The Dalai Lama's Greeting Card Company

This patch addresses multiple issues with minds that are receptive to Dalai Lama quotes.

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama (Photo by Jan Michael Ihl via Flickr)

The Dalai Lama is an agreeable man with twinkly eyes, and obviously an inspiration to many people, but while I admire his emphasis on love and compassion, I don't typically find what he says about these subjects any more insightful than the philosophy found in an average greeting card. It's possible that I regularly miss the point of the things he says, but much of the time, he seems to be either rehashing age-old truisms that I can't imagine are news to anyone, or making statements that initially sound true and profound, but when you really dwell on the substance of them and follow them through to their logical conclusions have almost everything backwards.

I don't expect agreement about this from anyone who is not already of this opinion without looking at some examples, so let's look at a few of his most popular quotes. In each case, I'll try to interpret his meaning as charitably as I can, but you'll see the problems I get into. Along the way, I'll use the opportunity to discuss what I think are more instructive (and much more interesting) ways of thinking about the issues raised.

While discussing these quotes, you'll notice that I avoid mention of who made them. That is to enforce the core enlightenment value that it is the substance of what someone says rather than who says it that is important.


"Love is the absence of judgement."

This quote is probably meant to refer only to negative judgements rather than to all judgements. To love someone is of course itself a kind of judgement so it would be a contradiction if taken too literally. The author of the quote presumably also didn't mean that a New York banking executive and a London schoolgirl, who are oblivious to each other's existence and so have never had any opportunity to judge one another, are treating each other with love. If love is the absence of judgement, it's not only that.

But what did the author mean if he or she didn't mean these things? Perhaps he or she meant that judgement is merely incompatible with love, like knife fights or blackmail, or perhaps that when someone has done something wrong, that you should treat them with love and compassion rather than condemnation, although that wouldn't be the absence of judgement so much as the absence of an unhelpful response to one.

It would be unfortunate if these words discouraged people from speaking out against injustices for fear of being judgmental. To right any wrong, you first have to acknowledge that there is a wrong to right, which is to make a moral judgement. There is nothing admirable about turning a blind eye to injustice so as to embrace a non-judgmental identity.

Judgement isn't incompatible with love either. Being judged can feel unpleasant in the moment, but providing certain kinds of constructive criticism is an essential part of loving someone. Imagine being surrounded only by an entourage of sycophants constantly telling you that everything you do is an act of genius. You'd soon end up wearing white jumpsuits covered in rhinestones and eating too many hamburgers. To grow as a person, it certainly helps to receive encouragement, but critical feedback from honest friends is arguably more important. If you love someone, you want to help them around life's pitfalls, so of course you offer constructive criticism. Even if it sometimes hurts, criticism that is offered in this spirit is an act of love. It's what any good friend would do for you if you wanted to drive home drunk.

This is quite unlike the sort of criticism designed to belittle a person, but I suspect a certain proportion of people will embrace this quote selectively as a convenient way to avoid introspection when faced with criticism directed at themselves. Instead of having to respond to the content of such criticisms, and perhaps reassess the consequences of their own actions, it's a license to dismiss all criticisms (constructive or not) as hateful.

This quote would make more sense if phrased in terms of condemnation rather than judgement per se. Judgement and condemnation are conflated in Christian thought too, probably because they often go hand in hand, but they don't have to.


"If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion."

The use of symmetry, rhyming and opposites often have a way of making very simple ideas sound profound. In this case, the quote's author uses parallel wording to pair a non-obvious claim with one that is blindingly obvious. The effect is to make the non-obvious partner sound more truthy. The obvious claim is that people who receive compassion are happy about it. The non-obvious one is that you will be happier if you practice compassion towards others, which doesn't sound as self-evident when paraphrased and stated in isolation. Nevertheless, it probably is true both because compassion is likely to be reciprocated and because you get to empathize with the happiness you bring to others in your environment. If you make the people around you happy, you get to live in a happy place. You're tending the garden you sit in.

So while I agree with the conclusion, this quote omits any mention of the reasons that personally helped me reach it.

"Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk."

I remember being unsure, as a child, of what it meant to love someone. I was told that I'd know it when it happened, and sure enough, when I was a bit older, I began to experience some all-consuming feelings that seemed to fit the bill, but when I was a bit older than that, I realized that there was actually something else which seemed even more worthy of that label, and that the feelings I'd previously taken to be 'love' were more about the need to be loved than my regard for the person I wanted it from. Up until that realization took shape, I can easily imagine that I would have gone along with the idea that great love carries great risk, but it would have been the risk of rejection, of not being loved by the person I wanted it from, that carried the potential for hurt.

There is also a masochistic approach to human relations that I sometimes detect in people who overgeneralize the economic principle that something is more valuable if it's harder to produce or harder to come by. If we are speaking of romantic love, there will be significant potential for hurt if two very incompatible people attempt to enter a relationship, while love might flow effortlessly and securely between two people who are made for each other. The economist would place higher value on the one that involves greater effort, risk and pain to produce, but that kind of love is for the asylum. I want none of it.

We might be able to imagine cases where love comes with great risk, a forbidden love like Romeo and Juliet's. From a literary perspective, the sacrifices these characters made served to measure their love, to show that it was great, but they weren't what made it great.

Love is not economics. There is no reason to think that it would be any less valuable if there were more of it in the world, and the outward expression of love is something you can do with very little effort or risk. You can probably do it in some small way right now if you want to without any practice or preparation.


"The way to change others' minds is with affection, and not anger."

When I see this quote, I imagine someone scratching their head in confusion, wondering why on Earth their public awareness campaign just isn't getting through.

"We tried making our slogans as angry as possible, so why isn't it working? I just don't get it!"

Then a bald man in a robe walks into the room.

"I have the answer! Instead of being angry, try being nice!"

"Nice? I suppose it's worth a try. Here, have a Nobel Peace Prize!"

The tone you adopt will naturally affect how receptive a listener will be to what you have to say. A generally sympathetic and good humored approach is bound to be more effective than lecturing and shouting, but this should be obvious, and so obvious that there's very little chance that anyone reading this is unaware of the fact. We don't always get this right in the heat of the moment, but most of us understand it.

Rather than assert something so trivial, it would be more helpful to highlight how people are manipulated into changing their minds by affection, to understand that our egos are susceptible to massaging, and that the joke at the beginning of a speech is designed to get the audience on-side. As every successful snake-oil salesman, politician, and cult leader knows, charm will get you everywhere, but the only really ethical approach to changing people's minds is by reasoning with them. Charm should never be a substitute for reasoned argument.

It's unlikely that anyone is in danger of thinking anger is a good way to change people's minds, but anger isn't completely without its uses. We're generally able to trust an angry response more than an affectionate one for the simple reason that secondary signs like tears, shakiness of the voice, and other involuntary manifestations of anger are harder to fake than words typically are. You might not say exactly what you mean when you're angry, but the other person will at least know that whatever is behind it is important to you. If you don't allow yourself to express your anger and instead remain completely calm when someone hurts you, they might not take it seriously. Aristotle spoke well about the balance that needs to be struck:

"Anyone can become angry. That is easy. But to be angry with the right person to the right degree at the right time for the right purpose and in the right way, that is not easy."


"Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other."

Among the very many things that love is more important than in a relationship is need, but is a relationship in which one partner falls ill and needs the care of the other a bad relationship, or is it just an unfortunate circumstance that a good relationship allows people to endure? Serious needs may or may not be present at various points in a relationship, but I don't think their presence is necessarily indicative of its quality. As they say, in sickness and in health.

There are certainly pathological forms of need as when someone approaches a relationship as a means to some sort of selfish end, a social manoeuvre to gain status or wealth, for instance, or when someone's overriding interest is to have children and they view their partner as an instrument to that end. For those with poor self-esteem, a relationship might also be a way of gaining validation, of proving they are worthy of love. A person who can satisfy our need for approval may come to be of obsessive interest to us, but no matter how strong these needs may be or how focused they are on a particular individual, they're still things we can get from someone without actually loving them in any meaningful sense.

I don't think we should view a partner as someone who is there to fulfill our needs, to give us things or make us feel special. If that's the lesson the quote was intended to communicate, then I agree, but then surely the best relationship would be one in which the love is as great as possible and not merely exceeding the pathological forms of need. Ideally, those needs would be minimized.

"If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito."

This, naturally, echoes David and Goliath. It's also a relative of the double-edged sword known as the American Dream, which tells us that if you try hard enough, you can accomplish anything. Normally taken to be a statement of optimism and hope, its flipside is the more unsympathetic idea that if you fail, you only have yourself to blame.

Your chances of succeeding in a task are probably greater if you believe that you can succeed, but no amount of effort and self-belief will guarantee that success. The fact that some small things can influence some large things doesn't tell you that all small things can influence all large things. There are situations where small things really are powerless like when a mosquito has its every path blocked by a mosquito net and the person under it is sleeping soundly with the aid of ear plugs.

It's hard to measure the amount of power a given person has to influence the world, but if we're simplistic about this, we risk fueling obnoxious views like the poor deserve to be poor. If we all have sufficient power to determine our own fate, then poverty could only be a result of things like laziness and racial inferiority rather than systematic obstacles to social mobility. In reality, power tends to be concentrated in the hands a tiny minority who very loudly and repeatedly attribute their own success to talent and hard work despite the rather obvious fact that the more money a person has, the less effort is required to make even more. Meanwhile, the people who work the longest hours in the most unpleasant jobs are paid the least.

At its core, power is a measure of one's ability to influence the world, and one of the things power allows people to influence is how much more power they'll have in the future. The more power you have, the greater your ability to further rig it in your favor and promote your own concerns, so the people who possess the most power inevitably accumulate more and more of it until it is maximally concentrated. This is true under any system of government. It happens faster with a centralized government and slower under a system that emphasizes democratic principles, an independent media, due process, a separation of powers, and so on, but it appears to be inevitable in any case.

For individuals, the climb is always steepest from the bottom, so the odds are always stacked against the mosquitoes and any victories they achieve at great effort are readily undone with minor effort by those in positions of power, especially after they have captured all of the institutions that would otherwise keep their power in check. All political systems are continuously inching towards a state of totalitarianism, except of course for those that are already there, and the relentless march towards totalitarianism cannot realistically be interrupted by individuals acting alone. For every David who beats the odds against a Goliath, there are thousands of battles that go the way you'd expect. The enormous power wielded by those who control most of the wealth and resources can only be matched by very large numbers of ordinary people acting together with common purpose. To defeat the strong, not merely in the occasional battle but in the long run, you need to be stronger. Strength in numbers is the only realistic means we have of resetting society to a more just condition, albeit a temporary one before the march towards totalitarianism begins anew under whatever principles govern access to power under the reformed system.

"My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness."

The author of this quote appears to be using the word 'religion' to mean something like a guiding principle. I would be very surprised if kindness is not also a guiding principle for the majority of non-religious people. It certainly is for me, but I would never describe myself as remotely religious or spiritual in any way because these words are strongly suggestive of supernatural beliefs that I simply don't hold.

It's clear to me that the moral urge derives from our empathetic nature as a species, a nature refined by evolution for our survival as social beings, which isn't to say that empathy can't be inhibited by various dehumanizing influences including those that drive people to label others as 'wicked' because they follow the 'wrong' religion. Excepting those influences, it's in our nature to experience empathy when we see another laugh or cry, much as we experience hunger when we haven't eaten. Empathy is not a religious impulse, it's a human one.

Unfortunately, this quote is likely to feed into the all-too-common belief that religions have a monopoly on kindness and morality, a position that is patently false and understandably offensive to many nonbelievers.

If I were to describe the 14th Dalai Lama's actual religious views, they wouldn't include any moral issues at all. Instead, I would include things like the belief that he is the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama. I would also include the concept of karma, which like the American Dream, has an unfortunate flipside that tells us that those who are suffering now must have done something to deserve it in the past. Not everyone who believes in karma makes this inference, but it's an inference that is readily available to justify an unsympathetic view of the poor and downtrodden, and should be anathema to compassionate people. The belief in karma is, for example, a serious obstacle to addressing poverty in India where the Dalai Lama has lived for the last 55 years.

---

It would be easy to dismiss the Dalai Lama on the basis of his qualifications without actually looking at the substance of quotes like these. As a seventy-nine-year-old virgin, the Dalai Lama is an unlikely person to be offering advice about romantic love. As a person who was chosen for a privileged leadership role at the age of fifteen, he's also an unlikely person to be offering advice about what a person of small means can achieve if they apply themselves. He's definitely not speaking from experience when he ventures into these topics nor would a person in his position presumably have much experience of many of the other challenges and interpersonal relationships that are more typical of the human condition.

Given this, it would be impressive if the Dalai Lama were able to offer important insights on these topics. I don't discount the possibility that a person in his position could do this though. A certain amount of distance from life's messy entanglements often helps to see things more clearly.

Ultimately, it is the substance of what he says that matters which is why I've attempted to separate my discussion of the above quotes from the person who made them. However, after looking at these quotes closely and I hope fairly, I simply don't see any remarkable insights. Worse, many of them appear to have matters entirely backwards. Perhaps their true meaning is going over my head. If so, I invite others to explain what I'm missing. Until then, I'll assume that I have made more than enough effort to interpret them charitably.