..续本文上一页omeone. For example, when we know that someone is facing difficulties, the feelings of care and concern for them will arise naturally. This will help motivate us to make every effort to assist and to comfort them. This is the practice of loving kindness and compassion. However, most of us only direct our loving kindness and compassion toward our loved ones, but do not extend loving kindness and compassion to other beings lying outside the circle of our affections. For instance, parents are normally very worried and anxious when their children are sick, and they are willing to suffer for their children. For most of us, this loving kindness and compassion is directed only to our own children and cannot be extended to the children of others. This is due to the fact that our love is reserved for a small number of people and does not go beyond this limitation. There is a saying in Confucianism,

　　"to take care of one”s own aged parents first,

　　then extend the same care to aged people in general;

　　to take care of one”s own young children,

　　then extend the same care to young people in general."

　　Buddha teaches us to cultivate perfect equanimity as the rightly mediate state of mind in which we can further develop and extend our loving kindness and compassion.

　　In order to cultivate boundless compassion we need to deepen our understanding of the true meaning of life by applying the wisdom attained through contemplation. For instance, all-encompassing compassion has its own lucid logic when we see the facts of our lives from the luminous perspective of the Buddhist teaching of dependent origination. Consider how we human beings gregariously live together, and how the necessities to support our inpidual lives are provided through the efforts of other people in all areas of society, such as scholars, farmers, workers and merchants. Our lives and properties are protected by our governments and their laws. The feeling of sympathy for someone will of course arise when we properly understand that we are mutually dependent, and complementary to each other. Furthermore, in view of the continuum of endless rebirths, in past lives we have had an infinite number of parents and relatives who have now been reborn and who surround us in our present lives. Therefore, we should requite the debt of love we owe our parents in this life as well as the debt we owe our parents from former lives. According to the Sutra,

　　"All men are my fathers; all women are my mothers."

　　Our loving kindness and compassion should therefore not be limited to only one family, one particular race, one country, or just one species (viz. mankind), but should extend to all sentient beings in the Universe. This is the main reason why Mahayana Buddhism emphasizes vegetarianism and abstention from killing. In Buddhism, loving kindness and compassion are not purely and simply expressions of humane generosity. They also justly requite our very real indebtedness to others. The union of wisdom and compassion thus coincides with the Truth exemplified in the Buddhist teaching of dependent origination with its grand vision of universal interdependence and interrelationship.

　　Even though most religions do emphasize universal love devoid of discrimination and prejudice, the content of that love still tends to be skewed toward egocentricity. For example, the sectarian slogans

　　"Long live the believers; down with the unbelievers." and

　　"He who believes will have life everlasting and

　　he who does not believe

　　will be cast into the lake of fire forever"

　　both exhibit a fiercely monopolistic exclusiveness. All outsiders have to be destroyed. Behind this inbred, partisan “love” one can see that there lies a culture of cruelty and hatred! Compassion in Buddhism is extended equally to both enemies and l…

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