Real Life Compassion

This story in the NYT, "Meeting Death With a Cool Heart" about the stoic, compassionate reaction of the Thai people to the tsunami tragedy rang a bell: an acquaintance of mine in India was describing his visit to Thailand and he said he had been struck by the gentle, peaceful mannerisms and the attitudes of the Thais: "It is the Buddhism they practise," he told me. Mind you, this acquaintance is a well-read scholar of the Hindu books and believes in the lofty achievements of Hindu thought and way of life. So it was a little surprising that he had observed the tranquil effects of Buddhism on the life-views of the Thai people, as opposed to, I would assume, the absence of such deep effects on his fellow Indians by the prevailing Hindu way of life. Of course, it all could have been a shallow, narrow, visitor's overeager observation, so I had also thought at that time...

But some things in the above article seemed to lend some confirmation to that observation, the relavants parts I quote below:

Here in Thailand, though, the mainly Buddhist population adopted a more practical perspective. Thais have made compassion a pillar of their society. A poor country, Thailand had few resources to mobilize, so the people mobilized themselves. Many tambons, or villages, sent one in every 100 young men down to Phuket to help out. Doctors, and especially dentists (to match dental records with unidentifiable corpses), went at their own expense, slept on the floors of temples, fed themselves as best they could and risked disease.

Survivors appeared on television to testify to the extraordinary courage of Thais who had died trying to save tourists. The phrase nam jai, meaning "consideration from the heart," was frequently heard. At least as many Thais as foreigners had died, but most of the nam jai seemed directed at visitors.
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The Thai way of grieving surprised tearful relatives of victims from the West. Life is tough for most of this country's 65 million inhabitants, who generally cultivate a Buddhist stoicism: strong emotion creates expanding circles of distress in the mind, tearing us away from the still center; best to meet tragedy with calm and dignity, not anger and guilt over having survived. Jai yen, or "cool heart," is what you need.

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