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1. What Is the Nature of Mercy and Compassion? Mercy is a word used to describe the leniency or kindness shown by one person to another or a request from one person to another to be shown such leniency or kindness. One of the basic virtues of chivalry ---- graciousness and loyalty ---- and Christian ethics, it is also related to concepts of justice and morality in behaviour between people. Mercy can refer both to compassionate behaviour on the part of those in power (e.g. mercy shown by a judge toward a prisoner) or on the part of a humanitarian group (e.g. a mission of mercy helping tsunami victims in Indonesia or flood victims in China). A famous literary example of mercy comes from Shakespeare’s play “The Merchant of Venice” when the heroine Portia asks the Jew Shylock to show mercy to her lover, saying: The quality of mercy is not strained (force). It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest: It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. Compassion, on the other hand, is a sense of shared suffering, most often combined with a desire to alleviate or reduce such suffering. Compassionate acts are generally considered those which are connected with the suffering of others and attempt to reduce that suffering as if it were one’s own. With this meaning, the various forms of the “Golden Rule ” ---- Treat others as you wanted to be treated, ---- are clearly based on the concept of compassion. Compassion differs from other forms of helpful or charitable behaviour in that it focused primarily on reducing human suffering. Acts of kindness which seek primarily to give benefit rather than relieve existing suffering are better classified as acts of altruism (generosity and unselfishness), although, in this sense, compassion itself can be seen as a form of altruism. The cultivation of compassion is considered a desirable quality in many philosophies and also in almost all major religions. For example, Buddhism, which is based on t