Study Hall

Continuing with Branching Streams Flow In The Darkness; the second talk has a section that I know well, as there is a beautiful calligraphy version of it on the third floor here. This excerpt starts near the end of that version, which is about ki as potentiality:
"Ki sometimes means the 'interrelationship between someone who helps and someone who is helped'. This is also called jihi. Ji here means to encourage someone. Hi means to give happiness. Jihi is usually translated 'love'. Love has two sides. One is to give joy, yoraku, and the other is to lessen suffering, bakku. To lessen someone's suffering we suffer with them, we share their suffering. That is love.
So if someone is very good, we can share the joy of practice with them by giving them a good cushion, a good zendo, or something like that. But a zendo doesn't mean anything to someone who is suffering too much; whatever you give may not be accepted. Someone may say, 'I don't need it. I'm suffering too much. I don't know why. Right now to get out of suffering is the most important thing for me. You can't help me, nothing can help me'. When you hear this, you should be like Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva - you should become like the one who is suffering, and you should suffer as that person suffers. Because of your innate love, your instinctive love, you share the suffering. That is love in its true sense".