When I was thirty years old, I came across a book called The Art of Happiness. It’s about the teachings of the Dalai Lama . . . [who] explains it this way: picture yourself walking along a mountainous trail. You come across a person being crushed by a boulder on their chest. The empathetic response would be to feel the same sense of crushing suffocation, thus rendering you helpless. The compassionate response would be to recognize that that person is in pain and to do everything within your power to remove the boulder and alleviate their suffering. Put another way, compassion is empathy plus
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Compassion = empathy + action.
