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This paper will explore the social engagement of Buddhists through their active voluntary works - works that result in the development of a religious philanthropic culture. Through three case examples, this paper will examine how the sangha and individual Buddhists understand social suffering and compassion and attempt to integrate their understanding of Buddhist virtues and values in their daily life where the performance of voluntary works is seen as Buddhist spiritualism. In this process, the individuals seek to understand the key principles of Buddhism that are of direct relevance to their daily existence and their quest to be a compassionate self. Foremost are two notions of yebao (karma) and gan-en (gratitude) and how through compassionate practices and gratitude for those who accepted compassionate acts, they would be rewarded with good karma. Here, pursuing compassionate acts and the alleviation of social suffering is the pursuit of this-worldly spiritualism.

Based on the case study of an Aids clinic operated in Nanning by MSF, this paper looks at how one international NGO, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders), deals with the HIV-carrier patients in Nanning, the capital of Guangxi province in China. It explores the process of care-giving to the HIV patients by MSF employees (both foreign and local) and how the patients react to the 'care-receiving' provided by this foreign NGO. This is especially pertinent in China today as HIV-patients are the victims of discriminating policies and are still very much discriminated by the general population. MSF, viewed by the victims as a foreign NGO, is regarded as an organization seen as promoting a changing and compassionate attitude toward AIDs patients through their anonymous and non-discriminating practices. Through the practices and the discourse of MSF workers and the testimonies of the patients, this paper looks at how the moral economy of AIDs is evolving from a repressive and discriminative attitude towards the compassionate attention to individual suffering. As such, MSF, through its actions, is seen as one of the agents promoting attitudinal changes toward disadvantaged groups and is facilitating the emergence of an emotional and compassionate subject.

This collection of essays opens a critical examination of compassionate acts responding to social suffering in the intensely complex moral context of a rapidly changing and globalizing China. Jeanne Shea describes self-compassion among older women in China as a post-revolutionary response to changing opportunities and resistance to consumerism. Khun Eng Kuah-Pearce's essay frames the Buddhist organizations as NGOs and shows compassion being mobilized and its acts being spiritual-philanthropic, not political. The next three papers illuminate the complexity of mobility in a moral sea of changing values. Even as modernity facilitates movement of people away from suffering, the grinding of entangled moral experiences within the mobile group can be the cause of suffering. Shu-Min Huang critiques 'cultural petrification' as the diasporic Yunnan Chinese community in Thailand attempt to preserve the cultural forms and procedures of the world they left behind. Likewise, Richard Madsen shows that the idea of a universalized cultural heritage fails in the face of the 'micro-ecologies'. And yet the modern impulse to universalize beyond China has important implications for transnational compassion and cooperation. The work of the humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières in China, discussed by Kuah-Pearce and Guiheux, challenges the universality of global humanitarian actions. Following the series of essays threaded across intersections of compassion, suffering, and a morally-divided China, the collection closes by looking at the West. Iain Wilkinson discusses the origins of social suffering as a focus of the social sciences, as well as the difficulties of making engaged compassion its task in a morally-divided world.