BPS Newsletter Cover Essay #8 (Winter 1987)
                                  
                                  
                         THE BALANCED WAY
                                  
                         by Bhikkhu Bodhi
                                  



   Like a bird in flight borne by its two wings, the practice of Dhamma
   is sustained by two contrasting qualities whose balanced development
   is essential to straight and steady progress. These two qualities are
   renunciation and compassion. As a doctrine of renunciation the Dhamma
   points out that the path to liberation is a personal course of
   training that centers on the gradual control and mastery of desire,
   the root cause of suffering. As a teaching of compassion the Dhamma
   bids us to avoid harming others, to act for their welfare, and to
   help realize the Buddha's own great resolve to offer the world the
   way to the Deathless.

   Considered in isolation, renunciation and compassion have inverse
   logics that at times seem to point us in opposite directions. The one
   steers us to greater solitude aimed at personal purification, the
   other to increased involvement with others issuing in beneficent
   action. Yet, despite their differences, renunciation and compassion
   nurture each other in dynamic interplay throughout the practice of
   the path, from its elementary steps of moral discipline to its
   culmination in liberating wisdom. The synthesis of the two, their
   balanced fusion, is expressed most perfectly in the figure of the
   Fully Enlightened One, who is at once the embodiment of complete
   renunciation and of all-embracing compassion.

   Both renunciation and compassion share a common root in the encounter
   with suffering. The one represents our response to suffering
   confronted in our own individual experience, the other our response
   to suffering witnessed in the lives of others. Our spontaneous
   reactions, however, are only the seeds of these higher qualities, not
   their substance. To acquire the capacity to sustain our practice of
   Dhamma, renunciation and compassion must be methodically cultivated,
   and this requires an ongoing process of reflection which transmutes
   our initial stirrings into full-fledged spiritual virtues.

   The framework within which this reflection is to be exercised is the
   teaching of the Four Noble Truths, which thus provides the common
   doctrinal matrix for both renunciation and compassion. Renunciation
   develops out of our innate urge to avoid suffering and pain. But
   whereas this urge, prior to reflection, leads to an anxious
   withdrawal from particular situations perceived as personally
   threatening, reflection reveals the basic danger to lie in our
   existential situation itself -- in being bound by ignorance and
   craving to a world which is inherently fearsome, deceptive and
   unreliable. Thence the governing motive behind the act of
   renunciation is the longing for spiritual freedom, coupled with the
   recognition that self-purification is an inward task most easily
   accomplished when we distance ourselves from the outer circumstances
   that nourish our unwholesome tendencies.

   Compassion develops out of our spontaneous feelings of sympathy with
   others. However, as a spiritual virtue compassion cannot be equated
   with a sentimental effusion of emotion, nor does it necessarily imply
   a dictum to lose oneself in altruistic activity. Though compassion
   surely includes emotional empathy and often does express itself in
   action, it comes to full maturity only when guided by wisdom and
   tempered by detachment. Wisdom enables us to see beyond the
   adventitious misfortunes with which living beings may be temporarily
   afflicted to the deep and hidden dimensions of suffering inseparable
   from conditioned existence. As a profound and comprehensive
   understanding of the Four Noble Truths, wisdom discloses to us the
   wide range, diverse gradations, and subtle roots of the suffering to
   which our fellow beings are enmeshed, as well as the means to lead
   them to irreversible release from suffering. Thence the directives of
   spontaneous sympathy and mature compassion are often contradictory,
   and only the latter are fully trustworthy as guides to beneficent
   action effective in the highest degree. Though often the judicious
   exercise of compassion will require us to act or speak up, sometimes
   it may well enjoin us to retreat into silence and solitude as the
   course most conducive to the long-range good of others as well as of
   ourselves.

   In our attempt to follow the Dhamma, one or the other of these twin
   cardinal virtues will have to be given prominence, depending on our
   temperament and circumstances. However, for monk and householder
   alike, success in developing the path requires that both receive due
   attention and that deficiencies in either gradually be remedied. Over
   time we will find that the two, though tending in different
   directions, eventually are mutually reinforcing. Compassion impels us
   towards greater renunciation, as we see how our own greed and
   attachment make us a danger to others. And renunciation impels us
   towards greater compassion, since the relinquishing of craving
   enables us to exchange the narrow perspectives of the ego for the
   wider perspectives of a mind of boundless sympathy. Held together in
   this mutually strengthening tension, renunciation and compassion
   contribute to the wholesome balance of the Buddhist path and to the
   completeness of its final fruit.

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