When I was living at Gyokuryuji in Japan, I had the incredible good fortune to spend a lot of time with Zen master Shinzan. I watched him dealing with a wide variety of people. Over the years, in all those interactions, I never saw him do or say anything selfish. Sometimes he was vigorous, even fierce; other times he was very gentle. I came to realise that his motivation was to bring out the potential of the person in front of him. He wanted their suffering to end. All of these different responses, different faces, that he presented, were his faces of compassion.
Kannon is the bodhisattva or symbolic image of the quality of compassion. A popular form of Kannon in Japan, and East Asia generally, is called Juichimen Kannon – “The Regarder of the Cries of the World with Eleven Faces.” This image attempts to display the multi-faceted response to suffering that true compassion must contain.
In Zen practice, our inner-focussed meditation develops our capacity to be compassionate towards ourselves – to be unflinchingly present with our own suffering. Almost everyone in going through this confrontation with the self finds memories, experiences, tendencies and mindsets that are fearful, antisocial, destructive and greedy. It can be really quite challenging to be with this chaos. Over time, however, we learn to face absolutely all of it without discriminating or judging. Through this compassionate presence we see for ourselves how the suffering can transform and liberate.
As we develop this capacity of self-compassion, a point comes where it automatically begins to turn outwards. We begin to look at the world, and particularly other people with the eye of compassion. We discover that compassion is the simple response to suffering, beyond any distinction of self and other. We start to find that the presence of compassion – the ability to be with pain is just as powerfully transformative in the outward sphere as it is when directed within. We begin to approach the world with our ever-changing faces of compassion and we play our part in reducing the suffering of the whole.
It might appear that this is it – compassion is all we need, but the traditional presentation of the way of Zen introduces another element – wisdom, the ability to see the reality (or non-reality) of things, the capacity to come to know what is often called emptiness. This faculty too is developed through ouir inner cultivation. Compassion without this wisdom can slip into emotionalism; wisdom without compassion can be as chilly as a starry night. But the two faculties together are like a pair of legs which work together, allowing as to walk forward on our way – beginingless, endless, living what is called the life of Buddha, the compassionate life of the universe itself.