In her foreword to this sterling collection of 40 stories, Joan Halifax Roshi writes: "Whether exalted lamas or ordinary students, the practitioners in this book have taken daring leaps into the unknown of their own being — into what might be called 'visionary compassion.' That is to say, compassion that goes the extra mile beyond one's comfort level, compassion that embraces self and other as one continuum."
Pamela Bloom is a meditator of 20 years with a special interest in spiritual healing. She learned about compassion while serving as a hospital chaplain, an interfaith minister, and a music critic, and by encountering the living Buddha in others. This is a new edition of her book previously published in 2000 and titled Buddhist Acts of Compassion. We have turned to it often over the years, considering it not only a book of stories but also a devotional resource. Selfless acts of love are a form of active prayer.
Here you can read about the ways in which a husband and a wife, a Tibetan Buddhist prisoner, a meditation master, a Buddhist nun, and many others show how it is possible to love without bias, to transform anger, to liberate beings, to take on the suffering of others, and to heal body and soul with compassion.
The book also contains meditations for developing compassion via metta practice and tonglen. An extra treat is a potpourri of soul-stretching quotations throughout the text like the following one by Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche: "Could we exclude any from our compassion any more than the sun could exclude any from the warmth and radiance of its rays?"
