“Compassion without wisdom can easily become another form of harm.” — a reflection inspired by the Diamond Sutra

By Jane Sonnenschein · First drafted July 15, 2026 · Revised October 12, 2026

Some time ago, I came across a post that was not particularly long, but it stayed with me for quite a while.

It was about a Chinese woman who had married a man in Africa. Later, she discovered that her husband had not only deceived her, but already had a family there. She wanted to return to China, but for various reasons she could not get herself out of the situation, so she turned to a Chinese man working locally for help.

At first, he did not want to get involved. The risks were considerable, and if anything went wrong, the consequences might not fall only on the woman asking for help. He could be drawn into the trouble as well. But after seeing her cry and beg repeatedly, he eventually decided to take the risk and help her return to China.

Up to that point, I think most people would feel relieved. Someone in a desperate situation had finally found a person willing to reach out a hand.

But the story did not end there.

The woman then asked whether the three children could be taken back to China as well. At that point, the nature of the situation changed completely. Helping one adult who could make decisions for herself was one thing. Taking three children across borders as well involved a completely different level of legal procedure, risk, and responsibility.

In the end, it did not work out, and the man who had originally stepped in out of kindness also found himself in trouble.

There was one comment under the post that I kept thinking about afterward. Roughly speaking, it said: if you look at the world with pusa xin, you will see suffering people everywhere; but if you look at the world through karma, you may also realize that many difficult situations do not simply appear out of nowhere.

At first, that sounds a little cold. It can easily remind people of the saying that someone who is pitiful must also have done something to deserve their situation.

But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that the real question was not whether someone “deserves” our sympathy. The harder question is this: once we decide to help someone, how far should that help go?

In the past, when I saw someone in trouble, I tended to begin with their situation. If someone had nowhere left to turn and was standing in front of you crying and asking for help, it was natural to imagine yourself in their place. If I were ever that desperate, I would probably hope that someone would be willing to pull me up too.

There is nothing wrong with that kind of sympathy. In fact, if someone can look at another person’s suffering and feel nothing at all, I am not sure that kind of detachment deserves to be called rational.

But as I have grown older, I have gradually realized that sympathy can tell us, “This person is having a very hard time.” It cannot always tell us what we should do next.

What we usually see is only the final scene of a much longer story.

A person may have reached a difficult place because of bad luck, because of the time and circumstances they were born into, or because someone else hurt them. But their own decisions over many years may also be part of the story. Real life is rarely clean enough to be explained by only one of these things.

Recognizing that choices have consequences is not the same as standing somewhere safe and blaming someone who is already suffering. Nor does it mean that every hardship is something a person brought upon themselves.

I see it more as a question of boundaries.

I can understand what has happened to you. I can help within the limits of what I am able to carry. But that does not mean I have to take over every responsibility in your life.

Thinking about this reminded me of Alicia.

She really believes in the idea of karma.

There was once a classmate who bullied her. Later, when that child got hurt, Alicia told me very seriously, “Mom, see? That’s karma.”

Another time, we were rushing to catch a train. She took out her little angel charm and quietly said something like, “Please, please, let the train come quickly.”

By coincidence, the train arrived almost immediately. She was delighted.

“See? It really works.”

Children seem naturally drawn to the idea that the world has some kind of order. Good people should receive kindness in return. Doing something bad should have a cost. Effort should not simply disappear without meaning, and treating others sincerely should not leave you losing forever.

There is something rather lovely about that belief, because it gives a child a sense that the world may be complicated, but it is not completely random.

Adults eventually learn that reality is nowhere near so tidy.

Good people are not rewarded immediately just because they are good, and people who do harmful things do not necessarily face consequences the next day. Some people try hard to live well and still run into one misfortune after another. Others behave selfishly for years and seem to live perfectly comfortable lives.

If we understand karma as an instant reward-and-punishment system, it clearly fails a great deal of the time.

But if we stretch the timeline a little longer, I still believe that the choices people repeatedly make gradually shape the environment they later find themselves in.

Someone who constantly avoids responsibility may not pay an obvious price straight away, but over time people begin to trust them less. Someone who repeatedly takes advantage of other people’s kindness and keeps passing their own problems on to those around them may find that there is always someone willing to help at first, but fewer and fewer people remain willing later.

The reverse can also be true. Someone who is consistently honest and dependable may never receive some dramatic “reward” for it, but that way of living often makes it easier to build steady, lasting relationships. And when that person genuinely needs help one day, there may be more people who are willing to trust them.

That is closer to what I mean by karma now.

It does not have to be mysterious, and it does not have to work immediately. Choices accumulate. Relationships remember. And many of the situations we face today are usually made up of several things at once: chance, circumstances, and consequences that have slowly taken shape over time.

Because of that, I no longer think the question “Should I help this person?” can always be answered with a simple rule.

There are certainly times when we should help. Someone may have suffered an accident, been hurt by another person, or simply fallen into a situation that is very difficult to climb out of alone. If we have the ability to reach out, I still think that kind of kindness is precious.

But helping someone does not mean that once we reach out, we have to keep walking beside them indefinitely.

Sometimes what matters is whether the person receiving help is also trying to carry the part that still belongs to them. Are they using the hand you offered to stand up again, or are they making one new request after another until your life is being pulled into the hole as well?

Both situations can look like “helping someone in difficulty” from the outside, but they are not the same thing at all.

That is what stayed with me about the story in the original post.

The Chinese worker may initially have thought he was simply doing something kind within his ability by helping a woman in trouble. But once the request expanded from helping one adult to taking responsibility for three children as well, the nature of the situation changed. So did the risks and responsibilities.

If at that point he still felt unable to say no simply because “she is suffering,” then kindness itself could begin to turn into a reason for accepting unlimited responsibility.

I used to think of boundaries as something rather hard, almost as if having boundaries meant being cold or uncaring.

Now I tend to think the opposite.

If someone wants to remain kind over the long term, perhaps they need to know what they can realistically carry—and when they need to stop.

Because kindness without boundaries is very easy to exhaust.

And when someone is repeatedly hurt or taken advantage of because they keep helping others, they may eventually swing to the other extreme. They stop trusting anyone who asks for help and become unwilling to feel sympathy for anyone at all.

That is not the outcome I want either.

At the same time, turning “karma” into an easy tool for judging other people can be just as dangerous.

When someone’s life is going badly, it is far too easy to look at the result and casually say, “They must have done something wrong before.”

That has very little to do with genuinely understanding cause and consequence. It is simply a convenient way of explaining someone else’s life after the fact.

A great deal of suffering is not created by personal choice at all. Illness, accidents, the family someone is born into, changes in society, or simply the people they happen to meet can alter the course of a life.

So karma should not become an excuse for losing sight of chance, unfairness, or innocent suffering.

When I think again about that comment about pusa xin and karma, I no longer see them as opposing ways of thinking.

Pusa xin asks us, when we see someone suffering, not to rush immediately into judgment.

Karma reminds us that understanding someone’s situation does not require us to take responsibility for their entire life.

Compassion without judgment can become endless self-sacrifice. But a belief in consequences without compassion can just as easily become coldness.

The difficult part has probably always been somewhere in between.

We can say to someone, “I know things are very difficult for you, so I am willing to help where I can.”

And at the same time, we can also say, “But there are things you will still have to face yourself.”

Those two sentences do not contradict each other.

Perhaps kindness with real strength was never about carrying someone else’s entire life on our own shoulders. It is about reaching out where we genuinely can, and knowing when we have reached the point where we need to stop.

Because what someone needs is not always another person to keep absorbing the consequences for them.

Sometimes what they need is one hand to pull them up—and then the chance to learn how to stand on their own feet again.

That is probably what compassion means to me now: seeing someone’s hardship without rushing to blame them, being willing to help when I can, while still remembering that both of us have our own lives and our own boundaries.

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Notes

1. púsà xīn (菩萨心) — Literally “a bodhisattva heart.” In everyday Chinese, the phrase describes someone who is especially compassionate, soft-hearted, and quick to feel sympathy for people who are suffering. It draws on the Buddhist image of the bodhisattva as a being motivated by compassion, but in ordinary conversation it does not necessarily imply religious belief. In this essay, pusa xin refers to the impulse to see suffering first and want to help, while “karma” represents the need to also consider responsibility, choices, and consequences.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 当菩萨心遇见因果律：可怜人，到底值不值得帮？

German version: Wenn Pusa Xin auf Karma trifft: Sollte man jedem helfen, der einem leidtut?