My issue with this specific concept is that lots and lots of people are lazy and instead of doing compassionate things, they "feel compassion" as a generic emotion through the use of meditation.

I studied Buddhism quite a while pretty seriously, and I know that a lot of the meditations involve practicing loving yourself, and your friends, family, community, and that these feelings of love are a core thing to have in your mind as your practice. But you also have to actually do things to help, it's not enough to be nice about it.

The Buddhist temple I took some meditation classes at practiced feeling good things towards people. The Episcopalians next door ran a shelter. It's not hard to see which is further on the path towards enlightenment, and it's something that seems like it's very very often missing from Western teachings.

And completely absent from self-help books about the subject, which are 100% self-centered. Lesson 1 of compassion meditation should be volunteering at a food bank, not learning to forgive yourself for your flaws. These things should be learned together, not in isolation.

This has broadly been my experience of secular meditation also, I haven’t explored any other schools.

What did help me though was a book called “Constructive Living” by David K Reynolds. It talks a lot about what you mention. The importance of “doing what needs to be done”.

I got quite into meditating, but I found it just made me go far too inside my own head. It’s easy to feel compassion inside your own house.

Yes, something about living in the moment and responding skillfully and helpfully naturally. Doing those things naturally is what takes practice, you just don't get practice exercising those compassion-action responses if you only do mantras in your own home and it remains entirely theoretical.

I suppose it's fair that in some senses "enlightenment" is orthogonal to "being good" if you use some systems of analysis. By that logic monks sequestered in a monastery are doing something important (?) even if there's little measurable impact of their work on the world around them. I have issues with that logic, I think "to whom" is important and if the answer is "to the person doing it" I'm not sure compassion is really the right adjective anymore.

Of course, translation challenges abound in this area of discussion.

Yeah fair. I asked a teacher once, "seems like Buddhists don't have the best record at service, should I be concerned about that?" and he just replied "yes."

That said, I wouldn't be dismissive about people learning to forgive themselves for their flaws ...

I suspect every Buddhist teacher will say yes to that question. But I don’t think it necessarily means they agree with the premise.

Nah, I'm not dismissive of it, it is extremely important. Self-love is critical to be able to love others. Still, my point is that compassion and actually helping people should be taught in parallel. It is better in a Sangha, of course, at least mutually.

Consider the story of Buddha’s Dog as my go-to story about how Buddhists are definitely saying you need to actually take action to help people in the world for your own self improvement, it's not enough to just feel sad about things and "want to help".

https://theosophywatch.wordpress.com/2019/06/05/tales-of-enl...

Agreed. As James 2:15 puts it:

If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food,

and one of you says to them, "Depart in peace, be warmed and filled," but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit?

I think this is partially due to meditation being strongly associated in Western culture with New Thought [1] type movements. This diverse movement is the inspiration for most of the modern self-help ideology. As the quotes from William James in that article mention, the basis is "Mind-Cure", or the idea that thinking the right thoughts leads to physically healing the body.

Many people in Western culture get into those Eastern (Taoist, Hindu, Buddhist) practices for the purpose of self enhancement. People will meditate to control anxiety, to improve focus or to increase performance in some aspect of their lives. Very often the goal is one of personal improvement, or managing some kind of idealized growth/flourishing of the individual.

Most people here would probably deride the outlandish New Age ideas that grew out of the original Christian Science underpinnings of New Thought. But I find the basic premises of new thought to be the spiritual zeitgeist of the current age.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Thought

Is this not just magic thinking? People used to (and, in many parts of the world, still do) believe in blessings/curses, magic rites etc. People believing in manifestation of thoughts in the body or the external world seems to me like magic just found a way back into our daily lives.

You're quite right, and it's something that has basically caused me to stop talking about my vipassana practice to people I befriend unless they bring it up first. When mentioning meditation or mindfulness practice, there are 2 types of people: those who say "yeah, that's nice, I should probably try that out some time" and nod along, and those who say "yeah, I did 16 self-affirmations today and visualised a new car, and listen to how it lines up with my horoscope..."

Mindfulness practice at its core is super simple, there's not much to talk about, but it's been completely associated with the self-help movement to the point that most people can't distinguish it from nonsense.

I suspect the result shown here is part of the broader tendency for people to only adopt the parts of things that make them "feel better".

Zen comes to America and it's adopted by self-absorbed people as a reason to be more like the self-absorbed people they want to be.

The advantaged of a well-thought out dogma is it can include things like a focus on compassion so that a tool doesn't just become another tool to help people rationalize their worst tendencies.

There are, of course, problems with dogmas, but I do encourage people to seek out things that challenge themselves rather than confirm their opinions and behavior.

"two wings of a bird". What a beautiful saying.