This article is part of our Elephant Journal podcast: The Mindful Life with Waylon Lewis. Find each episode on our YouTube channel or at elephantjournal.com/podcast.

“Idiot compassion is the highly conceptualized idea that you want to do good….

Of course, [according to the Mahayana teachings of Buddhism] you should do everything for everybody; there is no selection involved at all.⁠

But that doesn’t mean to say that you have to be gentle all the time.

Your gentleness should have heart, strength. In order that your compassion doesn’t become idiot compassion, you have to use your intelligence. Otherwise, there could be self-indulgence of thinking that you are creating a compassionate situation when in fact you are feeding the other person’s aggression.

If you go to a shop and the shopkeeper cheats you and you go back and let him cheat you again, that doesn’t seem to be a very healthy thing to do for others.” ~ Chögyam Trungpa

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