Begin with someone who is suffering, then widen the circle

Start compassion where it arises most easily — a person in real difficulty — then extend it to a dear one, a neutral person and a hostile one.

Warum es wirkt

The Visuddhimagga departs from its loving-kindness method here: compassion should not begin with a dear person, because a dear person simply stays in the position of being dear. It begins instead with someone plainly suffering, because the commentary names the proximate cause of compassion as seeing helplessness in one overwhelmed by suffering. Once that wish — “if only this being could be freed from suffering” — is alive, it is carried to a dear person, a neutral person and a hostile person, until the barriers between oneself and those three are broken down and the feeling no longer depends on who receives it.

So gehst du vor

1. Bring to mind someone you know or have seen who is in clear, present difficulty — not someone close to you, to begin with.
2. Let their situation be vivid, and form the wish in your own words: “May you be freed from this suffering.”
3. When the wish feels genuine, turn it to a person dear to you, then to someone you feel neutral about, then to someone you find difficult.
4. If resentment arises at the difficult person, return to the person who first moved you, then try again more gently.
5. Close by holding all four together — including yourself — with the same wish, noticing whether it still depends on who is in view.

Evidenz

The sequence is Buddhaghosa’s, in Visuddhimagga IX.77–81; the canonical formula it develops — spreading a heart full of compassion in every direction — appears in the discourses, for example Majjhima Nikāya 7. Hofmann, Grossman and Hinton’s review found loving-kindness and compassion meditation associated with more positive and less negative affect, and Zeng and colleagues’ meta-analysis found loving-kindness meditation increased positive emotions. Neither tests this commentarial sequence, and the meta-analysis is of loving-kindness, not compassion practice specifically. (anecdotal)

The research is for loving-kindness and compassion meditation as a family; the specific order Buddhaghosa gives has not been tested against other orders. He also notes, and rejects, a different order given in another commentary — the sequence is a tradition, not a single fixed rule.

Quellen

• Buddhaghosa. The Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga), trans. Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli, chapter IX, “The Divine Abidings.” Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society (BP 207), 2010 edition.
• Sujato, B. (trans.). The Simile of the Cloth (Vatthasutta, Majjhima Nikāya 7). SuttaCentral.
• Hofmann, S. G., Grossman, P., & Hinton, D. E. (2011). Loving-kindness and compassion meditation: Potential for psychological interventions. Clinical Psychology Review, 31(7), 1126–1132.
• Zeng, X., Chiu, C. P. K., Wang, R., Oei, T. P. S., & Leung, F. Y. K. (2015). The effect of loving-kindness meditation on positive emotions: a meta-analytic review. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1693.

Häufiger Fehler

Starting with someone you love because it feels warm — the commentary’s point is that affection for a dear one is not yet compassion, and beginning with real suffering trains the specific response to suffering.