Social Creatures

We are social creatures endowed with instincts for compassion and kindness... Our welfare is intertwined.

"Thanks to thousands of ordinary British citizens who contributed to Save the Children, more than a thousand Tibetan children like me found a home to grow up in safely in the early 1960s, while our parents struggled to adjust as refugees in a land where they did not speak the language or know the customs. Thanks to individuals such as Dr. Valentina Stache-Rosen and Zemey Rinpoche, I found a purpose as I struggled through my very unconventional education. In my professional life, serving the Dalai Lama so closely, I have had the privilege of witnessing, from the front seat as it were, what it means for someone to live a life with complete conviction in this defining human quality we call compassion.

Today I am a husband and a father of two teenage daughters. I live in a North American city and lead a life very different from the one I was used to in a Tibetan monastery in India. On a daily basis, I struggle like most people with the typical challenges of a fast-paced modern life—balancing work, family, and relationships, paying the bills—while maintaining sanity, a sense of proportion, and basic optimism. Remarkably, it’s in the teachings of my own Tibetan Buddhist tradition that I find many of the tools that help me navigate the challenges of everyday living in the contemporary world...

Broadly defined, compassion is a sense of concern that arises when we are confronted with another’s suffering and feel motivated to see that suffering relieved. The English word compassion, from its Latin root, literally means “to suffer with.” According to religious historian Karen Armstrong, the word for compassion in Semitic languages—rahamanut in Hebrew and rahman in Arabic—is etymologically related to the word for womb, evoking the mother’s love for her child as an archetypal expression of our compassion. At its core, compassion is a response to the inevitable reality of our human condition—our experience of pain and sorrow...

We have bought into a popular narrative that seeks to explain all our behavior through the prism of competition and self-interest. This is the story we have been telling about ourselves. The thing about a story like this is that it tends to be self-fulfilling. When our story says that we are at heart selfish and aggressive creatures, we assume that every man is for himself. In this “dog eat dog world” it is only logical, then, to see others as a source of rivalry and antagonism. And so we relate to others with apprehension, fear, and suspicion, instead of fellow feeling and a sense of connection. By contrast, if our story says that we are social creatures endowed with instincts for compassion and kindness, and that as deeply interdependent beings our welfare is intertwined, this totally changes the way we view—and behave in—the world. So the stories we tell about ourselves do matter, quite profoundly so...

The Dalai Lama’s explicit advocacy for adapting Buddhist-based mental training practices for the secular world has also played a significant part in raising awareness of the benefits of mindfulness. Today mindfulness turns up in therapy, in management and leadership training, in schools, and in competitive sports. Phrases such as “mindful parenting,” “mindful leadership,” “mindful schools,” and “mindfulness for stress management” are mainstream. And searching for “mindfulness” in book titles on Amazon calls up more than three thousand books.

The stage is now set for compassion to make the next big impact in our world. There is a growing scientific movement to redefine the place of compassion in our understanding of human nature and behavior. Therapies based on compassion training are showing promise for mental health conditions ranging from social phobia to excessive negative self-judgment, and from post-traumatic stress disorder to eating disorders. Educators are exploring ways to bring kindness and compassion into schools as part of our children’s social, emotional, and ethical development. In this context, an opportunity came to me to design a standardized program for secular compassion training known today as compassion cultivation training (CCT)."

-- Thupten Jinpa PhD.