Empathy and Compassion

(This is an edited version of a Dharma talk given at the Berkeley Buddhist Priory on March 1, 2026)

Today I will talk about the practice of empathy and compassion, because these two aspects are reciprocal. Compassion is the opening of our hearts so we can embrace and feel the suffering of others. Empathy is the ability to recognize, understand, and share the thoughts and feelings of another person. Empathy allows us to feel our connection to another being because we have some sympathetic understanding of what they are experiencing.

There is a medical condition, Hyper-Empathy Syndrome, that certain people have, where they feel too much of what other people are feeling — if somebody scratches their nose, they’ll actually feel as if their own nose is being scratched. We all have some sensitivity to what others around us are experiencing. Just think of watching a movie where a knife cutting someone is too graphic; you feel something. Horror movies would not work without empathetic feelings.

The reverse — feeling too little — is what psychopathsand sociopaths have: they don’t feel what other people are feeling. It’s interesting to read how different people cope with that lack of sensitivity. We are all living with varying degrees of sensitivity. In Buddhism, the training is learning how to do our best with the sensitivity we have been given and then cultivating ways to open our minds and hearts so we become more sensitive and connect better with others. Humans are social animals and we all have a deep need to share our lives with others. For instance, children’s need for affection is as deep as their need for food.

In Buddhist practice we are cultivating our empathy and our understanding of whoever is part of our lives. A common example of how we can lack empathy is when we hold fixed opinions and ideas about how people and things should be. This comes up clearly in life, because whenever we feel angry and upset, what is actually happening is we are suffering due to our lack of wisdom, empathy and  compassion.

I remember talking to someone who got really upset at the monk running the temple they were in. He said, “That monk lost his temper with me, and I don’t like him. I’m not going to put up with that.” I told him: “Do you want a world where it’s simply wrong for someone to lose their temper, rather than having the empathy to realize that you may have done something that bothered the monk? Even if the monk was completely wrong, where in samsara will you ever find the being who is always right? And also, what will you do when you are the one who is completely wrong? Will you be angry and upset with yourself rather than working on having compassion and empathetic understanding of why you made the mistake?”

It’s a very human thing that the people we get upset with are often the very ones we’re closest to, because they’re the ones who’ll put up with our anger and irritation. I remember when my mother developed dementia, she was having a hard time and she was often upset with my father. He said to her, “Why are you upset with me?” She’d say, “Who else can I be upset with?” She was a nice, sweet woman; the only person she was comfortable being angry and irritated with was her husband.

The point is that no one is always anything. Assuming someone is always a certain way is itself a lack of empathy for the fact that all people have many different sides to themselves and almost everyone can get angry, irritated, selfish and frustrated. These are normal human feelings that arise in all people, including great Buddhist Masters. However, through our Buddhist practice, we can cultivate the wisdom and compassion that frees us from having a strong reaction to these difficult feelings. We can gain better control over our difficult emotions so that they do not cause serious problems.

We free ourselves in Buddhism by wholeheartedly accepting the present situation we find ourselves in. That is why compassion is essential so we can be willing to embrace and understand all suffering in our own lives and all the suffering that we encounter with others. Everyone is having some degree of difficulty with life. Even people who insist everything is fine often carry a great deal of anxiety, worry, and fear underneath a stiff upper lip. People often just assume their difficult feelings are just an inescapable part of the human condition rather than realizing there is a way to free ourselves from our deluded reactions to our difficult karmic conditions that are causing us to feel fear, anger or despair.

I remember talking to a relative who simply didn’t want to talk about old age and dying, as if not talking about it would help them not to suffer. Pretending and pushing difficulties away doesn’t help; it just makes it harder when you actually have to deal with them.

In Buddhism, we try to cultivate what Buddhism calls the Four Immeasurable States. It is pointing to enlightenment when we cultivate these Four Immeasurables — compassion, loving-kindness, equanimity, and sympathetic joy for others. These open our hearts and allow us to feel and embrace what others are experiencing and feeling. This is how we free ourselves from suffering. It opens our heart to trusting that nothing is being fundamentally lost in all the suffering in samsara. This helps us so that all good and bad conditions in our life can both freely flow into our hearts and minds but also so we are not creating a barrier that stops them from flowing out of our hearts and minds. The open heart does not cling to the pain and suffering we experience and this allows all the suffering to flow back out of our heart. We do not need to carry our painful emotions and memories around like a burdensome weight.

Sometimes I will hear someone say, “I can’t waste my compassion on that” as if we only have eight ounces of compassion to ration out carefully. But real compassion is tapping into a limitless, boundless stream; we should never put any limits on it. We access that by trusting that, in the end, nothing is really being lost. Pain is just feeling. Nothing is fundamentally hurt when we experience pain. You don’t need to cling to it; it’s just passing through us, like changing weather. We don’t actually possess pain or any feelings, just as we don’t possess our happiness or unhappiness. They are all arising and passing with the same substance as a dream.

Wisdom in Buddhism is not wisdom unless we are seeing with the eyes of compassion and empathy. Whatever mistake is happening in the human realm is being made simply because this behavior is what humans actually do. When we call something inhumane, we are looking at it wrongly because all inhumane behavior is always part of the range of what humans actually do. It will always be part of the human realm that some people are treating others very well and some people are treating others very poorly. That’s the human condition. We need to have empathy for the reasons people make mistakes and do wrong. The world can become a better place with more peace and happiness only through people cultivating more empathy so they can gain more understanding of others’ feelings, thoughts and behavior.

Question: “I tend to think of empathy as a feeling, but it sounds like you’re describing it more as a point of view.”

We cultivate empathy through the right point of view — our feelings are influenced by our thoughts. If we’re critical of somebody, we won’t feel empathy, because we’ll feel the criticism instead. If someone gets angry with you, what do you feel? But you can direct your mind toward trying to understand why they’re angry. And when you feel hurt by someone’s anger, it is good to ask yourself, why do I care what this person thinks of me? It’s remarkable how much energy we put into caring what others think of us. With empathy, you’may gain insight into what’s underlying their anger, but with wisdom and empathy you also see that it doesn’t really matter — it’s just someone floating feelings and opinions. What frees us in Buddhism is not taking to heart what everyone thinks and feels about us, but taking the Dharma to heart.

Buddhism is really about having the Right View, which leads to the right feelings. But the important thing in Buddhism isn’t how much empathy you feel, but rather how much you have right behavior and do that which will bring the most good. And you have to let go of the idea that someone shouldn’t be the way they are. That way of looking at someone will get in the way constantly, because however they are is how they are. It might be good if they were different, but that’s always true of everyone; we could all be a much improved version of ourselves.

Question: “I work in housing services, and we deal with a lot of compassion fatigue — how do you cultivate empathy and compassion when you feel you’ve lost it from being worn down?”

What often happens in the helping professions is that you get overloaded — there’s too much to deal with, it hurts too much, and you become insensitive as a form of self-protection. That’s a normal reaction, and it’s part of why there’s so much burnout in fields like social work, where people are suffering and you often can’t help them, or people are actively destroying their own lives and you can’t find a way to change their destructive behavior.

We all need to bring ourselves back to what is the mind of meditation and the Dharma: being still, being present, trusting that nothing is fundamentally going wrong, that this is simply the nature of things. People suffer; people are in pain. You have to stay open to that without letting your mind spin out over how it shouldn’t be happening or how awful it is. These thoughts will naturally arise, but dwelling too much on them doesn’t help. All you can usefully dwell on is: what can I do here? Wise compassion is staying open to all the suffering without believing something is fundamentally wrong with the world — this is just the nature of the world. We can’t even picture a world in which children aren’t sometimes mistreated. Can we conceive of a world where every parent is a good parent? It’s inconceivable, because many people are always going to be dealing with a myriad of difficulties that can make them bad parents.

Question: “Do we have to have compassion for ourselves before we can have compassion for others?”

It’s very hard to do it the other way around. The main thing that blocks compassion is the judgment that things shouldn’t be happening this way; that is the real source of our lack of compassion. There is always a karmic reason that people are angry, selfish, proud or greedy. In Buddhism, until you can stop judging yourself — “I shouldn’t be this way” — you’ll have trouble accepting the faults in someone else. I always notice I find it harder to tolerate my own faults when I deal with someone who has the same faults as me. If someone is opinionated about the very thing I’m opinionated about, I find it much harder for me to let go.

We have to first trust that it’s okay to be ourselves — that what’s “wrong” with us isn’t a fundamental problem; it is just something we need to work on. And for others, we recognize: yes, they may need to work on something, and it is possible they may never fully get there in this lifetime. That is an obvious truth when we look at the lives of everyone we know. For instance, some people have had such a rough childhood or other serious difficulties that they may never fully move past it in this life; that’s just the nature of karma.

We can cling to the idea that something is wrong when someone is suffering, but suffering comes from our desires and it is impossible to conceive of a reality in which everyone’s desires are fulfilled. For instance, envy and jealousy come from our ill will that someone else is getting what we desire. We are both suffering and then perpetuating our suffering through our misguided views of what is causing the suffering. This is unfortunate, but it’s also how life works: the lessons we haven’t learned will keep returning to our lives. If you struggle with anger, anger keeps showing up as a teaching; can we learn to stop reacting this way? The same is true of greed, fear, despair; they keep returning until we see through them and recognize how we are actually choosing to suffer.

With Right View, we train ourselves to keep offering the Dharma to our own delusions, rather than, for instance, the wrong view “this person is making me suffer”. It is our delusions and defilements that are making us suffer. What solves our suffering is cultivating the compassion and trust that there is real goodness that is filling everything; the Buddha Heart is the real ground of existence. When we look at our life with deluded eyes, we can be filled with anger, fear, or burning desires. This does not change the living reality of the all-embracing Buddha Heart.

Buddhism is teaching us the truth that we don’t possess our feelings; they are something passing through us, which is why they don’t stay. There is a delusion that when something upsets us, we assume that we will remain upset. But even when we are truly furious, we don’t stay that way; it’s exhausting. We can maintain a low simmer of upset, and we can rekindle our angry feelings by telling ourselves “I should still be upset about this,” but the feeling itself is ethereal and will just pass through us eventually.

In Buddhism, we are seeking to have a spacious mind and heart that lets everything simply arise and pass. We are trying to trust that everything we experience is transient and thus has no fundamental substance. Everything in our life is arising and passing like a dream. If someone tells me how wonderful I am, that has no substance. It is just a feeling generated by someone’s opinion. If someone tells me how awful I am, it is the same thing. Neither carries real weight or deep importance. The real ground of Buddhist training is to see through the seeming substance of our hurt feelings and our good feelings. We need to just bring ourselves back to just concentrating  on what is right thought and right action in the present moment, and this helps us to open our hearts to that which is boundless.

There’s real freedom in recognizing “I am not this feeling” rather than simply allowing our feelings to fill us and drive our behavior, as most of us tend to do. This underlies the practice of accepting whatever we are being given in the present situation. As the Buddha said: “volition is the doer of karma; feelings are the reaper of karma.” All our choices are generating good and bad karma. In our present life, we are experiencing the karmic consequences of our past right choices and our past wrong choices. When I act upon my karmic tendencies to be greedy, selfish, or angry, I am generating future suffering for myself and others. When I choose to be kind, generous and compassionate, I am generating future peace and happiness for myself and others.

One of the easiest places to see the karmic consequence of right and wrong actions is to look at our personal relationships: how we create karmic patterns in how we relate to the people we are close to and this in turn will then produce specific feelings. If someone irritates you, the teaching is for us to understand why we are allowing this behavior to disturb us. If you’re patient with someone when they make a mistake, you set up a karmic pattern in which they are more likely to be patient with you when you make a mistake. If you’re always irritable, others are likely to be less patient with you. I remember seeing this in the monastery: someone was surprised their teacher wasn’t as patient with them as they were with another monk. Yet they did not recognize that they often had behaved with anger and irritation with their teacher, which naturally, in turn, affected how their teacher related to them.

Freedom comes from realizing nothing is actually binding us; the feelings are just feelings. This is why meditation is teaching us to be still and present without reacting to whatever thoughts and feelings arise. Notice what we are feeling but try not to blindly react. Sometimes our difficult feelings quickly dissolve. Sometimes they linger, but given time, everything we experience flows back to the source, the Bodhicitta, the Buddha Heart.

I remember, early in my own meditation practice, having a difficult phone call with my mother; she pushed some familiar buttons. Nothing was wrong with our relationship overall; it was just normal friction where she could get under my skin. I got off the phone irritated, sat down to meditate, and the feeling simply dissolved. I realized I don’t have to stay upset. I can just meditate and that actually helps me to learn how I can let something go.

Seeing that everything is, in a sense, Buddha is part of how pain dissolves when we stop holding onto it. In Buddhism, “emptiness” doesn’t mean things aren’t real — it means they have no fixed substance. None of our pain, none of our feelings, have any substance, otherwise we could never fully let go of them.

In Trust in the Heart, by the third Chinese Zen ancestor, Kanchi Sosan teaches: All suffering and pain, if you seek serenity in oneness, will dissolve all on its own. If you look deeply enough and trust that there’s nothing solid underneath whatever we are experiencing, everything begins to become less solid and start dissolving. In Buddhism, everything is regarded as a Buddha, both ourselves and everything else.

Buddha bows to Buddha. 

We bow to whatever life is giving us 

in this present moment. 

We bow to youth, we bow to middle age, we bow to 

old age and disease, and we bow to dying.

We bow to all the good in our life and 

we bow to all the good in the world.

 We bow to all that is going wrong and creating 

suffering with the wish to help all beings 

to see beyond all suffering and find the 

unshakable peace and joy of the Buddha Heart.

Priory News

by Rev. Kinrei

I went to Shasta Abbey for almost three weeks in September to attend a gathering of monks of our Sangha. It was good to see many monks I had not seen in years and to be able to join in the life of the monastery. We had meetings about some issues we are facing as a Sangha and as a religious order. I am very grateful for the deep training of so many of my fellow monks and for the harmony I experienced in the Sangha.

We held our yearly Segaki ceremony on Sunday, October 4. It was good to make this yearly offering to the hungry ghosts. We held the ceremony outside on a warm day. We also had a potluck lunch, which was well attended, with the usual wonderful offering of different foods.

With Gratitude

Charity is one of the four wisdoms and demonstrates the Bodhisattva’s aspiration. The generosity of the entire Priory Sangha is what makes it possible for the Priory to exist and for the Dharma to be freely offered to whomever is interested.In recent months, we have been given many generous gifts, including books, gongs, statues, altar cabinet, soil, fertilizer, plants, paper goods and cleaning supplies. 

Providing monks with food is the traditional offering given when coming to a Buddhist temple, and we appreciate all the generous food offerings we have been given. During the past few months we have been given food donations of pies, salsa, various vegetables and fruit, cheese, soy milk, coconut milk, tofu, breakfast cereal, oats, vegetarian burgers, vegetarian meats, coffee, teas, nuts, various chips and fruit preserves. You are always welcome to check with the Priory on what foods are currently needed.

. Introductory Meditation Retreat

October 24   January 30  (10 am–5 pm)

This introductory meditation retreat  will provide an introduction to the sitting meditation and the basic teachings of the Soto Zen tradition. It will include meditation instruction, several period of meditation and a Dharma talks on how to practice meditation and integrate Buddhist teaching with our lives. A vegan lunch is included with the retreat. 

Priory Meditation Retreats

October 10   November 14   December 12   January 16

Retreats are an excellent way to deepen our meditation and training. The retreat is 8am to 5pm and the day is a mixture of meditation, Dharma talks, spiritual reading and Buddhist services. 

Spiritual Counseling

Rev. Kinrei is available to discuss your spiritual practice and to help you to better apply the Dharma to your life.  Taking refuge in a senior member of the Sangha is an important aid in gaining a better perspective and deeper insight into our spiritual life. It is also helpful in learning to cultivate openness and trust. You are welcome to contact the Priory and arrange a time to talk, either in person or by phone or Zoom..

Meditation Instruction

Meditation instruction and an orientation to the practice at the Priory are offered each Thursday at 6:45 pm. Please arrive a few minutes early so that we can begin promptly at 6:45. The instruction is followed by a 7:30-8:05 pm meditation period. We ask all people new to our practice to attend this instruction. The meditation instruction is free, as are all the activities at the Priory. If your schedule will not allow you to come on Thursday evening, you are welcome to call the Priory to try to arrange a different time for the instruction.