Is there a compassion only Buddhist path? In a recent version of the Buddhist Geeks podcast Rick Hanson said that recent academic research is showing that in the Pali Canon there were teachings indicating that compassion is enough to progress all the way on the Buddhist path. He further states that this foreshadows the Mahayana developments and if this has been emphasised within the early schools it would have negated the need for Mahayana at all.

Does that ring any bells with anyone? Has anyone heard anything of this research or more broadly has anyone got any references where the Buddha really emphasises compassion and indicates that compassion alone is enough.

Note: if anyone is interested Rick Hanson says this in the last 10 minutes of the podcast.



It's at about time 29:55 through 30:48 in the podcast. Rick Hanson starts by saying (I paraphrase) that:


The Buddha talked about the three poisons: ignorance, anger, greed
Anger and greed map to the brain's two 'red-zone' behaviours, i.e. the 'aversion' and 'approaching' systems of the brain.


Rick goes on to say that the brain has a third need or drive i.e. "heart-ache" for which the antidote is "love", and,


  recent scholarship has shown that for him [the Buddha] love is a fully-sufficient path to complete awakening, and scholarship today has shown that maybe if there was a better understanding at the time that that's what he taught, after he died, there might not have been a need for the Mahayana revision if you will in terms of bringing more heart back into Dhamma practice."


He goes on to say that there's a social brain, that love and social skills are the primary evolutionary driver of the brain, etc., that we need to honour heart-ache and pay attention to the attachment system. He thinks of "heartache" as a "fourth poison".
The recent scholarship that Hanson is referring to  is probably this, by Richard Gombrich, the eminent British academic scholar of Buddhism:

Kindness and Compassion as means to Nirvana in Early Buddhism

This abstract mentions other places where Gombrich explicated his thesis:


  Gotama Buddha taught that compassion can produce enlightenment. So
  Richard Gombrich claims, based most notably on his reading of the
  Tevijja Sutta. First announced in his 1996 How Buddhism Began,
  Gombrich revisited this thesis (his “discovery”) the next year in his
  Gonda Lecture, “Kindness and Compassion as Means to Nirvana in Early
  Buddhism” and has returned to it more recently in his 2009 What the
  Buddha Thought.


Despite Gombrich's rather radical assertion, now almost 20 years ago, I have never been able to find any direct discussion of it by other authors either Western or of any tradition of Buddhism (the above paper is about the neuroscience of the issue). I suspect that is because it is so earthshaking for the Theravada -- effectively saying that they have been missing something huge in the Pali Canon for millenia -- that nobody would touch it with a ten-foot katvanga. 

My own speculation (totally unsupported by any scholarship) is that Gombrich may have uncovered the hidden and forgotten roots of the Mahayana in the Pali Canon, but has mistaken it as an either-or doctrine when in fact it is meant -- and was developed by the Mahayana -- as a coordinate path to the highest enlightenment: you need both wisdom (Pañña, Prajna) and compassion, and at the highest level they actually become one.

Addendum -- 8/27/2015. I have since found this rejoinder to Gombrich by Bikkhu Bodhi, the distinguished Theravada scholar and translator. The nub of his objection to Gombrich's proposal is this:


  But Gombrich then goes on to argue that for the Buddha union with
  Brahmà is simply a metaphor for Nibbàna, and thus he concludes the
  Buddha taught that kindness ... was a way to salvation (p. 62). Such
  an inference, however, cannot stand, for in many texts the Buddha
  declares the divine abodes to be inadequate for attaining Nibbàna
  (e.g. DN 17, MN 83, MN 97, etc.); it would also mean that paññā,
  insight or wisdom, is not needed for final liberation. Gombrich is not
  unaware of the texts that contradict his position, but he casually
  dismisses them as the work of the compilers of other suttas (p. 61).
  The contrary evidence, however, is just too weighty to allow such an
  easy way out.