world the way to the Deathless.
Considered in isolation, renunciation and compassion have inverse logics that
at times seem to point us in opposite directions. The one steers us to greater
solitude aimed at personal purification, the other to increased involvement
with others issuing in beneficent action. Yet, despite their differences, renunciation
and compassion nurture each other in dynamic interplay throughout the practice
of the path, from its elementary steps of moral discipline to its culmination
in liberating wisdom. The synthesis of the two, their balanced fusion, is expressed
most perfectly in the figure of the Fully Enlightened One, who is at once the
embodiment of complete renunciation and of all-embracing compassion.
Both renunciation and compassion share a common root in the encounter with suffering.
The one represents our response to suffering confronted in our own individual
experience, the other our response to suffering witnessed in the lives of others.
Our spontaneous reactions, however, are only the seeds of these higher qualities,
not their substance. To acquire the capacity to sustain our practice of Dhamma,
renunciation and compassion must be methodically cultivated, and this requires
an ongoing process of reflection, which transmutes our initial stirrings into
full-fledged spiritual virtues.
The framework within which this reflection is to be exercised is the teaching
of the Four Noble Truths, which thus provides the common doctrinal matrix for
both renunciation and compassion. Renunciation develops out of our innate urge
to avoid suffering and pain. But whereas this urge, prior to reflection, leads
to an anxious withdrawal from particular situations perceived as personally
threatening, reflection reveals the basic danger to lie in our existential situation
itself -- in being bound by ignorance and craving to a world which is inherently
fearsome, deceptive and unreliable. Thence the governing motive behind the act
of renunciation is the longing for spiritual freedom, coupled with the recognition
that self-purification is an inward task most easily accomplished when we distance
ourselves from the outer circumstances that nourish our unwholesome tendencies.
Compassion develops out of our spontaneous feelings of sympathy with others.
However, as a spiritual virtue compassion cannot be equated with a sentimental
effusion of emotion, nor does it necessarily imply a dictum to lose oneself
in altruistic activity. Though compassion surely includes emotional empathy
and often does express itself in action, it comes to full maturity only when
guided by wisdom and tempered by detachment. Wisdom enables us to see beyond
the adventitious misfortunes with which living beings may be temporarily afflicted
to the deep and hidden dimensions of suffering inseparable from conditioned
existence. As a profound and comprehensive understanding of the Four Noble Truths,
wisdom discloses to us the wide range, diverse gradations, and subtle roots
of the suffering to which our fellow beings are enmeshed, as well as the means
to lead them to irreversible release from suffering. Thence the directives of
spontaneous sympathy and mature compassion are often contradictory, and only
the latter are fully trustworthy as guides to beneficent action effective in
the highest degree. Though often the judicious exercise of compassion will require
us to act or speak up, sometimes it may well enjoin us to retreat into silence
and solitude as the course most conducive to the long-range good of others as
well as of ourselves.
In our attempt to follow the Dhamma, one or the other of these twin cardinal
virtues will have to be given prominence, depending on our temperament and circumstances.
However, for monk and householder alike, success in developing the path requires
that both receive due attention and that deficiencies in either gradually be
remedied. Over time we will find that the two, though tending in different directions,
eventually are mutually reinforcing. Compassion impels us towards greater renunciation,
as we see how our own greed and attachment make us a danger to others. And renunciation
impels us towards greater compassion, since the relinquishing of craving enables
us to exchange the narrow perspectives of the ego for the wider perspectives
of a mind of boundless sympathy. Held together in this mutually strengthening
tension, renunciation and compassion contribute to the wholesome balance of
the Buddhist path and to the completeness of its final fruit.