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What Is The Difference Between Compassion and Pity?
AllbuddhaBound
Veteran
And how does compassion make things better, whereas pity does not?
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Pity is a contemptuous sorrow or empathy. It completely lacks equanimity and action.
To me, I would say, "compassion" involves a sense of oneness and intention to action, "pity" does not.
Maybe "Compassion" is a simple dharmic concept, in that we can see why compassion is wholesome, we can explain it and it explains other dharmic ideas. "Pity" doesn't seem to have this property. Is it a higher defilement? I guess so but don't know.
One day soon we will have artificially intelligent computers, but I can't imagine we will ever have artificially compassionate computers.
namaste
Sorry, I don't understand your sentence?
Words have many ways to have their meanings expressed, none better than the other. Buddhism captures this well with its ability to teach the same truths to such diverse cultures.
We often use "compassion" as a reference to bodhicitta, at least in the Mahayana context. All I was saying is that I feel it is an insufficient translation.
That is one of the properties of dharmic terms, they have lots of ways to define them, and no way is supreamly right. So we should expect all attempts at definition to be insufficient. For example, we see this with "Dukka" as a translation/definition.
Hows about this for another attempt:
We could walk away from the wounded stranger with pity, but never with compassion.
any good?
namaste
feeling arise after seen such a truth is the compassion for the beings who are ignorance to the truth and wanting to help them to awake
that is the meaning of Great Compassion of Lord Buddha
The Four Sublime States
Contemplations on Love, Compassion, Sympathetic Joy and Equanimity
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/nyanaponika/wheel006.html
Buddha said :
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I think it all depends on how you define each term, but I'd say that to have compassion for someone is to have the desire to relieve their suffering whereas to have pity on someone is simply to feel bad about their suffering. So, in this case, I'd say that compassion is a more active emotion whereas pity is a predominately passive one.
Compassion does not seek to eliminate another's pain, merely to acknowledge the legitimacy of life's painful qualities and to acknowledge our shared human capacity to register that pain. In fact, oftentimes our attempts to alleviate another's pain is a form of aversion. In such cases, we try to make the other person feel better because their pain makes us uncomfortable. This is ignorance. We are working off the misguided assumption that there's something wrong with pain. The compassionate approach, instead, will first and foremost allow the pain to be as it is (thus eliminating the unnecessary suffering associated with blaming ourselves or another or life itself for feeling pain). Then, if the pain is the result of something action can resolve, we can take appropriate action. If we cannot resolve it through action (say, in the case of the death of a loved one, for instance), we accept the fact that we are hurting.
In some schools of Buddhism, the near-enemy of compassion is pity. Pity is the result of operating under the ignorant assumption that pain is unacceptable. On one level, it's a form of conceit. Thus, when we pity someone, we mistakenly believe that their pain is something that should not be and we feel glad we aren't them. There's a layer of separation there that isn't the case with compassion. There's also a layer of denial. The reality is that, when we pity someone, we are averse to their pain, and thus averse to the idea of pain. This will manifest itself in unskillful action (trying to make the pain go away, thus stigmatizing pain in ourselves and others, thus attempting to ignore, avoid or repress pain rather than our aversion to it) which will perpetuate our own and others' suffering.