By Kabir Saxena, co-director of Root Institute

Some of you will have heard of compassion-fatigue. I’d like to share with everybody what it’s like to be destitute of compassion as I experienced it for six months from January to July last year.

Munshi Sao was an old destitute we picked up in Rajgir after receiving Manjushri wisdom text transmissions from Kirti Tsenshab Rinpoche on January 27. My experience of being with him, living near him, was like a slow-motion bolt of lightning into the image of myself as basically a kind-hearted person. I will have to write verse and prose in order to describe a little of what I think and feel about the process of living with a “problematic” fellow-being, of facing up to a painful realization – an inability to actualize compassion or feeling another’s suffering as one’s own.

A million savage, brittle silences,

where no compassion is.

No warm breath on tear-streaked cheeks anymore.

Munshi, why do I love you now, now that you are gone?

Munshi was pumped with food and drink like a mother by Bill Sternhagen, who looked after him for a couple of months. His body grew a little rounder, a little brighter, and by the time Bill left, Munshi was singing:

“He Prabhu, anand-datta, sharan hamko dijiye.”

(“O Lord, bestower of happiness, please give me refuge.”)

Snippets of Ramayana, Mahabharat and what he’d picked up on his painful journeying would now and then erupt from his worn face with bright, searching eyes. But as the days grew hotter, the westerly wind drier and more scathing, the food plainer (the Westerners had left), Munshi deteriorated. He was sharing my room by now. Ten feet separated his bed from mine. But that was not the only gap between us, alas. I would begin to resent his presence. He was toilet-trained early on, but now, with his physical and mental deterioration (Bill, his mother, had left remember), his incontinence returned. Little offerings of urine and feces may be delightful to mothers, but I was no mother. I cleaned the floor dutifully again and again, but the mind was disturbed. The main problem was easy to isolate: he was no fun to be with anymore.

No songs, only complaints: “I’m not eating this food. It’s fit for the dogs!” His eruptions of anger, his nocturnal wanderings to do pee-pee; waking up the great man (me) in doing so; wetting the sheets. I mean to say, I had other visualizations for who should be an ideal roommate! That wasn’t all. Munshi demanded effort, care and attention. And that awful quality of love.

Have you ever loved when you were afraid, resentful, unable to give time and space? Don’t try; it’s impossible. Even Shantideva can’t help you if you don’t have time and attention. Whatever I did try failed. I gave Munshi a bucket to shit in. Soon I was granted the holy vision of Munshi squatting on the floor of the room, bucket tightly grasped against his left buttock, feces oozing from him like a stream of slowly moving viscous Ganga. Something inside of oneself dies at moments like that. Ego didn’t die; Hope, a spark of effortful compassion died. And I was left the poorer. Oh, I had excuses: difficult, even traumatic, work situation; loneliness, blah, blah. Yet there was no avoiding it:

Sweeping and washing after you, Munshi,

Thinking I was such a bloody great bodhisattva,

Yet knowing inside I was a sluggish, selfish worm of

a person,

Tunneling in the dark corners of myself,

Eschewing the light of non-fear.

When, many months later I read Tilopa’s words, it

struck deep:

“For if the mind when filled with some desire

Should seek a goal, it only hides the light.”

In the true fitness of things, Munshi passed away while I was in Patna. He sensed my non-love, my non-attention. I didn’t feel loss, only relief. “One less problem,” I thought. I didn’t visit his burial site and haven’t since. I don’t think I recited even one mala of manis for him. Can you believe this? I can’t sometimes. Was I suffering from some deep disturbing “hindrance” to compassion? Is my heart really so tightly closed to another’s pain? Intellectually oriented as I had been, were words, teach­ings, only cosmetic, only a facade to cover up profound inner sickness? I can’t really explain this. So now I relax more and open my heart a fraction the door of compassion, and echo Spender:

“where all that was certain and stated, falls apart into original meanings, and the words that weighed like boul­ders on us from the past are displaced by an earthquake of the heart.”

May all beings develop a warm heart.