My friend @nowtheo made a beautiful series of artworks using Midjourney where he visualised each of the four brahmavihara’s as an artistic expression of it’s aesthetic essence.

Metta (loving-kindness) Karuna (compassion) Mudita (sympathetic joy) Upekkha (equanimity)

I thought these were absolutely gorgeous and pretty much spot on in capturing the essence of each (in my expereince), except for compassion. I felt expression of compassion here was too heavily weighted towards sadness/grief which is not at all what the buddhist conception of compassion is about. Compassion in buddhism is about holding the suffering of others with love and equanimity and acting in a skilful way that can be of help to others.

So I reach out to theo and asked him about his thoughts around the compassion image. He similarly stated that it was his least favourite generation and the one he had the most trouble with. He was kind enough to share his prompt with me. So I decided I would try my hand at generating a better version of what the artistic expression of compassion should look like.