My wife and I were fortunate enough to see the Dalai Lama on our first wedding anniversary this year in Lisbon, Portugal. What follows is a summary of his teaching based on the notes taken by my wife on the inside cover and back pages of a David Baldacci novel.
His Holiness began by responding to three potential reasons why we might have come to hear an elderly monk talk about the things he has learned in his life.
1) Out of simple curiosity—His Holiness said that if we were there out of simple curiosity, that was fine. We should listen, judge for ourselves, take what we wished to take, and leave the rest behind.
2) Out of a desire to be healed—He said that, in fact, he had had in the recent past a stomach ache, conjunctivitis, and a sore left pinky finger, so if he had his way, he would wish for us to heal him. But he surely couldn’t heal us.
3) Out of a desire to see a living Buddha—He claimed to understand that desire, but that he had, in all honesty, to disappoint us all. He was not, he said adamantly, a living Buddha. He was just a simple monk.
After this brief disclaimer, he announced that he wanted to talk about values, most specifically inner values and outer values. He mentioned that the evidence of success in Western society lies largely in our external accomplishments: technology, infra-structure, computers, medicine, and our overall standards of living and health are clearly the highest and most accomplished in the world. It was truly inspiring, he claimed, to witness this incredible civilization at the peak of its power.
And yet, he also said that he couldn’t help but notice that many Westerners are very sad, many have
what we call a very low self-esteem (a phrase that doesn’t really exist in Tibetan), and that while our external accomplishments were unparalleled, our inner lives, our inner values were lagging far behind our other, highly visible accomplishments. Accordingly, many of us are unable to enjoy the great accomplishments that we can claim as our very own. We needed to restore a balance between what we have accomplished externally and what we could accomplish internally.
What is needed, then, is a cultivation of the inner values. What are the most important inner values? The Dalai Lama listed two:
1) Intelligence—His Holiness made an impassioned defense of education, of improving our minds so that they are best able to facilitate our happiness and to provide for the happiness of others. But he also warned that education alone can lead to pride, jealousy, and anxiety unless it is accompanied by the second value, that of warm-heartedness.
2) Warm-heartedness—A synonym for compassion, warm-heartedness is of two sorts: a) genuine, unbiased compassion, of the sort that is extended equally to friends and enemies alike; b) and biased or limited compassion, which is easier to practice, of clear value, but of limited scope when compared to the first sort.
How then do we begin to develop this unbiased compassion? First, we demonstrate to ourselves the necessity of compassion in our lives. His Holiness mentioned that medical tests have shown that the influence of a mother’s touch on the infant has profound influences on the infant’s happiness as reflected in his neurological development. We have all had mothers, we have, most of us, all been nurtured by a mother, and so this fundamental and compassionate aspect of our being is central to human life. Compassion, in other words, is a vital and irreplaceable part of our personalities, one that is central to building those inner values that His Holiness spoke of at the beginning of his talk
He continued by reminding us of the specific effects in our lives of hatred, the opposite of compassion. When overcome by hatred, we are visited by anger, which breeds fear, doubt, and suspicion, both in ourselves and in those around us. We begin to lose our sense of community, and then we experience loneliness, and finally isolation and depression. And all of these debilitating factors, from hatred to depression, can be effectively countered by the active cultivation of unbiased compassion, the founding value of all the inner values.
His Holiness then shifted gears, slightly, and began to talk generally about the art of smiling, an art that he has, by the way, mastered. He said that there are many kinds of smiles: sarcastic, artificial, appeasing, insincere, but that a real smile, an authentic expression of warm-heartedness and compassion, is a thing of beauty and a great force of unity. No one is immune to a warm-hearted smile.
Thus, the smile, the physical indication of warm-heartedness, and our intuitive attraction to such a smile, prove that compassion is one of the fundamental components of human nature. Thus, compassion is the foundation of an authentic inner life.
Most religions have a version of unbiased compassion, of valuing your neighbor’s welfare over you own. But often, this becomes a rule that we follow and not a prescription that we truly believe is good for us. Now, we can see the beginning of scientific evidence that such considerations are even good for our health. His Holiness said that he’d recently attended a conference in which a cardiologist present evidence that those patients who had a high usage of “I,” “me,” and “mine” in their daily conversation also had a higher incidence of heart disease. So unbiased, selfless compassion is not only a religious virtue, His Holiness pointed out, but also a physical one as well.
Having established the beneficial aspects of compassion, he began to speak more generally about the global community. He mentioned that with advanced technology, and with increased communication, our global community is growing smaller and smaller. We are all instantly aware of each others’ well being and of each others’ suffering. And there is a great deal of suffering in the world—terrorism, poverty, disease, and most conspicuously in the Western nations, the increasing gap between the wealthy and the poor. Such conditions become fertile breeding grounds for hatred and anger, hatred and anger become the catalysts for terrorism, and terrorism increases the amount of fear and isolation and the general overall angst within our communities, homes, and families. Nothing is accomplished, in the long run, by terrorism and hatred.
Therefore, compassion both as an antidote to the world’s problems and to our own individual difficulties, is more needed now than it ever has been. Warm-heartedness is one of the essential ingredients of securing happiness and global security in the 21st century.
In the question and answer session, he responded to several questions that had been written out and handed in before his talk.
1) In responding to what could be done about Tibet, he mentioned that there was suffering in many places in the world—Darfur, for example—but that the best thing anyone could do about Tibet was to go there, keep your eyes open, and make an honest assessment of the plight of Tibetans in their homeland. And then come back and report what you have seen. If you can’t do that, he also suggested that if we felt drawn to the Tibetan question, then it would be good to support an organization that was actively trying to bring awareness and education about Tibet to our community.
2) In the second question, he was asked to respond to an educational question: How do you teach compassion? His Holiness said that, as one who had never gone to school, he felt uncomfortable talking about education, but that many professors he spoke to agreed that Western education is very one-sided, very intellectual, but not very strong on practical ethics, on how to use the vast resources of philosophy, science, and history that we’ve accumulated to increase our happiness and to improve the general well-being of our communities. Westerners need to investigate a curriculum of compassion, he suggested.
3) His Holiness received a question about the preservation of the environment, and he responded by saying that the cultivation of unbiased compassion would, of course, include the health of the environment as part of its central concern. He said that unbiased compassion led us to consider the natural world not as ours and theirs, not as Central America’s rain forest and southwestern America’s deserts, but as our world, as one organism cared for by the constant exercise of compassion. He said, as he often does, that “inner disarmament” is the only way to bring about real change in the world, and that such disarmament is very difficult to achieve, but certainly possible, and clearly worth working toward, according to our own capacities. It was the only way to achieve lasting happiness and prosperity, both within our private lives and within our communities.
4) He was asked if inter-faith dialogue alone would solve the problem of religious violence that afflicted so many communities around the world. He answered that it would not. He said that he had been able to take part in such dialogues in Northern Ireland, having been invited there by a Christian monk. He arrived as a Buddhist, of course, a monk who didn’t believe in God and who had many strange practices, from the Christian perspective. His Holiness pointed out that if the assembled Protestants and Catholics were able to get along with him, then how much easier would it be for them to get along with each other, with those who shared so much regarding a belief in Jesus Christ, in the Trinity, and a host of other doctrines that they had in common. He advised that the political and religious conflicts be separated, and that attention be paid to uncovering the many, many factors that these splintered groups have in common, and having done that, to recognize the utter stupidity of encouraging these conflicts for selfish reasons. But above all, the solution to all of these problems lay in the active cultivation of compassion, of an unbiased compassion, within our own lives, and working outward from there, to extend this compassion to include all sentient beings. When we look at our world today, this is the only solution we have open to us. When he returned later to Northern Ireland, he said that progress had been made because they had made a conscious decision to concentrate on their many shared values, and to begin to talk about their differences within the larger context of agreement.
This was the last question His Holiness took, and after a brief performance from a group of Portuguese school children, His Holiness walked around the stage, bowing to the audience, and left, of course, to a standing ovation.
I must mention the fact that His Holiness radiates an intangible personal energy that’s not evident in my own pale rendition of what he said. His talks are engaged, passionate, perfectly clear, and deeply logical. Instruction always occurs at levels above, below—beyond—the verbal. That is part of the pleasure of being in his company. I mention it here only to indicate that what he said was far more clear, far more impressive, and far more convincing than what I’ve written here.
Still my intention was to give you a sense of a wonderful afternoon spent with the Dalai Lama.
Sidney Burris
