02/04/2025
“Honor to the jewel in the lotus”. 🪷
Translation by
The Buddhist tradition offers us the analogy of the lotus and the mud: the lotus roots are in the sticky mud but yet it grows upward to give rise to a pristine, radiant flower. The jewel (maṇi, indicating compassion) is in the lotus (padme, indicating wisdom): oṁ maṇi padme hu̅ṁ symbolically expresses the unity of compassion and wisdom on the path of liberation (hu̅ṁ suggests indivisibility). And just as the lotus cannot flourish without mud, compassion and wisdom cannot flourish without the fertilizing power of suffering.
In the last decades many disciplines —including evolutionary psychology, social sciences and neuroscience— have been investigating how compassion works, its mechanisms and benefits. The research is rigorous and acknowledges what yogis have known since days of old: compassion is like a jewel in our hearts, an elevated state that fosters individual and collective healing, redemption, transformation and evolution. Compassion is described as a 6-steps process:** 1) perception of the suffering or need (mindfulness); 2) emotional connection with it (empathy); 3) instinctive wish for the suffering to be relieved (intention); 4) willingness to do something about it (motivation); 5) the actual compassionate action; 6) experiencing the elevated feeling (the “warm glow” of compassion).
April 2025 Jivamukti FOTM
The Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus
by Candida Vivalda