Karuṇā

Karuṇā is compassion toward beings who suffer, cultivated as a virtue and one of the four immeasurables in Buddhist traditions.

Brahmavihāra: The four Buddhist immeasurables: loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. Karuṇā is one of these four cultivated states.
Karuṇā-bhāvanā: Meditative cultivation of compassion in Buddhist practice. This is the deliberate practice of developing karuṇā.
Pāli Canon: The collection of scriptures preserved in the Theravāda Buddhist tradition. Its discourses preserve early teachings on the immeasurables.
Bodhisattva: A being who seeks awakening, especially for the benefit of all beings, in Mahayana Buddhism. The bodhisattva ideal makes compassion central to the path to awakening.
Pity: Sorrow or concern for another's misfortune, sometimes accompanied by a sense of distance or superiority. Karuṇā seeks compassionate concern without reducing the sufferer to an object of pity.
Dukkha: The unsatisfactoriness, suffering, and instability that characterize conditioned existence in Buddhist thought. Karuṇā responds directly to beings' experience of suffering.
Compassion meditation: Meditative exercises that cultivate concern for suffering and the wish to relieve it. It describes practical methods used to strengthen compassion.
Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta: A Pāli discourse presenting the practice and qualities of loving-kindness. Its verses place compassion among the immeasurable states to cultivate.
Avalokiteśvara: A bodhisattva associated with compassion in Mahayana Buddhist traditions. This figure embodies and answers the suffering that karuṇā attends to.
Empathy: The capacity to understand or share another person's feelings and perspective. Empathy can recognize suffering; karuṇā adds a cultivated wish to relieve it.

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