Quan. To care for, to love, family. Below in the symbol for quan is the character for “eye”. Above is a phonetic, a contraction of a word that means “nourish”.
To care for others is to look after them.
It is natural to care for others. If you are the one doing the caring, then do it happily. A mother tiger, for example, will take care of her cubs, An older brother will look after the younger. Even in the temples, one monk looks after another. And the sages often looked after one another. Let us not be so concerned with our own practice that we do not look after others.
All is Tao anyway. Who is to say that the only way to be enlightened is to be sealed in a cave? Tao is movement. Tao is diverse. Our purpose is not to look for the Tao of books. Our purpose is to look for the Tao of our lives. If you have family, or children, or a spouse, or students, or classmates, or friends, then look after them. Not because it is the right thing to do. Not because you will get something in return. But because it is part of who you are.
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Caring for people is hard sometimes. But if it is a part of who you are, you can’t help but do it. Sometimes people resent being cared about, and push you away. Some people even walk out of your lives, claining you care too much about them or insisting you must want something in return for your care. But there are other people who come into your lives and need your care as well. Most people accept care happily, some greedily, demanding more and more.
But I think caring is a part of who I am, and I have had to accept that. Just as for my mother, caring was an important part of life, it is for me as well. I don’t think I am like her in that I would care for others before taking good care of myself, though. I recognize that i need to keep myself strong in order to care for others. Sometimes, people get a bit tired of waiting for me to care for them again, but when they need me, I’ll be there. It’s just that they may be confusing what they want with things they really need.
Sometimes, I’ve even been accused of being selfish for caring for others. People confuse caring for others with neglecting loyalty to someone else. You can be loyal to one person and still care about someone else. But, obviously to those who only see selfish reasons for doing things, you must have selfish reasons to care for others. They can’t see that it’s just a part of who you are. They can’t separate your motives from what would have been their motives.
It bothers me a lot when people complain about others not living by the words of their books, like the Bible, but can’t see that these are people who obviously love and care for others. What good is preaching to someone else about their faults when it just shows that you lack caring and compassion in yourself? If you went beyond a book written thousands of years ago, by men whose motives you can’t know, and looked at what is really happening now, in the lives of people who you can know, maybe you can learn more about compassion than just what you read in a book.
Care because it is a part of who you are. Forget what anyone else says, or what a book tells you, or what you might get out of it, or if it’s right. Just care for those in your life, and don’t worry about the rest of it. Just because it is who you are.
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