What Tibetan Buddhism says about compassion

Tibetan Buddhism does not ask you to feel compassion. It hands you exercises and expects the feeling to follow, which is a more forgiving assumption than it first appears. The concepts below begin with the four states the tradition wants to build, then move to the training that builds them, including one practice that deliberately runs the instinct backwards. Each links to its own page in the library with the source given there.

Karuna - Compassion

The wish to free beings from suffering and from what causes it. The library is careful to say this is not sentimental: it looks at causes.

The Art of Happiness

Metta - Loving-Kindness

Wanting others to be happy, with no conditions attached. It is trained in a set order beginning with yourself, which surprises people.

Karaniya Metta Sutta

Mudita - Sympathetic Joy

Gladness at someone else's good fortune. It is offered as the specific antidote to envy, which is the nearest failure to hand.

Traditional Teaching

Upekkha - Equanimity

Even-handedness. Not indifference, but care that does not rise for friends and drop for strangers.

Metta Sutta

Great Compassion

Compassion with no exceptions in it. In this tradition the exceptions are treated as the thing being worked on.

Four Immeasurables Prayer

Recognizing All Beings as Mothers

A mind-training exercise: consider that across countless lives every being has at some point been your mother. It is used to make gratitude specific rather than general.

Seven-Point Mind Training

Exchanging Self and Other

Swapping places in your own mind, until another person's wish to be happy weighs what yours does.

Bodhicaryavatara

Tonglen - Sending and Taking

On the in-breath, take in someone's pain; on the out-breath, send them relief. The practice reverses what the body wants, on purpose.

Lojong Teachings

Bodhicitta - The Awakening Mind

The aim behind all of it: to wake up for everyone's sake rather than privately. The library notes it has two parts, the wish and the work.

Bodhicaryavatara

None of this waits for warm feeling to arrive. The wish is rehearsed, breath by breath and person by person, on the assumption that a mind can be trained the way a hand can. That assumption, rather than any particular feeling, is what the tradition asks a reader to take seriously.