Feel compassion for someone who is causing harm but seems fine
See the person who appears to be thriving on harm as someone headed toward suffering — and let resentment soften into concern.
Why it works
The Visuddhimagga anticipates that a meditator may meet no one obviously suffering, and offers another object: a person doing harm who seems happy. Its image is a condemned robber led to execution, eating and enjoying gifts on the way — no one thinks he is really well off. Seeing a harm-doer’s present ease as temporary, and their conduct as a cause of their own future suffering, shifts the frame from “they are getting away with it” to “they are not exempt.” The commentary adds, in its loving-kindness section, that “irritation subsides too through compassion.”
How to do it
- Bring to mind someone whose behaviour harms others but who seems untroubled by it.
- Notice the resentment or sense of injustice first, without trying to argue yourself out of it.
- Then consider, as the text does, that their ease is not the whole story: conduct like theirs tends to come back on the one who does it.
- Let a wish form, if it can: “May you be free of what is driving this, and of the suffering it will bring you.”
- If the wish feels like condescension or a hidden wish for their comeuppance, stop there — that is a different state, and worth noticing honestly.
Evidence
This object for compassion is given in Visuddhimagga IX.78–79, and the use of compassion to soften irritation toward a person with no redeeming conduct appears at IX.20. The support is textual and practitioner-based; no study has examined this exercise. (anecdotal)
The commentary frames future suffering in terms of rebirth and karma; a reader who does not hold those views can still work with the simpler observation that harmful conduct tends to cost the person doing it. Compassion for a harm-doer is not approval, and it does not require staying in contact with someone who harms you.
Sources
- Buddhaghosa. The Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga), trans. Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli, chapter IX, “The Divine Abidings.” Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society (BP 207), 2010 edition.
- Nyanaponika Thera. The Four Sublime States: Contemplations on Love, Compassion, Sympathetic Joy and Equanimity (The Wheel No. 6). Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society; Access to Insight edition.
Common mistake
Letting “they will suffer for this” become quiet satisfaction that they will — the moment the thought carries relish rather than concern, it has turned into the far enemy, cruelty, wearing compassion’s language.
Practice this with IX Coach
More practices for Karuṇā: Compassion Meditation in the Theravāda Tradition
- 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.
- Catch the near enemy: grief that looks like compassion
Notice when caring about someone’s suffering slides into your own sorrow — and turn back toward the wish that they be free.
- Use compassion as the counter to cruelty
Notice the small cruelties in thought — contempt, relish at someone’s failure — and let compassion replace them.
- Let equanimity steady compassion
Hold real concern for someone’s suffering together with the recognition that much of it is not yours to fix.
- Shift from feeling someone’s pain to caring about it
When you start to feel another’s pain as your own, deliberately turn toward warmth and the wish to help.
- Let compassion become an act of help
Turn the wish that someone be free of suffering into one concrete thing that eases it.
- Include yourself among the beings who suffer
Hold your own difficulty with the same wish for freedom you hold for others — as one being among many, not as a special case.
- Know what to do when compassion becomes too much
When caring tips into exhaustion, narrow the scope, steady yourself, and come back to compassion later.
Related concepts
- Metta Bhavana: The Practice of Loving-Kindness
Systematic cultivation of goodwill toward self, others, and all beings
- Tonglen: The Tibetan Practice of Taking and Sending
Moving toward suffering on the breath — Tibetan Buddhism’s radical compassion practice
- Upekkha: Cultivating Equanimity in Meditation and Life
Steadiness without coldness — the fourth brahma-vihara in practice
- Mudita: How to Cultivate Sympathetic Joy
The antidote to comparison suffering — mechanism, method, and honest evidence
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