Why Compassion Doesn't Do It For Me
In Praise of Big Open Heartedness
Hi y’all,
Lately I’ve been thinking about big open heartedness. I heard this term recently in a talk by a Dzogchen teacher, Lama Lena. She uses big open heartedness as a way to describe the Sanskrit Buddhist term, bodhichitta, which literally translates to “awakened mind.”
But like the best words, bodhichitta evades translation. It feels like the kind of word we should leave alone, the way we leave so many European words alone—déjà vu, saudade, duende. They evoke states of being. They summon a host of qualities rather than trying to define a quality as singular.
Bodhichitta is like that. A tiny poem contained within a single word.
Big open heartedness feels like the second line to a poem. It alludes to a sense of geography, to a place we carry around inside of us but isn’t anywhere particular. The lack of particular location makes big open heartedness feel like a dizzying challenge, something that sounds nearly impossible, but isn’t. When you consider how cruel the world is, how terribly unfair, and how tedious that cruelty and unfairness can be, how all of it is beyond repair, beyond hope, and inevitably, how none of this is going to end well—big open heartedness feels like a rebellion.
It’s funny because people get into meditation to become happier, and you do, but what