From heart to heart, without a word.

One day the Buddha was preaching on Vulture Peak to a great host of disciples and heavenly beings. But that day was different. The Buddha did not open his mouth; he merely held up before the assembly a single golden lotus (金波羅華) in his hand. All were silent. No one understood what he meant to say. Then, alone in the assembly, one person — his disciple Mahakasyapa (摩訶迦葉) — quietly smiled (破顏微笑). Seeing that smile, the Buddha said: "I possess the treasury of the true Dharma eye (正法眼藏), the wondrous mind of nirvana (涅槃妙心), the formless true form (實相無相), the subtle gate of the teaching (微妙法門). Not setting it up in words (不立文字), transmitting it apart from the teaching (敎外別傳), I now entrust it to Mahakasyapa." This is the anecdote of "holding up the flower before the assembly" (拈華示衆), which became the origin of the Chan (Zen) school. What passed between flower and smile became the prototype of "以心傳心" (mind transmitting mind). The Chan school thereafter built all its teaching upon this principle: "An awakening that can be explained in words is no longer awakening."

Remarkably, the English "empathy" is a word of very short history. It was coined only in 1909. Its root lies in German aesthetic theory. In the late 19th century the German philosopher Robert Vischer, in his 1873 doctoral dissertation, used the word "Einfühlung" (literally, "feeling one's way into"). With this concept he explained "the experience of a viewer before a work of art who projects his own feeling into the work and feels the work as if it were alive." Passing through Theodor Lipps, the concept became a central idea of German psychology. In 1909, while working to render the German into English, the Cornell University psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener coined an entirely new word. He combined two Greek pieces — "em- (into) + pathos (feeling)" → "empathy." The choice was made to distinguish it from the already existing "sympathy" (sym- together + pathos feeling). If sympathy is "feeling alongside, from beside," empathy is "going inside and feeling as the other person." In a little more than a century the word became a central concept of psychology, neuroscience, education, and management, and in the 21st century a central concept of AI ethics and Design Thinking.