Lannie Rose
1 min readJan 3, 2020

--

I don’t know about your description of compassion. As I was recently reading in the book “Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst” by Robert M. Sapolsky, compassion and empathy are two quite distinct things. Compassion means understanding the suffering of others in a way that motivates us to take positive action to help them. On the other hand, when we have empathy — deeply feeling the pain of another — we are likely motivated to take action to relieve our own pain, rather than the pain of the other person. According to the book, Buddist monks practice compassion but not empathy.

--

--

Lannie Rose
Lannie Rose

Written by Lannie Rose

Nice to have a place where my writing can be ignored by millions

Responses (2)