COMPASSION

Compassion itself is seen to be
The Seed of a rich harvest, water for growth,
And the ripened state of long enjoyment.
Therefore at the start, I praise compassion.
--CHANDRAKIRTI

Compassion draws the world into us. When we reach out with the light streaming from under our fingernails, as Chekhov says, we can touch the world, something it is impossible to do "literally." Imaginatively, though, we can do this, and the Vidya world, the Ultimate Reality, is reached only through imagination. Therefore, compassion is a doorway, every expanding into it, until ultimately the door is all it opens into and we no longer need it. Compassion becomes our natural state and we are thereby fused to and of the world completely. In this state, we become, as Paul writes in "Hebrews" "authors of life." Our compassion shapes the world in its own image. What we think, is. First, though we must overcome our perception of ourselves as separate from anything. We have to overcome our attachment to the illusion of form.

It is easy to overlook the mentioning of the nurturing mother in the Bible. When God's harshness is mentioned, it is in a context of a father "shaping" a son, just as fire shapes matter. When the Holy Ghost's desire for our return is mentioned, it is in terms of a mother's undying compassion for her child, her desire for her child to get well again. Paul mentions in "Romans" the world in labor pains until we allow ourselves to be adopted back into the whole. Certainly the strictness of masculinity, of form, dominates the subject matter of the Holy Bible, but in the manner of the feminine, the feminine when mentioned, when present indicates an unfathomable mother whose pains we are causing by not returning to her. The Bible is written in the masculine idiom of violence, but once we tame that violence by perceiving the fire as a healing and purifying force adn the sword as a method of
"detachment" from form, the language opens up and we can experience the compassionate teachings as celebrations of the imaginative mind liberated from linearity. The Dead Sea Scrolls become anthems toward creative spirit and perception of what lies under the material surface of 10,000 things.

And there, too, we find again and again, as in the Bible, that the path to this liberation is love. Love for the whole. Once we traverse the violent shells of the Holy Bible's words and enter the mystical content, we find, on every single bloodstained page, the Buddhist notion of compassion. Shame we didn't see this before we killed everybody. . . .