“What is the key to compassion?” Through greater and greater familiarisation, I discovered that the only time I can have pure compassion is when I am free from ego. This is what the Buddha refers to in the King of Meditation Sutra when he says, “Therefore, you teach them emptiness, profundity, peace, and non-conceptuality.”

The profound equality of all beings is known only at the moment in which the “I” no longer exists. Only through the recognition of emptiness is there stainless compassion. This stainless compassion, inseparable from emptiness, is none other than the ultimate samadhi.

-- Kyabgon Phakchok Rinpoche