Ask His Holiness the Dalai Lama a Question

Seeds of Compassion participants and site visitors submitted the following questions to inform one or more panel discussions. Although the event is over, the issues raised below will be incorporated into planning for 2008-09. 

Personal

1. How do you define compassion?
2. What are your top 10 favorite movies?
3. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is a gentle, compassionate person, at peace with himself. What does he recommend people do to achieve compassion and peace with themselves?
4. What has been your most challenging moment? What got you through it?

Community and Family

1. What are simple everyday techniques to cultivate compassion?
2. What does it mean for youth to be “spiritual"?
3. What is the most important way a community can spread compassion?
4. How can we live more compassionately in the midst of stressful and overly busy lives? 
5. The needs around us (and around the world) seem overwhelming. How can we find ways to take positive and compassionate action?
6. How can we fight cynicism and despair?
7. How can we use compassion to help reverse obesity?
8. In a world that may always have challenges, how do we maintain inner peace?
9. Please list 10 things that will help parents plant the seed of compassion in children.
10. Many affluent Western parents—primarily, but not only, European-American—spend very little time with their children. In the U.S., non-white children with little money are targeted as "at risk." However, children who are raised by electronic devices, child care centers, and underpaid nannies are suffering from Compassion Deficit Disorder. How can we help end this racist perception that risk is about lack of money and lack of academic "success"?

Spiritual

1. How can we build common values and counter the misrepresentations of individual religions?
2. Please address the importance and relevance of "gratitude" and the "spirituality of serving."
3. How can we reach out beyond traditional faith communities?
4. How can we counter the darkness in some aspects of organized religion?
5. How can we distinguish between Truths and Untruths within traditions? 
6. One way to increase deeper understanding and appreciation of another's Path is to respond to the question: What is it that others say about your faith that hurts you? And the follow-up question: What is it you most want others to know about your faith? Because "faith" might not be a possible topic for this particular forum, I would ask: How can we best compassionately revisit situations in which we have acted reactively and unkindly? How can we best approach those to whom we had been unkind?
7. How can a merciful God allow terrible things to happen, such as war, extraordinary poverty, devastating personal traumas, and environmental disasters?

Global

1. How can we heal the spread of terrorism on our planet?
2. What can we as ordinary citizens do? What can we urge our leaders to do?  
3. How can we emphasize our common humanity?
4. Looking at the future of humanity, what are our greatest barriers to raising compassionate children? To developing national and international agreements that are rooted in compassion? Most cultures and religions define an in-group and an out-group. How can we keep from raising children who are compassionate only toward members of their in-group? Most people have moral sensibilities—they feel the pain of at least some other people and are distressed by it. However, we tend to draw boundaries around these moral sensibilities. Empathy and compassionate behavior get triggered by the suffering of some fellow human beings (or sentient beings) but not others. Why? How can we change this?  

 
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