Engaging Compassion

A working list of projects where compassion is part of how the software is built, rather than part of how it is sold. The list is not meant to be comprehensive, and the entries are short notes rather than endorsements.

The Plum Village App is one of the few mindfulness products of any scale that is run by the people who teach the practice. It was built by the monastic community founded by Thich Nhat Hanh. The meditations are recorded by the monks and nuns themselves. There is no advertising.

Insight Timer is more of a marketplace than a monastery. The teacher roster is broader than usual, with academic clinicians and trauma-informed practitioners alongside the more familiar names, and the core of the platform has stayed free.

Crisis Text Line is a free 24/7 crisis service. Volunteers are trained and clinically supervised. The choice of text over voice was deliberate, made for reasons of access and safety. The service has had public trouble, particularly over the use of conversation data for research, and that is part of the story too.

7 Cups was founded by the psychologist Glen Moriarty. The product is built around active listening by trained peers, with licensed therapy available on top when the user wants it. Active listening in the counsellor's sense, not in the marketing sense, is what the interface is organised around.

Be My Eyes connects blind and partially sighted users with sighted volunteers, and now with an image-recognition model, for live visual help. There is no monetisation layer. The product is strangers giving each other small amounts of attention, organised by code.

The Center for Humane Technology is not itself a product, but most of the people now building in this area cite its work somewhere in their reasoning. It was founded by Tristan Harris, formerly a design ethicist at Google. It publishes the Ledger of Harms, a set of design guidelines for non-extractive products, and research on what attention-extracting software does to the people who use it.

Woebot is on the list for what it tried to be: a mental-health chatbot grounded in published evidence, with a rule-based scaffolding rather than a free-form language model. Woebot Health has since shifted away from the consumer product toward clinical partnerships. The original design discipline still matters.

Charter for Compassion runs the network Louisville joined when the city adopted the Charter, along with the directory and toolkits that go with it. The software is plain. It is the connective tissue of a movement, not a product.

The list will be revised.

English uses one word, compassion, for several things that Sanskrit and Pali keep apart. That is part of why the Dalai Lama can be hard to read in translation: the surface word covers several different ones underneath.

The four main ones are the brahmavihāras, the divine abodes, set out by Buddhaghosa in the Visuddhimagga and inherited by Theravāda and Mahāyāna both. Karuṇā, the same word in both languages, is compassion: the wish that beings be free from suffering. Maitrī in Sanskrit, mettā in Pali, is loving-kindness: the wish that beings be happy. It is a different cultivation from karuṇā, though English readers usually merge them. Muditā is sympathetic joy, gladness at someone else's happiness without measuring it against your own. Upekṣā in Sanskrit, upekkhā in Pali, is equanimity, the steadying ground that keeps the other three from drifting into sentimentality or burnout.

Bodhicitta, awakening-mind, is the larger Mahāyāna term. It is the aspiration to attain awakening for the sake of all beings. Karuṇā is one of its emotional grounds. Śāntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra spends most of its length on what taking bodhicitta seriously involves, and the Dalai Lama's commentaries return to that text.

There is one distinction the Dalai Lama has drawn in conversations with Paul Ekman and Tania Singer that is useful for English readers: karuṇā versus what most of us mean by empathy. Empathy in the modern sense is feeling-with, registering someone else's distress in yourself. It is unstable on its own. It can tip into personal distress, and it can produce the fatigue anyone who has worked in care knows. Karuṇā is empathy plus the wish to relieve, and the wish is what keeps the feeling-with from consuming the person feeling it.

Thupten Jinpa writes about this in A Fearless Heart, and it is the framing behind the compassion training course he developed at Stanford. The English word does the work of several Sanskrit ones at once.

Louisville signed the international Charter for Compassion in November 2011, Greg Fischer's first year as mayor. The Charter had been launched two years earlier by the religious historian Karen Armstrong as a statement of compassion shared across traditions, drafted by representatives of several of them. By the end of 2011 a few dozen cities had signed on. Louisville's adoption was reported as the largest in North America at that point. The claim came from Fischer's office and was not, so far as we can tell, independently audited.

Fischer ran on three pillars: a healthier city, a city of lifelong learning, and a more compassionate city. The first two are the kind of thing every American mayor says. The third is unusual enough that it is worth taking seriously when an administration says it and then assigns staff to it, which is what happened here.

The most substantive piece of work to come out of the framing has been the Compassionate Schools Project, launched in 2014 in Jefferson County Public Schools as a partnership with researchers at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education. The project introduced a curriculum of contemplative and social-emotional practices into a set of elementary schools, with a randomised-controlled evaluation arm running alongside. It is one of the few attempts in the country to study what mindfulness and emotional-literacy training actually do in a public-school setting at scale, rather than as a wellness add-on. The results so far have been mixed, which is what serious educational research usually looks like.

The Give A Day Mayor's Week of Service, running annually since 2011, is the other piece worth recording. Several hundred thousand acts of service are reported each year, organised through a coordinating office that connects volunteers with nonprofit and faith partners. It is a less philosophically loaded programme than the schools project, but the scale is real, and it sits inside the Charter framing rather than being adjacent to it. Louisville also hosts the annual Festival of Faiths, the gathering that brought the Dalai Lama to the Yum Center in 2013, and which has continued to convene Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim and indigenous voices each spring since.

What none of this resolves is the harder question of whether a city becomes more compassionate by being told it is, or by being given programmes that train particular practices, or by something less measurable than either. Fischer's bet, made repeatedly in interviews and in his book Compassionate Louisville, is that civic compassion is a habit, and that habits respond to deliberate practice. It is not a hypothesis that the methods of city government are well-equipped to test. But the programmes are real, the funding has been sustained, and the framing has held up across two re-elections. Whether the framing outlives the administration that put it in place is an open question, and one we will come back to.