Compassion: Where The World's Religions Come Together

Compassion

The title of the chapter “Compassion: Where the World’s Religions Come Together” is self-explanatory. Without reading the chapter, the title alone can make a basic statement that all religions emphasize compassion. The whole chapter shows how great the act of compassion is and how it can beautify everyone’s lives. Although I do not believe in a religion, I am very compassionate which is why I was able to grasp all the ideas explained in the chapter. His holiness The Dalai Lama sees compassion as a special joy. The first paragraph states that the great religions ask their followers to be compassionate. Different verses have been taken from authentic sources of different religions as the evidence that they all believe in compassion. The religions urge the practitioners to follow compassion to achieve spiritual feats such as happiness can be achieved. The previous statement holds true at my personal level, at least, because I feel being compassionate and helping others gives one a different kind of joy and internal peace that cannot be achieved from materialistic values. The Dalai Lama goes further to explain compassion from different approaches, namely theistic, nontheistic, and secular. Each approach has a reason to exercise the holy act of compassion. When I read the last lines of the penultimate paragraph, I disagreed

The first being the ethics of restraints where a morality develops that prevents one from acting wrong that he/she does not want to happen with him/her. Different examples are pulled from different religious books to illustrate the act. All the religions converge with the same statement that harm against others is a “sin.” Although, this basic step leads to better, peaceful, and respectful way how people treat each other, Lama explains there is more that you can do. I guess most people, including me, follow this “Golden Rule” as compassion, because of incomplete