He was offered a chair but he wanted to stand: “So I can see your faces – some of you have beautiful faces – and then you can see mine”. That was how His Holiness The 14
th Dalai Lama began his public talk at Melbourne’s Princes Park on Saturday 9
th June 2007. He welcomed the 10,000 + crowd by holding out his hands and saying: “I am like you. We are all the same”.
If you’d settled down on your picnic rug to hear something you’d never heard before, like the answer to life and the universe itself, you would’ve been severely disappointed. But the beauty of the Dalai Lama’s wisdom is to share with you what you already know, to remind you of the love, compassion and peace, which we each have within us (as His Holiness says “by birth we already have it”) but which too easily and too often gives way to fear and hatred.
The theme of His Holiness’ talk was ‘universal responsibility’. This seemed to go hand in hand with two other topics he spoke about: ‘internal disarmament’ and ‘unbiased compassion’. While the Dalai Lama doesn’t have the answers to the world’s problems he does have some good advice on how we can start to solve them. He says 90% of negative-ness is mental perception, meaning if we have ill feelings towards another person or indeed another culture or religion or race, we have created a lot of the conflict in our mind.
The way out of this is compassion. The Dalai Lama teaches that compassion brings inner strength, as he terms it ‘proper function of the brain’, which helps us to judge right from wrong. “Real compassion is unbiased compassion, as soon as that attitude changes hatred will come”. And His Holiness rightly points out that the benefits of compassion immediately go to the practitioner.
As I understand it, internal disarmament is to give up any of your own prejudices, ignorance or misconceptions that prevent you from feeling unbiased compassion. Each of us needs to disarm his or her own mind before we can achieve world peace.
For me, the ‘take-home’ point of His Holiness’ talk was not to think of practices of kindness, compassion and forgiveness as practices of religion but as practices of humanity.
And a personal favourite from His Holiness’ answers to the audiences’ questions:
What do you do if you see two people who you love fighting? What can you do to stop them?
A: Beat both of them! (laughs)
I may not be the leader of our country, your Holiness, but I would gladly sit and talk with you any time.
Find out more about the tour at:
http://www.dalailama.org.au
Learn more about the plight of Tibet at:
http://www.atc.org.au
