To find the balance of compassion is not easy. It's like walking a tightrope. Sometimes we are going to fall off left, and sometimes we are going to fall off right. Equanimity in a sense is a balanced mind. To put the two together is often difficult as the compassion can go wrong into grief or into anger. Equanimity is not the harder part in putting these two together, it's the compassion part. Equanimity if it changes is only going to change a bit into indifference. Compassion perks that up the minute you bring it in, but with compassion, it is so easy to fall into grief or into anger.
Think about India, many of you have been there. Think about Mother Teresa going there sixty or seventy years ago. Think about a Western person arriving in India, a young person, about eighteen or twenty. Looking at it, for so many Westerners, it's over whelming. It's easy to slide into grief thinking, "oh my gosh". Then it's easy to get angry at the Indian government for doing what they're doing and not taking care of so much of the poverty. So it's very easy for compassion to slide one way or the other.
Equanimity, to strengthen compassion, needs that foundation of wisdom. Equanimity is very strong if it has wisdom there. Someone like Mother Teresa understood that more than many other people. She just went about doing things to help. She was very strong and very stable. Her compassion and equanimity were very solid.
These are some ways of looking at compassion balanced with equanimity. Every time you go into grief, take a look at what's happened. Every time you go into anger, take a look at what's happened. Try to bring up wisdom and try to bring up more equanimity. Buddhism teaches the Law of Kamma. That all that comes to people arise due to their Kamma, to causes sown in the past.
Granted, we might not be able to see that, and we don't have to believe it a hundred percent, but to take it on as a possibility helps to bring more balance to the compassion.
In that way when a person goes to India or the middle of Africa or sees a beggar on the streets of Bangkok, equanimity and wisdom allows the person to reflect, "Every person is the owner of their own Kamma."
That stops our compassion going left or right. Yet it doesn't stop us from wanting to help. So we may still give something to the person on the street in Bangkok or those in Africa or India. We may still do something to help. We don't have to suffer, and we don't have to go into grief or into anger with them.