Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
What does "compassion" mean in your language?
Ficus_religiosa
Veteran
I reckon most on this forum speak English as their native language, but for those of us who doesn't:
What does "compassion" mean in your language? How do you understand and apply it?
In my native language it's called "overbærenhed", "barmhjertighed" or "medfølelse" - the latter two mostly applying to situations where one feels with another (empathy), while the first is "understanding and forgiving".
I do not think of the term as "love thy neighbor" or "neighbor love", which in my language is called "næstekærlighed" (love for thy next).
So to me compassion becomes "to understand and forgive", "forgive" in the sense of letting go of bad feelings towards others..
(you native English-speakers can add your understanding of "compassion" still, of course)
What does "compassion" mean in your language? How do you understand and apply it?
In my native language it's called "overbærenhed", "barmhjertighed" or "medfølelse" - the latter two mostly applying to situations where one feels with another (empathy), while the first is "understanding and forgiving".
I do not think of the term as "love thy neighbor" or "neighbor love", which in my language is called "næstekærlighed" (love for thy next).
So to me compassion becomes "to understand and forgive", "forgive" in the sense of letting go of bad feelings towards others..
(you native English-speakers can add your understanding of "compassion" still, of course)
0
Comments
Compassion: The wish for someone to be free from suffering and from the causes for suffering.
I would define Buddhist "compassion" as a genuine concern that drives us to help other beings, based not on pity or merit-gathering or a feeling of accomplishment/pride, but simply upon the knowledge that the suffering of others has the same root cause as one's own suffering, and for that matter there is not truly a separation of "other" from "self".
To ease or help eliminate the suffering of others is as much to one's own benefit as the other person/being, from this adjusted (right) view that we are all part of a larger interdependent system rather than truly separate entities. Effort we put into cultivating this compassion toward even our worst enemies generates boundless wholesome karma; we can begin to think of "wrongdoing" or "evil" done by others as conditioned actions, nothing "personal" to hold against an individual, but rather belonging to the stream of causality including everything that individual (mind/body complex) has ever thought or experienced and the specific conditions of that moment.
Ok, In Ukrainian it's співчуття. It's defined as: It's actually quite insightful as the definition continues...
It goes on to define what is suffering as that which goes against our desires.
I am not throwing the words 'desire' and 'suffering' in there, that's actually the direct translation of the words. So it's quite in line with Buddhism... you can't have suffering without desire.
It says compassion is feeling other people's suffering as our own (empathy).
The prefix (спів-) means something like unity or togetherness. It's similar to the english prefix 'co' (as in co-operate.... or compassion?). The second part of the word is '-чуття' which means feeling or sensing.
The Russian word is kind of similar (Сочувствие). 'Со' (pronounced 'so', not 'co') at the start of the word means 'with' or 'together' and 'чувствие' meaning feeling.
In English, the word feeling doesn't have the same feel as it does in Russian. It's closer to 'heartfelt', I suppose.
So, in Slavic language group, it basically means heartfelt togetherness with other people's suffering.
Actually, now that I have analyzed the word, it's kind of the same as it is in English. It is the same language group after all (Indo-European).
The English word comes from Latin, meaning co-suffering. In the Slavic languages suffering is replaced with feeling/sensing.
Well there you go. It means the same thing as it does in English. Lol, so much for my analysis.
Good definitions.
With metta,
Todd