The power of their compassion has been rooted in the fact that they themselves have overcome the entrapment of suffering. They have broken the link between painful circumstance and mental resistance. They have gone beyond it. This doesn’t mean that they have denied the experience of pain. In Gethsemane, on the cross, throughout his life, Christ surely felt and understood the burden of human incarnation. In his humanity, he experienced it. But in his divinity, he transcended it and transformed it into redemption and liberation, a possibility for all. So too the Buddha, having seen what he saw,
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