Those who are most profoundly cultivated in the disciplines of morality will feel some degree of obligation to reach out to hungry beings wherever they are found on the planet. Beyond this sense of obligation, however, stands the personification of an ideal – the bodhisattvas – who respond to the needs of strangers not out of a sense of moral obligation but out of a far deeper sense of identity with all living beings. These bodhisattvas – people like Mother Teresa – no doubt begin their path with a sense of moral obligation but conclude it having shaped their own identity to include the welfare of others as an integral part of themselves. Although it may be true initially that I respond, if at all, to the hunger of unknown people in other cultures out of a sense of moral obligation and not out of a deeper sense of identity, it could occur through the practices of morality that my identity is so enlarged that I actually experience the links between their well-being and my own. When this occurs to the extent that my feelings for them are engaged, my actions will begin to be motivated by compassion rather than duty.

This is the image of the bodhisattva’s perfection of morality, an expansion of the self that includes others in the innermost domain of self-concern. Buddhists sometimes refer to this expansion as an experience of “no-self,” but it could just as well be conceived as a magnificent transformation or expansion of the self. Although moral practices begin by cultivating the sense of duty or obligation that we owe to others, it comes to ideal fruition in the irrelevance of this same sense of duty made possible by an enlargement of the self toward the ultimate goal of profound reverence for life.