Dalai Lama Quote of the Week - Real Compassion

HOW TO PRACTICE:
The Way to a Meaningful Life
by His Holiness the Dalai Lama,
translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins
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Dalai Lama Quote of the Week

Real compassion extends to each and every sentient being, not just to friends or family or those in terrible situations. To develop the practice of compassion to its fullest extent, one must practice patience. Shantideva tells us that if the practice of patience really moves your mind and brings about a change, you will begin to see your enemies as the best of friends, even as spiritual guides.

Enemies provide us some of the best opportunities to practice patience, tolerance, and compassion. Shantideva [in "A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life"] gives us many marvelous examples of this in the form of dialogues between positive and negative aspects of one's own mind. His reflections on compassion and patience have been very useful in my own practice. Read them and your whole soul can be transformed. Here is an example:

For a practitioner of love and compassion, an enemy is one of the most important teachers. Without an enemy you cannot practice tolerance, and without tolerance you cannot build a sound basis of compassion. So in order to practice compassion, you should have an enemy.
When you face your enemy who is going to hurt you, that is the real time to practice tolerance. Therefore, an enemy is the cause of the practice of tolerance; tolerance is the effect or result of an enemy. So those are cause and effect. As is said, "Once something has the relationship of arising from that thing, one cannot consider that thing from which it arises as a harmer; rather it assists the production of the effect."

--from How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful Life by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins

Tags: Buddhism, compassion, Snow Lion Publications, Dalai Lama, Quote of the Week, Real Compassion, How to Practice, The Way to a Meaningful Life, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Jeffrey Hopkins