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Goddesses of Compassion: Her Name Is Kindness

Kuan Yin, She-Who-Harkens-to-the-Cries-of-the-World The Virgin Mary and Lady Liberty

The development of compassion is like wisdom: it grows through life experience. But just as growing older does not necessarily mean growing wiser, so it is with compassion. The dictionary definition and the spiritual one are the same: it is an empathic sympathy for the distress of others, coupled with the desire to alleviate suffering. Through our maternal and caregiver roles, through sharing confidences with women friends, and hearing men reveal themselves to us—something they are much more likely to do with us than with another man—we learn about vulnerabilities and the suffering of others as we grow older. In midlife and our crone years, our parents are likely to become old and dependent; and even if we have been angry or resentful at them, this, too, often changes because they are not the same people they used to be. Given circumstances such as these, the older the woman, the more opportunities she may have to know the truth about people’s lives and circumstances and if she feels for them and is thoughtful and responsive, her compassion will grow with age. However, forgiving and caretaking are not always an expression of compassion or altruism. They may express codependency.

Many women mistake codependency for compassion because both are often about feeling another person’s pain. The concept of codependency comes from the psychology of addictions; it developed from seeing a characteristic marriage pattern. One person, the alcoholic, dominates the other with selfish needs and irresponsible behavior, and can be abusively angry. The codependent partner repeatedly makes excuses and forgives, and if abuse continues, she becomes emotionally numb and unable to look out for herself or her best interests. Codependency is about putting yourself second to someone else who is self-centered. The other person may not be addicted to alcohol, but could be a driven workaholic, or obsessed by something else. The resulting match—between a narcissist and a codependent—is not made in heaven. It is a dysfunctional relationship in which the codependent learns that what she perceives or feels doesn’t really matter.

Even when a goddess of compassion is an active archetype in the codependent, the wise crone sees a clear and distinct difference between codependency and compassion. It is not as simple as saying that compassion without wisdom is codependency; a woman with wisdom and compassion might see the situation clearly, know what course should be taken, and (without Sehkmet) still be immobilized by her inability to act. As positive as these goddesses of compassion are, to identify with them is fraught with the potential to become a martyr or an enabler of another person’s worst or weak qualities.

Development of compassion is a spiritual task as well as a psychological one, and like all human capabilities that have to do with nature and nurture, easier for some than others. Girls are encouraged to be so; boys often learn that it is a liability. With an emphasis on hierarchy, on the acquisition of power or profit, on warfare and other ruthless means of domination, compassion is seen as weakness in patriarchal cultures. It is no wonder that the Greeks lacked a divinity of compassion. The Olympian gods raped mortal women and goddesses in a mythology in which obsessive or possessive sexual passion rather than compassion was emphasized. In order to find archetypes of compassion, it was necessary for me to look elsewhere, where they were to be found in female or androgynous figures.

KUAN YIN, CHINESE GODDESS OF COMPASSION

Kuan Yin means “She-Who-Hearkens-to-the-Cries-of-the-World.” For over a thousand years, in China, Korea, and Japan, Kuan Yin has been popularly revered as a goddess of compassion. Her importance and comfort to common folk who assumed that she listened to their sorrows, gives her the same meaning as the Virgin Mary in Roman Catholicism. Neither Kuan Yin nor the Virgin Mary are goddesses in their respective theological traditions, but in practice, both are prayed to as divine and holy. From a psychological perspective, they are similar archetypes.

Kuan Yin and the Virgin Mary wear robes that conceal the body; a viewer is drawn to the serenity of the face. In contrast, statues of Aphrodite as the goddess of sexual love are usually of a mostly undressed or totally nude woman. Aphrodite had the compelling power to cause gods and mortals to fall in love (or obsession); she could be without mercy or consideration of the consequences.

Kuan Yin was often depicted in paintings as standing upon a floating lotus or seated on a rock gazing out across the water. Statues of her are of a graceful and ageless robed woman, often holding in one hand a vase of “sweet dew” symbolizing the nectar of compassion, and in the other hand, a willow spray to sprinkle this nectar on the heads of those who call upon her mercy. There are also splendidly robed and bejeweled depictions of Kuan Yin that could almost be mistaken for that of Mary arrayed as Queen of Heaven. In whatever form, her chief attribute is “pure, unwavering compassion, utterly free from pride or vengefulness and reluctant to punish even those to whom a severe lesson would be salutary.”1

Just as an archetype might manifest with a different name in Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology and have slightly different characteristics, so it is in eastern religious traditions that Kuan Yin (sometimes spelled Guanyin) was known as Kwannon-Sama (Kannon) in Japan, Quan Am in Vietnam, and as Tara in Tibet. Tara is a beautiful female divinity able to manifest herself in twenty-one different forms in order to come to the aid of sentient beings.

John Blofeld, a renowned scholar of eastern religion, described in Bodhisattva of Compassion the many ways in which Kuan Yin has been perceived and understood. She was worshiped as a folk goddess whose shrines were found in pre-Communist China, throughout the length and breadth of the country, usually placed near running water or overlooking a lake or the sea. Provided only that one’s wish was not evil in itself, all that was required to pray for aid to Kuan Yin was a belief in her power to help. No degree of piety or strict conduct was required.

As Blofeld discovered as he sought Kuan Yin, she is regarded as a mental concept by some and as a goddess by others; how one sees her depends upon one’s expectation and attitude of mind. The more sophisticated perception of Kuan Yin is as a bodhisattva, which Blofeld described as similar to the Jungian concept of an archetype.

Taigen Daniel Leighton, an American Zen priest, explicitly described Kuan Yin and other bodhisattvas as archetypes. In Bodhisattva Archetypes, he describes the images that we have of them as representations of awakened qualities within our own selves, and within all beings. Bodhisattvas are dedicated to the universal awakening or enlightenment of everyone. They exist as guides and providers of support to suffering beings, and offer everyone an approach to meaningful spiritual life. The Sanskrit name for the bodhisattva of compassion is Avalokiteshvara, of which Kuan Yin is the most famous. The qualities associated with bodhisattvas of compassion are kindness, gentleness, responsiveness, empathy, and helpfulness. Simply giving people what they want and need is one of her attributes. Leighton notes that this provides the experience of generosity, which can be contagious, encouraging caring for others and loss of self-centered concerns.

To take compassionate action, one must be capable of feeling compassion for oneself and others, and the most natural way is to grow up in an environment where there is justice and love, where a child matters, and where empathy and compassion are taught by example and by story in families and in the culture. As Robert Coles, M.D., author of The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism, observed, “A child who has been treated with kindness and has been able to summon others successfully is more likely to respond to the dire straits of others.”2

The golden rule “to do unto others as you would have done unto you” is a universal message that is at the heart of compassionate action, just as the sayings that counsel us to “walk for a day in another’s shoes” are lessons about empathy. Abusive families and institutions that are indifferent to suffering and social justice teach fear instead of love, and perpetuate abuse and indifference through action and attitude.

Bodhisattvas are an ideal in Mahayama (“Great Vehicle”) Buddhism, which is the dominant branch of Buddhism in Tibet, China, Taiwan, Mongolia, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. A bodhisattva has vowed not to personally withdraw from the world as a fully awakened buddha until he or she can assist all sentient beings to become enlightened and free from suffering. Leighton makes the point that bodhisattva qualities appear in people of all religious and cultural backgrounds, citing exemplars as diverse as Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Gloria Steinem, Bob Dylan, and many other contemporary figures.

The historical Buddha was Siddhartha Gautama in sixth-century B.C.E. India. The bodhisattva of compassion, of which Kuan Yin is the most popular and well known, appears in more different forms than any other bodhisattva. There are male and female bodhisattvas of compassion, and many images are androgynous in appearance. There are systems that have described from seven to one hundred and eight manifestations of this bodhisattva. In Tibet, he is named Chenrezig. The current and fourteenth Dalai Lama is considered an incarnation of Chenrezig.

Just before he received the Nobel Prize in 1989, the Dalai Lama engaged in a series of dialogues in compassionate action at a conference. It was a lively three-day discussion between his holiness and seven psychologists and psychiatrists—of whom I was one—before a rapt audience. He changed my understanding of compassion; before this, I had thought that compassion was the same as empathy. The point he made was that genuine compassion generates a spontaneous sense of responsibility to do something to alleviate the suffering. The Norwegian Nobel Prize committee quoted a verse that His Holiness recites daily, which contains the central themes of the Bodhisattva vows:

As long as space remains

As long as sentient beings remain

Until then, may I too remain

And dispel the miseries of the world.

Compassion is presented in the bodhisattva tradition by figures that are male, female, or could be either. Psychologically, as we grow older, women and men become more androgynous, and since compassion is an evolved human quality, it is appropriate that there be a gender ambiguity in many representations of the bodhisattva of compassion, who also appear ageless. Compassion is ageless as well as the nonexclusive attribute of either sex. Many children come into the world with an inherent compassion that many adults either have lost along the way, or develop only after they have had experienced suffering themselves.

Though compassion is a universal quality and an attribute found in men, women, and children, I am calling Kuan Yin a crone archetype because the conscious awareness of its development is such a common experience in older women. Some comment that when they were younger, they were judgmental and unforgiving toward parents, and now they have compassion for them and a relationship with them. Others describe how bitter and even vengeful they had been and now they aren’t the same person. Many can remember how ignorant or afraid they were of people who were of a different social class, religion, or race, or were homosexual. Many also recall that they had no compassion for themselves, and say, “I’m not so hard on myself.” Kuan Yin makes us kinder, easier on ourselves and others. Growing older and wiser seems invariably linked with also growing kinder.

When I was in Kansas City a number of years ago, I went to the Nelson-Atkins Museum to see a stunningly beautiful statue of Kuan Yin, a painted wooden statue from about the eleventh—early twelfth century C.E. There was a serenity, strength, beauty, and grace about this Kuan Yin. Something about it, a “suchness” or presence, gave this stationary figure both a fluidity and a stillness, qualities enhanced by the similar colors and flow of lines in the ancient mural on the wall immediately behind it. This Kuan Yin was seated in what is described as a royal ease position, from which she could rise easily in response to those in need. She could be a graceful he, as the androgyny of the figure made the gender ambiguous, yet it was neither an effeminate male nor a masculinized female figure. Strength and grace, serenity and intensity came together in this Kuan Yin that drew me into a timeless contemplation.

Seeing this particular statue of Kuan Yin helped me to understand the archetype of She-Who-Hearkens-to-the-Cries-of-the-World. It’s the ability to listen empathically, accepting the person and his or her feelings, without becoming judgmental or defensive. It’s an ability to hear and bear another’s pain, anger, and suffering, which can help to relieve it. It is a responsive act that involves feeling and doing, even if no physical action can be observed. It is this kind of response that heals. This is how people who feel that what was done to them or by them makes them outcasts can be healed when they risk speaking of the reasons for these feelings. Telling this kind of secret with courage and listening with the compassion of Kuan Yin are two halves of a healing process.

The archetype of compassion is present in recovery group meetings, in psychotherapy sessions, and in any other relationships which can become vessels for healing psychological and spiritual wounds. To listen as well as to tell involves risk. It is difficult to bear witness, to listen with compassion without becoming personally affected by the story. When we listen empathically, we take what we hear into our imagination, heart, body, and soul. When what we hear from another is beyond our own experience and even our comprehension, the task and opportunity is to become “bigger” and be able to hold what we are hearing and feeling. The listener is at risk of becoming vicariously traumatized by her empathy or becoming emotionally distant when it becomes hard to listen. Kuan Yin is the archetype that we call on to be able to hear and bear our own pain and the pain of others and have mercy.

THE VIRGIN MARY

In the Roman Catholic Church, Mary, the mother of Jesus, is the “Blessed Mother.” For nearly two millennia, she has been the predominant female figure in Western culture, in religion and art, and as the inspiration for the construction of some of the most magnificent edifices in the world. The cathedrals built throughout Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, such as Chartres and Notre Dame, were consecrated to Mary. Patriarchal and monotheistic religions sup planted and suppressed the Triple Goddess, and yet in the figure of Mary, the goddess continued to be in the world.

Mary has absorbed and transformed the Triple Goddess as maiden, mother, and crone. Mary was the immaculately conceived Virgin to whom the Archangel Gabriel appeared. She was the Mother, who parthenogenically gave birth to Jesus and is depicted in her most characteristic pose as the Madonna and child, holding the infant Jesus on her lap. And, as the grieving mother of the crucified Christ, Mary was also an embodiment of the Crone.

Prayers for mercy and comfort are directed to Mary because people relate to her as a mother and as a woman who has known grief and suffering herself. In the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece, her equivalent was Demeter the mother goddess and goddess of the grain, who grieved for her abducted divine daughter, as Mary grieved for her crucified divine son. In the solitary figure of Mary, the three phases of women’s lives that correspond to the Eleusinian trinity of Persephone-Demeter-Hecate or maiden-mother-crone, can still be found.

It is the older Mary, the crone, who knew suffering herself, and not the pure young virgin, nor even the young mother of an infant that people appeal to with their prayers and offerings when they ask her to intercede in their lives. This is the Mary in Michelangelo’s Pietà, the mother who holds her dead grown son in her arms. Common folk pray to her, consciously or unconsciously making the connection between her suffering and her compassion for their suffering.

MARY AS THE GODDESS OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA

In The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley retold Arthurian legends from the viewpoint of the women in the story, as if this were the time in which the goddess and Avalon as the realm of the goddess disappeared from the world and was replaced by patriarchy and the Christian religion. This book stirred the collective unconscious of her readers. Women read it like amnesiacs, sensing there was something familiar and yet not quite remembered about a time when there was a goddess. (It contributed to the experience that led me to write an autobiographical book, Crossing to Avalon: A Woman’s Midlife Pilgrimage). At the end of the book, Morgaine—the main character who is Arthur’s half-sister and the last priestess of the Goddess—despaired at the passing of Avalon until she visited the new Christian nuns at Glastonbury and realized that while Avalon has passed into the mists, the goddess is still in the world:

“Morgaine followed the young girl into the small side chapel. There were flowers here, armfuls of apple blossoms, before a statue of a veiled woman crowned with a halo of light; and in her arms she bore a child. Morgaine drew a shaking breath and bowed her head before the Goddess.”

“Morgaine looked on the statue of Brigid, and she could feel the power coming from it in great waves that permeated the chapel. She bowed her head…But Brigid is not a Christian saint, she thought, even if Patricius thinks so. That is the Goddess as she is worshiped in Ireland…Exile her as they may, she will prevail. The Goddess will never withdraw herself from mankind.”3

Mary replaced the goddess not just as an archetype or as a divine figure, but literally so when cathedrals or churches dedicated to Mary were built on sites that were once sacred to the goddess. As Barbara G. Walker noted, “Rome’s cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore was built over the sacred cave of the Magna Mater. Santa Maria in Aracoeli on the Capitoline Hill was formerly a temple of the goddess Tanit. Mary’s churches throughout Italy were founded on shrines of Juno, Isis, Minerva, Diana, Hecate. One church was even naively named Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Holy Mary over (the shrine of) Minerva. In the sixth century, the great temple of Isis at Philae (Egypt) was rededicated to Mary. Aphrodite’s sanctuaries on Cyprus became churches of Mary, whom the Cypriots continued to address by Aphrodite’s name.”⁴

For psychological and archetypal reasons, common people turned to Mary for compassion easier than to her son, and asked her to intercede for them to him or to God the Father: human beings have expectations that mothers will listen, forgive, comfort, and be understanding and accepting much more than fathers. Even when one’s personal mother has not been so, the archetype of the good mother predisposes us to project these attributes onto maternal figures.

MARY AS A RETURN OF THE GODDESS

Catholics are often surprised that Mary is so little mentioned in the New Testament. Sally Cunneen, author of In Search of Mary, commented about this from her own experience: “What is striking in the Gospel stories is how seldom Mary is mentioned. Many of the scenes and characters I assumed were there are not; they were added by legend, art, and devotion in later centuries. No St. Anne, for example…The New Testament tells us nothing of Mary’s parentage. Nor does it have Jesus appear to his mother after the Resurrection, something later believers found hard to accept.”5

References to Mary in the Gospels are mainly related to the birth or childhood of Jesus, reported only by Matthew and Luke. Mark begins his narrative with the baptism of Jesus at the beginning of his ministry. There is precious little, fewer than two dozen mentions of Mary in the New Testament. Her only biblical role was as the human mother of Jesus, which is also the only importance she has for Protestants. There are no remnants of the goddess in Protestant Christianity except the structure of divinity as three in one: only now, the trinity is Father, Son, and a (male) Holy Spirit. In the last half of the twentieth century, a feminine dimension has entered most mainstream Protestant churches, however. Women priests and women ministers have been ordained by Protestant denominations, and gender-inclusive language has increasingly been adopted in rewritten liturgy. God is sometimes referred to as She as well as He. There have also been theological revisioning by some who see the Holy Spirit as feminine. The Holy Spirit appeared in the form of a dove in the New Testament, which is an ancient goddess symbol, associated with Aphrodite in classical Greek mythology and a feminine archetype.

In contrast, in Roman Catholicism, the Virgin Mary has been elevated in significance to where one could say that there is a Christian quaternity of Mary and the Trinity. It could be even said (especially by others outside the Roman Catholic Church) that the goddess is returning into the culture through Mary. Common people have long worshiped her as common people did the goddess before Christianity, even if her divinity was not claimed by the church. However, within the theology and dogma of the Roman Catholic Church, a deification of Mary seems to be proceeding.

Mary was declared Mother of God in 431 C.E. at the third Council of Ephesus. In 1854, Pope Pius IX declared the Immaculate Conception, in which Mary was preserved from original sin because she had been chosen by God to be the mother of Christ. In 1950, Pope Pius XII invoked papal infallibility and proclaimed the Assumption of Mary, which declared that Mary was taken up into heaven, body and soul.

There is now a major movement within Catholicism directed toward a receptive pope, asking him to exercise the power of papal infallibility once more, to declare that Mary is “Co-Redemptrix, Mediator of All Graces and Advocate for the People of God.” If this drive succeeds, the result would be what theologians call “High Mariology.” It would proclaim that Mary participates in the redemption achieved by her son, that all graces that flow from the suffering and death of Jesus Christ are granted only through Mary’s intercession with her son, and that all prayers and petitions from the faithful on earth must likewise flow through Mary. If proclaimed, so say the theologians, it would not make Mary God. In practice and in the psyche of those who pray to her, however, she becomes (if she is not already) the Divine Mother, the Mother Goddess.

In many parts of the world, the most beloved and revered image of Mary is as a dark or black madonna, whose immediate precursor in the Roman empire was black Isis, the Egyptian goddess who also suffered loss with the death and dismemberment of her husband Osiris. Shrines and temples to Isis were established in Rome and on Delos, the sacred island of the Greeks. The goddesses of the dark moon were black, the color of the crone aspect of the goddess was black, and now, in this century, there has been a great resurgence of worship and reverence for black madonnas such as Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, and the black madonnas of Montserrat in Spain, Einsiedeln in Switzerland, and Pope John Paul II’s beloved Black Madonna of Czestochowa in Poland. In the black madonnas especially people see the compassionate face of a maternal God.

Mary’s increasing significance is also expressed in the increasing number of appearances or apparitions of Mary all over the world. In the twentieth century, four hundred apparitions of Mary were reported (Newsweek, August 25, 1997). Her appearances, the interest in black madonnas, and the growing Mariology movement are catholic expressions of the return of the Goddess into the culture and a yearning for compassion.

LADY LIBERTY

We in the United States have our own version of the goddess of compassion. I realized this one morning shortly before dawn on the deck of a cruise ship as we passed by the Statue of Liberty. How breathtaking she is. This “graven image” is Our Lady of Liberty or Goddess of Liberty, or goddess of compassion. Lady Liberty (my best name for her) holds her torch aloft as a homecoming beacon and, in the words of Emma Lazarus, inscribed on the base, is saying: “Give me your tired, your poor/ Your teeming masses yearning to breathe free…” As we passed by, I remembered the Chinese students in Tiananmen Square who erected their “Goddess of Liberty” and were shot and imprisoned after their demonstration for freedom. Even if current immigration policies close the door to the world’s tired and poor, “Lady Liberty” remains as an American Kuan Yin, an archetype of “she-who-hearkens-to-the cries-of-the world.”

Time and time again, Americans have responded to natural disasters and postwar devastation around the world with an outpouring of compassionate action through volunteer efforts, donations from individuals, and aid from the government. It’s part of our national character to hearken-to-the-cries-of-the-world and rush in with help. Immediate aid efforts crop up on the heels of devastating earthquakes and hurricanes. These and long-established nonprofit organizations that help people are expressions of the Kuan Yin archetype.

Community-based organizations count most upon women in the third phase of their lives, whose children are grown and whose energies now go into volunteer work. Even with the two-career family now more the rule than the exception, this still seems to be the case. Com passionate action is a challenge to “walk your talk,” and as baby boomers come of crone age, they’ll find that Kuan Yin opportunities come their way.

COMPASSIONATE CRONES

Crone archetypes are those potentials for development in individual women who come into their crone years and continue to grow spiritually and psychologically. Compassion is the essential one, without which the others cannot be all they can be. Wisdom in its several forms becomes compassionate wisdom. Outrage demands justice, but outrage and compassion together becomes justice tempered by mercy. When compassion is present, the laughter and humor of mirth is never unkind. Compassion acts to relieve suffering, one’s own as well as others.

Compassion is unpossessive love that does not need to be reciprocated and is unrationed: the more you give away, the more you have. It is a wise crone who has learned the difference between codependency and compassion, usually through her own experience of each.