How about Burma, Somalia, Afghanistan, Libya, our streets, our neighborhoods, our own minds. We don't have to look far - and we should look far as well.

Kaz came to Switzerland where I was teaching to share with me [Heart Sutra] wondrous insight. There he and I worked on this new translation - with my part being to help render it into a verse form that would be good to chant. Since I have worked with many dying people over the years and often share the Heart Sutra with them, I found this new version that we created together to be so much more accessible to those who were facing death.

Compassion has enemies, and those enemies are things like pity, moral outrage, fear.

The roots of all living things are tied together. Deep in the ground of being, they tangle and embrace. This understanding is expressed in the term nonduality. If we look deeply, we find that we do not have a separate self-identity, a self that does not include sun and wind, earth and water, creatures and plants, and one another.

I am working on a technical paper on compassion. So I am reading everything I can on the subject, including my own mind and heart.

We live in a time when science is validating what humans have known throughout the ages: that compassion is not a luxury; it is a necessity for our well-being, resilience, and survival.

We believe that it takes a strong back and a soft front to face the world.