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The Dalai Lama's "Vision of a Compassionate Future"
What do you think? Visionary and inspiring? Naive and unrealistic? Delusional and dangerous? What?
Excerpts:
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Many people today agree that we need to reduce violence in our society. If we are truly serious about this, we must deal with the roots of violence, particularly those that exist within each of us. We need to embrace "inner disarmament," reducing our own emotions of suspicion, hatred and hostility toward our brothers and sisters.
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Many of the problems we confront today are our own creation. I believe that one of the root causes of these manmade problems is the inability of humans to control their agitated minds and hearts -- an area in which the teachings of the world's great religions have much to offer.
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I do not mean to suggest that religion is indispensable to a sound ethical way of life, or for that matter to genuine happiness. In the end, whether one is a believer or a nonbeliever, what matters is that one be a good, kind and warmhearted person. A deep sense of caring for others, based on a profound sense of interconnection, is the essence of the teachings of all great religions of the world. In my travels, I always consider my foremost mission to be the promotion of basic human qualities of goodness -- the need for and appreciation of the value of love, our natural capacity for compassion and the need for genuine fellow feeling. No matter how new the face or how different the dress and behavior, there is no significant division between us and other people.
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This blue planet of ours is the most delightful habitat we know. Its life is our life, its future our future. Now Mother Nature is telling us to cooperate. In the face of such global problems as the greenhouse effect and the deterioration of the ozone layer, individual organizations and single nations are helpless. Our mother is teaching us a lesson in universal responsibility.
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Large human movements spring from individual human initiatives. If you feel that you cannot have much of an effect, the next person may also become discouraged, and a great opportunity will have been lost. On the other hand, each of us can inspire others simply by working to develop our own altruistic motivations -- and engaging the world with a compassion-tempered heart and mind.
I think there have been better Buddhist thinkers than the Dali Lama . I guess you can build a following by emanating happy thoughts and New Age platitudes. Westerners just eat this stuff up .
The Dali Lama is a man who makes claims to the hereditary kingdom of Tibet ;appointed by divine right . As much as the Chinese suppress the Tibetans now, the Tibetan peasants were equally suppressed by the monarchy.
The Dalai Lama is the foremost admired spiritual leader in the world today. From what you quoted we can easily see why.
He teaches how the world can be reversed and put on the road to peace...it starts in the individual heart, primarily....if like minded folks unite, the world can be changed.
*Teaching real action to power*.... I think there are those who would think this is subversive, those leaders who teach praying alone, but whose actions are violent toward everything.
Like Tom, I think that there have been better Buddhist thinkers than the Dalai Lama. That is not intended as a disrespect of him or his following. I think he's a great man and an island of peace and happiness and joy in an otherwise turbulent, violent world. But I don't necessarily see him as a great thinker.
Here's an example:
He starts off the article with a very strong statement about freedom. But from there he talks about an end to violence and finding peae within ourselves.
The problem is that the two ideas of peace and freedom can sometimes be contradictory. One must often fight for freedom. Freedom costs, and the price is most often blood. The Dalai Lama seems to think that freedom can come simply from having happy thoughts like Peter Pan flying.
Peace is a very nice sentiment, but tell the Chinese Christian peasant who is suffering extreme subjegation at the hands of the Communist Chinese Government that he should be "peaceful" instead of trying to attain freedom. Tell the Rawandan laborer who is just trying to get by that he should be peaceful in the face of the violence of the warlords. Tell the Ethiopian Christian suffering genocide at the hands of Islamo-fascists that he should be peaceful in the face of genocide instead of fighting back against the killers.
Personally, I think that the Dalai Lama is being naive in his thinking. An example of a religious leader who was a better thinker was the late Pope John Paul II. JP2 pushed the idea of uniting to fight for freedom. He pushed the idea that freedom has a cost, and every right-thinking Christian should be willing to make a sacrifice fo freedom. He pushed for Christians in the Soviet Union to unite for the cause of religious freedom against the Soviet government, even if doing so results in violence. Violence for the cause of freedom was not seen by him as a bad thing, but rather as a neessary price for freedom.
So I think that the Dalai Lama is being naive. His thinking sounds good, and has nice feelgood undertones, but it isn't reality-based thinking.
In many ways, it is similar to how I compare liberal thinking to cotton candy: it looks nice and feels good on first examination, but as you get into it more you find that it is mostly fluff and hot air, and isn't really any good for you.
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