this Tuesday thing

From my morning reading:

Huangbo says, “Feeling compassion is knowing that there’s no one to be saved.” In other words, there aren’t people and things fundementally different from you, falling into the category of “those who need to be saved,” yourself falling into the category of “the one who’s doing the saving.” We are all here in this thin band of life between rock and space, and we lift each other up and we push each other down, and we help, and we don’t help, and we receive help, and it goes around and around. Sometimes we offer compassion and sometimes we receive it, and often those two things are so intimately intertwined it’s hard to tell one from the other. To put it in koan terms, sometimes you’re the host and sometimes you’re the guest. There’s humility in this understanding, and perhaps a bit of relief.”

From Joan Sutherland – ‘Vimalakirti & the Awakened Heart’