What Is Compassion?

Ungan asked, "What does Kannon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, do with her bazillions of hands and eyes?"

Dogo answered, "She's like someone reaching for a pillow in the middle of the night."

Ungan replied, "Right on. I get it."

Dogo asked, "How do you get it?"

Ungan answered, "The entire body is hands and eyes."

Dogo said, "Not bad. I'd give you a B-plus."

Ungan said, "That's my take on it. What's yours bro?"

Dogo said, "No matter where you go it's all hands and eyes."

Lots of people have tried expressing what compassion really is, but nobody has ever equaled Ungan and Dogo. If you really want to know about compassion you should study their words.

Along with Kannon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion has a lot of other names, too. Sometimes she's called "the One Who Hears the Sounds of the World" and sometimes she's called "the One Who Perceives Everything."Don't think of Kannon as one of the lesser Buddhist deities. She is the mother and the father of all the Buddhas. She's a pretty big deal.

~An edited plagiarizing of Brad Warner's work It Came From Beyond Zen

Note: In Sanskrit Kannon is known as Avalokiteshvara; In Chinese he/she is know as Quan Shi Yin.