Understanding Karuna: The Civilisational Idea of Compassion in Indian Philosophy, Public Ethics and Governance

✍️ Written by Saket Suman

There are some words that a civilisation carries for centuries and in due course of time it becomes a part of our living memory. Karuna is one such word in India. It does not translate cleanly into “compassion” because it asks much more of us than sympathy, charity, or even kindness. Karuna is an obligation. It is the unsettling recognition that somebody else’s suffering is not separate from our own and therefore cannot be ignored without cost to the self.

In the Indian philosophical imagination, Karuna holds together ethics, community, and governance in ways that are both simple and righteous. To speak of Karuna, then, is not to speak of benevolence in the abstract but of the moral mechanics by which a society chooses to function or fail.

Reprsentational Image of Aloka, the peace dog! Via: Bobby Devito

Across India’s spiritual traditions, compassion has never been passive, or at least that is what I found in my limited readings. In Buddhist thought, Karuna is one of the four brahmaviharas, sublime states of being, and it is inseparable from wisdom. It is not pity, which assumes distance, but proximity. To feel Karuna is to move toward suffering and not away from it.

The Bhagavad Gita frames compassion through dharma: right action aligned with moral responsibility. The Jain ethic of ahimsa extends this even further, insisting that harm avoided is compassion practiced. Sikh philosophy grounds Karuna in seva, that is service without hierarchy and service without spectatorship.

Across these traditions, the message is that compassion that does not translate into action is incomplete. Feeling is not enough. Intention is not enough. Karuna demands participation. This is why food occupies such a sacred place in India’s moral universe.

In Indian thought, food, or anna, is life force. To withhold it is violence; to offer it is grace. The act of feeding another, annadana, has long been considered among the highest forms of virtue, precisely because it affirms life at its most vulnerable point.

This is ancient Indian realism shaped by centuries of scarcity, famine, and collective survival. A civilisation that has known hunger does not mythologise food lightly.

Community kitchens, temple offerings, harvest feasts, and shared meals are not merely cultural practices but are also ethical technologies, the systems designed to ensure that no one is excluded from the most basic condition of dignity. The question asked is never Who are you? but Have you eaten?

That question, asked sincerely, collapses the collective weight of social distance. It dissolves caste, creed, income, and status in one motion. Hunger is the great equaliser and feeding is its most radical answer.

It is here that Karuna also becomes a political force. A society may forgive itself many contradictions but hunger amid abundance is not one of them. When granaries are full and stomachs are empty, the failure is moral. Systems may be blamed, processes scrutinised, policies debated, but beneath all of it lies a more uncomfortable truth that compassion has been proceduralised out of governance.

Modern states often speak the language of efficiency. Numbers are audited, targets are set and outcomes are measured but suffering does not experience itself as a statistic behaviour. Hunger cannot be lived as a percentage point, instead it is lived as dizziness, weakness, anxiety and often shame. A child does not understand inflation indices. A mother does not eat policy assurances. It is therefore that Karuna insists that governance must retain a human face, that the purpose of systems is not merely distribution but also care. When care is replaced by compliance, people fall through the cracks not because they are invisible but because they become inconvenient.

One of the cruellest forms of suffering is the pain which does not announce itself loudly. Hunger often arrives this way, it is gradual, cumulative before being normalised. Meals become smaller. Nutrition thins out. Children adapt to less. Bodies learn to endure what they should never have to. Indian scriptures have warned repeatedly against this quiet violence. The Upanishadic vision of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, the world as one family, is also a warning of you pause to read between the lines. Families do not allow members to starve without consequences. When they do, something essential must have already fractured.

In this sense, Karuna is also diagnostic as it reveals the health of a society by examining who is left hungry, who eats last, and who learns to shrink themselves to survive.

One of the most persistent misunderstandings about compassion is that it belongs only in the realm of charity. But in my understanding, the ancient Indian view of Karuna rejects this framing because charity is optional whereas compassion is foundational. If you have observed closely in your day to day lives, charity flows downward but Karuna always moves horizontally.

To practice Karuna is not to “help” the hungry from a position of comfort but to recognise hunger as a shared moral emergency. It shifts the question from What can I give? to What must we change so this does not continue?

This is why India’s most enduring compassionate practices are collective rather than individual. They are sustained by repetition and by continuity. A pot that is kept on the fire every day feeds more people over time than a feast prepared once for display.

It is tempting to believe that technology can solve moral problems. It can assist, it can improve efficiency, reduce leakage, expand reach but technology without Karuna risks becoming another gatekeeper that is unforgiving and blind to context.

Compassion requires discretion. It allows for exceptions, it recognises that human lives do not always fit cleanly into systems designed for averages. Ancient Indian governance texts understood this intuitively. The king’s duty was not merely to collect taxes or maintain order but also to ensure lokasangraha, which loosely translates to the welfare of the people. Rulers were meant to be judged by suffering of the people that they helped reduced. This remains the most relevant benchmark today even as passage of time have introduced us to the concepts of democracy and welfare state.

Every generation inherits the moral vocabulary of its civilisation and decides, consciously or otherwise, what to do with it. Karuna is not guaranteed to survive simply because it exists in scripture or memory. It must be practiced, renewed and also defended. A society that speaks of greatness while tolerating hunger is engaged in self-deception and a nation that celebrates growth while normalising malnutrition is hollowing itself from within.

At the same time, the presence of suffering does not mean the absence of compassion. It simply means the work is unfinished. Across India, Karuna continues to appear in small, stubborn ways: in shared meals, in community kitchens, in teachers who ensure children eat before they learn, in neighbours who notice absence and respond with presence. These everyday acts of Karuna rarely make headlines but they sustain the moral fabric far more reliably than declarations or slogans do.