A number of years ago, the Buddhist scholar John Peacock offered a challenge that I believe is especially relevant today. He wrote: “If our quest for personal flourishing in this world, through the study and practice of Buddhism, doesn’t lead us to question the structures that give rise to hunger, inequality, prejudice, and injustice, then our Buddhism exists in a rarefied atmosphere divorced from the struggle for existence of billions of beings on this planet.”
These words ask something important of us. They ask whether Buddhism is merely a refuge from the world or whether it is a path into deeper intimacy with the world.
For many of us, practice opens through the gate of personal suffering. We sit because we are uneasy, grieving, lonely, confused, angry, afraid, or searching for meaning. The Buddha himself began with his own experience of suffering. Yet the Buddha did not stop there. He asked what gives rise to suffering. He then investigated causes and conditions, and he saw that suffering could be transformed. Then he outlined a path of transformation.
Today, I sense that we often fail to explore causes and conditions honestly and bravely. When we encounter suffering, do we merely adapt ourselves to it, tolerate it, say “This is just how things are,” or collapse under the weight of futility?
This is particularly important in a time when spiritual teachings can unintentionally become tools for accommodation. We are encouraged to be resilient, adaptable, accepting, and calm. These qualities have tremendous value. But they can also be misunderstood and misused.
A challenge in contemporary contemplative culture is the tendency to reinterpret collective and structural problems as individual psychological difficulties. Conditions rooted in economic insecurity, social fragmentation, institutional neglect, militarization, or political instability are often reframed as matters of personal resilience or emotional regulation. In this way, systemic suffering becomes privatized. The burden of adaptation falls on individuals, while the larger conditions that generate harm remain largely unexamined.
The Buddha himself began with his own experience of suffering. Yet the Buddha did not stop there.
For Buddhist practitioners, this presents an important ethical and spiritual question. Buddhism teaches us to encounter suffering directly, but it does not ask us to normalize or legitimize it. The First Noble Truth acknowledges the reality of suffering; the Second Noble Truth invites us to investigate its causes. While craving, ignorance, and aversion are fundamental sources of suffering, they are not the only causes.
Human suffering also arises through historical forces, political arrangements, economic systems, and institutional structures. Violence, dispossession, exploitation, abandonment, genocide, and social exclusion are not merely expressions of individual delusion; they are often embedded in collective conditions that shape and powerfully impact people’s lives and the environment.
When all suffering is reduced to a universal feature of the human condition, important moral distinctions often disappear. Such flattening obscures questions of responsibility, power, and justice. It can make suffering appear inevitable when, in fact, much of it is produced, maintained, or intensified by social systems.
The suffering that accompanies mortality and impermanence is different from suffering imposed through marginalization, discrimination, oppression, warfare, genocide, colonization, or deprivation. To blur this distinction is to risk transforming avoidable harm into something that appears natural or unavoidable.
A Buddhist understanding of causes and conditions, therefore, requires a wider lens. The inquiry into suffering must include not only the inner landscape of the mind but also the social, economic, political, and historical realities that condition experience. Wisdom asks us to see clearly how suffering arises; compassion asks us not to turn away from what we see. The Bodhisattva path calls for both inner transformation and an honest engagement with the structures that shape our shared world.
Recently, I read an essay by Erin Williams in her Substack “Critical Intimacies.” She astutely observes that there is a tendency in contemporary culture to translate institutional violence into personal psychological problems. Burnout becomes an issue of not enough mindfulness practice or inadequate self-care. The utter precariousness of life is reduced to issues related to personal anxiety. Loneliness and feelings of isolation become attachment insecurity. The effects of the erosion of our democracy is reduced to poor emotional regulation. Williams makes the important point that the result is that institutions remain untouched, while individuals learn to endure what should not be endured.
This is an important challenge for Buddhist practitioners, because Buddhism teaches us to work with suffering. But let’s be clear, Buddhism does not teach us to normalize suffering.
This is the difference. The First Noble Truth says there is suffering. The Second Noble Truth asks why, and sometimes the answer is not merely craving, ignorance, or aversion. Sometimes suffering’s roots are historical and political. As Williams reminds us, suffering can be the outcome of policy, policing, colonialism, warmongering, genocide, extraction, abandonment, institutional design, or systems designed to privilege some and marginalize others.
Here we see that to universalize suffering as the human condition is to flatten distinctions that matter ethically and can reshape the moral field and disperse responsibility into abstraction. As Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us, there is a difference between the suffering that comes with being alive and suffering that has been meted out by human systems.
Buddhism asks us not only to understand suffering but also to understand causes and conditions. That inquiry must include social and institutional causes and conditions. These causes and conditions are not ones that the Bodhisattva turns away from.
The Danger of Misunderstood Acceptance
One of the most frequently misunderstood teachings in Buddhism is acceptance. Acceptance is often confused with acquiescence. But they are not the same thing.
As Erin Williams has pointed out, acceptance means seeing reality clearly. Acquiescence means surrendering to harmful conditions. The Buddha accepted the reality of aging, illness, and death. He did not accept caste oppression. He did not accept violence, nor did he accept the exclusion of women from spiritual life. Again and again, he challenged prevailing assumptions of his time.
Today, many people are pushed to cooperate with conditions they did not choose and accede to systems that damage their lives. In such circumstances, agreement is not wisdom. Rather, wisdom requires resistance, and compassion requires refusal. And further, dignity requires saying no.
As Williams states so powerfully: “Resilience and acquiescence are not the same thing. Acceptance and surrender are not the same thing.” And perhaps most importantly: “We were never supposed to become better at surviving this. We are supposed to stop it.”
So What Is Compassion?
This brings us to the heart of our exploration. If compassion is not about helping individuals adapt to harmful conditions, then what is compassion? Many definitions describe compassion as concern for another’s suffering accompanied by the desire to alleviate it. This is useful but does not go far enough.
Francisco Varela, whose work has influenced many of us deeply, offered another perspective: “One of the main characteristics of spontaneous compassion… is that it follows no rules.” Compassion, for Varela, is not a moral algorithm nor a prescribed response. Nor is it a checklist or something imposed from outside. Rather, compassion emerges naturally from intimate, unfiltered participation in the lived experience. Fundamentally, it is spontaneous, unscripted, responsive, alive.
If our Buddhism does not lead us to question the structures that generate suffering, then it risks becoming disconnected from the lives of countless beings. Yet if we only critique structures without cultivating wisdom and compassion, we risk becoming trapped in anguish, anger, futility, and despair.
This insight is exemplified in a Zen koan. Yunyan asks: “What does the Bodhisattva of great compassion do with so many hands and eyes?” Daowu replies: “It’s like someone reaching for a pillow at night.”
Here, there is no deliberation, calculation, self-conscious virtue, and no ethical spreadsheet. There is simply responsiveness. The body knows what to do, the hand moves without thought, and the pillow is adjusted.
Compassion is not something added onto life. Compassion is life responding to itself.
Throughout the Body, Hands, and Eyes
The koan continues.
Yunyan says: “All over the body, hands and eyes.” Daowu says, “You only got eighty percent.” Then Daowu offers his own understanding: “Throughout the body, hands and eyes.” The difference is subtle. “All over the body” suggests compassion as something superficial. “Throughout the body” suggests something more radical. The entire body is compassion. The entire field of existence is responsivity. There is no separate observer deciding whether to be compassionate. There is only responsiveness. Hands and eyes everywhere.
This is not merely a psychological state. It is an ontological shift. The world is no longer divided into self and other. The suffering of another is not distant. It is intimate.
Compassion as Emergence
In my work of mapping compassion, I realized that compassion emerges from a complex interplay of attention, perception, embodiment, affect, cognition, and relationship. It also arises from our embeddedness in a living world. Compassion is not a thing. It is a process and is emergent, arising through participation.
Compassion emerges when another’s suffering appears within our own field of awareness, and then action naturally follows, not because we should respond but that response is in the field of embedded mutuality.
This means compassion is not simply feeling sorry for someone and trying to be helpful. Nor is it merely kindness. Compassion is a way of making sense of the world through openness, intimacy, and relationality.
Sympoiesis and Compassion
This view of compassion connects with the concept of sympoiesis. Sympoiesis means “making-with.” Nothing exists independently. Everything arises through relationship. We are not self-made beings. We are co-created beings. Every breath depends on forests. Every meal depends on soil. Every thought depends on language. Every life depends on countless lives.
Sympoiesis describes reality. Compassion is our embeddedness in and response to that reality. When we truly understand interdependence, compassion is no longer optional. It is natural, because we are making the world together.
In our sympoietic world, compassion becomes participation in collective becoming. Every compassionate act helps shape what emerges next. Then we come to see that compassion is not merely reactive. It is mutual and generative.
Compassion and Solidarity
This brings us to a crucial point. Compassion without solidarity might devolve into sentiment. Feeling concern for others is important, but if concern remains an emotion like sympathy, pity, or good intentions, it may not address the actual conditions that cause suffering.
Solidarity without compassion can become ideology. Compassion is expressed through relationship, responsibility, care, and action. Working for social change, justice, or collective causes is essential, but when solidarity loses its grounding in empathy, humility, and concern for actual people, it can harden into rigid belief systems, tribalism, or moral certainty. If this happens, people can become symbols rather than human beings.
Compassion keeps solidarity humane, flexible, and rooted in the lived experience of suffering. Solidarity gives compassion form, courage, and effectiveness in the world. From a Buddhist perspective, neither inward feeling nor outward action alone is sufficient; wisdom and compassion must be embodied in relationship, embeddedness, and collective responsibility.
The Bodhisattva path requires both. To stand with those who suffer is not only to serve them. It is also to examine the social conditions, institutions, and systems generating suffering. This is not separate from Buddhism. It is Buddhism. Dependent arising is not only a psychological teaching. It is also a social teaching. It asks us to look deeply into the causes and conditions of socially and institutionally generated harm and to respond. And as well to care for those affected by that harm.
The Bodhisattva in Today’s World
What does the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion do with so many hands and eyes? The answer today may be different from what it was centuries ago. The Bodhisattva may be a clinician addressing the inequities in healthcare. A teacher working in an un-resourced high school and calling out for support of their students. An environmentalist protecting a watershed from a data center. A chaplain accompanying a dying person who has been abandoned by their relatives. A young woman on a boat headed to Gaza. A citizen defending democracy through protests or tax resistance. A neighbor feeding the unsheltered and hungry. A practitioner speaking truth when silence might seem easier.
The Bodhisattva’s hands and eyes appear wherever suffering is met with wisdom and courageous action. Not because of ideology and not because of certainty, but because intimacy makes indifference impossible.
John Peacock’s challenge returns us to where we began. If our Buddhism does not lead us to question the structures that generate suffering, then it risks becoming disconnected from the lives of countless beings. Yet if we only critique structures without cultivating wisdom and compassion, we risk becoming trapped in anguish, anger, futility, and despair.
When we awaken to our mutual belonging, we respond to suffering at every level, from the intimate and personal to the institutional and systemic.
The Bodhisattva Way asks something more difficult. To see clearly, to feel deeply, to understand causes and conditions, to remain open-hearted, to refuse accommodation to harm, to act without hatred, and to cultivate compassion that is spontaneous, responsive, and unprescribed.
Compassion is life awakening to its intrinsic interdependence and arises from the recognition that life is sympoietic: we are beings who come into existence through relationship, participation, and mutual influence. Nothing stands alone. Everything is co-created through an immeasurable network of causes and conditions.
This insight lies at the heart of Buddhist teachings on interdependence. As Keizan Zenji wrote of the Buddha’s awakening, “I, the earth, and all beings simultaneously realize the Way.” Awakening is not merely personal; it is relational and collective. To realize our sympoietic nature is to understand that the well-being of each is bound up with the well-being of all, and from this realization compassion naturally emerges.
This understanding also reveals the reality of structural and institutional violence. If our lives are profoundly interconnected, then suffering cannot be understood solely as an individual problem. The causes of suffering are often embedded in the social, economic, political, and institutional systems that shape our lives. Poverty, racism, sexism, gender violence, environmental degradation, genocide, exclusion, and inequitable access to healthcare and education are not simply personal misfortunes; they are manifestations of collective conditions that produce harm. A sympoietic understanding of life makes visible how suffering is generated and sustained through systems of interdependence, historical conditions, and structural and institutional violence.
Compassion, therefore, is more than an emotional response to the suffering of others. It is a commitment to understanding and transforming the conditions that give rise to suffering. From this perspective, compassion is both contemplative and engaged. It asks us not only to care for those who are harmed, but also to examine and address the structures that perpetuate harm.
When we awaken to our mutual belonging, we respond to suffering at every level, from the intimate and personal to the institutional and systemic. Such compassion is not merely kindness; it is solidarity grounded in the recognition that our lives arise together and that our liberation is inseparable from the liberation of all.
This article was originally published on the Upaya Institute and Zen Center blog. It is reprinted here with permission.
