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Empathy, sympathy, compassion – Humanity’s cultural heritage, key to world peace. Speech by Karel Vereycken, painter-engraver, at the Schiller Institute’s international conference on 15 and 16 June 2024.

Before talking about World Cultural Heritage, two words about the notions of “sympathy”, “empathy” and “compassion,” three words constructed with the word “pathos”, the Greek word for “suffering” or “affection”.

Today, the word “empathy” is often used interchangeably with the words “sympathy” and “compassion,” but they aren’t really the same thing. All three refer to a caring response to someone else’s distress (pathos).

–Sympathy is a feeling of sincere concern for and share the feelings of someone who is experiencing something difficult or painful (pathos).

—Empathy was a word coined in the early 20th century as a translation of the German Einfühlung, it means feeling with people, not just feeling for them. When you’re empathetic, you’re right there with them, feeling it too, because you put yourself, in a sense, “in the shoes of the other person.”

–Compassion goes of course beyond empathy and means action. Compassion goes with altruism, or “a desire to act on that person’s behalf.” Put simply: you relate to someone’s situation, and you want to help them.

But empathy is particularly key for our subject here, that of “peace building” because it can build a bridge between persons considering each other as “enemies”. We can show empathy for persons we don’t consider sympathetic at all. We don’t share their feelings, but we go beyond mere affection and engage in what is called “cognitive empathy”: we know enough about the other person’s background and culture to understand his motivations. As a byproduct, empathy can help us to forgive and pardon as requested by the Peace of Westphalia.

Today, if we want to make peace a reality, we have to mobilize ourselves to raise the level of empathy. Empathy is under massive attack:

• –by the promotion of brutal competition (that’s why professionnal sports are allowed)
• –a culture of screens and
• –the breakdown of person to person dialogue.

There was a campaign to increase empathy in Europe after the bloody wars between France and Germany, when the Goethe Institute opened in France and the Alliance Française in Germany. There was also a movement of “sister” cities allowing people from one village to visit a “sister” village in the other country. They would talk, laugh with their prejudices and celebrate together, have inter personal dialogue and learn to read on the faces the emotions standing “behind” the words.

Now, the knowledge one can acquire of each other culture, language and history, are of course a fundamental tools to develop this “cognitive empathy” which allows you to see persons as “products” of a history, a culture and a civilization, rather then as atomized little entities.

For example, after I discovered the philosophy of mutazalism of the Baghdad Abassides Califate, my entire vision of Islam changed. I know exactly what happened to their civilization, their frustrations and hopes.

Today, China is currently heavily involved and mobilized to protect especially the pre-islamic cultural heritage of Afghanistan and other countries of Central Asia. It is in its own interest. One leading Chinese archaeologist which I met, rightly said that the beauty and intellectual challenge of this art is “the best way to fight terrorism.” Not weapons and drones but culture!

It it was in Afghanistan that the silk road players met when the Greek culture walked towards the East and the Chinese culture walked towards the West.

The Buddhists that prospered in this area were very active over both the maritime and terrestrial silk roads, reaching into Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Xinjiang and China. They paid huge attention to metallurgy, architecture, painting, sculpture, poetry, and literature. The first printed text known today is a Buddhist text of 868 AD.

Added to this, the birth of a very agapic form of Mahayana buddhism in the region of Gandhara (now mainly in Pakistan). Its followers, in stead of pursuing a purely personal goal of nirwana (enlightenment), rather took pleasure to free all of humanity from suffering !

Empathy, compassion and mercy were the supreme qualities to be glorified in Gandhara art especially in the form of what are called Bodhisattva’s, that is ordinary persons that are set to become enlightened but elect instead to remain in this world, easing the suffering of all beings and helping others attain enlightenment.

Two examples:

The one who understood that this revolutionary form of Buddhism could pacify the region was the Indian Prime minister Nehru who named his daughter Indira Priyadashini (the future Prime Minister Indira Gandhi), because « Priyadarshi » was the name adopted by the great emperor Ashoka the great (304 – 232 BC) after he converted and became a Buddhist prince of peace! 

In 1956, just before the creation of the non-aligned movement and the Bandung conference, Nehru orchestrated a year-long celebration honorifying “2,500 years of Buddhism”, not to resurrect an ancient faith per se, but to claim for India the status as the birthplace of Buddhism: an ancient belief advocating non-violence, pacifism and that calls for ending the disgraceful “caste system” the British worsened and wanted to maintain worldwide.

Mes Aynak

Today, with the Ibn Sina Research & Development Center in Kaboul, we of the Schiller Institute are working day and night to save the archaeological site of Mes Aynak which we want to have classified by UNESCO as a world heritage site.

Mes Aynak is the world’s second largest copper reserve and Afghanistan needs the mining activity to get revenues to complete its urgent reconstruction. But on top of the mine stands the ruins of a vast monastic Buddhist complex that was a key trading post of the silk road between the 1st and the 8^th century.

After our campaign and forth and back discussions between the afghan government, China and the Chinese mining company, all actors agreed that the entire cultural heritage on the surface will be protected and mining will only take place with underground mining techniques.

We won a fight, now we have to win the peace.

Full study:

The « Miracle of Gandhara » : When Buddha turned himself into man