Tibetan Buddhism

Lately I've been reading Pema Chödrön on Buddhism. She writes from a Tibetan perspective and thus includes tonglen in her practice. I was not familiar with tonglen, but it's been a while since I've delved into Buddhism so I may have just forgotten. Tonglen is a practice incorporated into meditation where one breathes in whatever feels bad and breathes out whatever feels good. It falls in line with the general Buddhist idea of accepting and facing suffering as an essential part of the human condition. I suffer. You suffer. All people suffer. By embracing my own suffering and allowing myself to experience it completely I can learn compassion for the suffering of others. Tonglen attempts to add a physical component to this process.

Wah. I'm sad. You're sad. We all get sad sometimes. So what? Emotion is often a poor guide to action compared to logic. How many times have we heard compassion invoked to justify higher taxation to take care of some group's suffering? How many times has compassion for the mother (or even more fucked up, the kid) been called on to justify abortion? We have compassion for the poor people of Afghanistan who have seen so many generations of war, so let's bomb them with shock and awe! Indeed, even the word itself has Latin root "passio", as in suffering or agony, and "cum" meaning with. So to have compassion means to suffer with someone, to add your suffering to theirs as if the idea of increasing the world's suffering is a good one. I'm not buying it.