Compassion on the Rise: the Dalai Lama’s and Alice Walker’s Tactics
The Dalai Lama is considered to be a wise and respected leader, among other things, while Alice Walker is regarded as a respected novelist and activist in her right. Through their writings each of them expresses their concern on many subjects; nevertheless, both the Dalai Lama and Walker show the need for expansion of one's compassion to those that are not immediately close to him or her. However, they both ask for this growth in two distinctive ways. In his passage The Ethic of Compassion, the Dalai Lama proposes for the increase in compassion through his tactics of reasoning and experience. While Walker focuses more on the emotions of people and trying to get her audience
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As he acknowledges in the first line that humans will receive a "temptation to deceive" he starts his argument by connecting with the audience by noting that no one is perfect. However, he immediately continues by saying that, "our compassion for them" will come into play and stop us from proceeding with that kind of idea and by doing so illustrates how powerful compassion can be. With these couple of lines, the Dalai Lama is able to reason with his audience through his “if this then that” statement and not just present his point with no background information. Next, the Dalai Lama goes on to mention a very relevant and important issue with research and science. As he takes this mock case, we can see him using kairos to further his point. By adding this example of a scientist right after defining what compassion can do, it enables his audience to connect the dots and realize how powerful being compassionate towards everyone can be. Research can be daunting and take years to develop; however, the Dalai Lama expresses if it is "to be a source of suffering" then compassion will enable the scientist to do the right thing. The Dalai Lama never specifies to who it would be a source of suffering and by doing so includes everyone and anyone, non-human, to that circle of compassion. Even if this means "abandoning the project" which can be a daunting and have severely negative effects to a scientist that has spent so much of his time to it. By using his various persuasive techniques including Kairos, the Dalai Lama is able to compel his audience into including compassion outside their inner
Compassion has became something rare in our society, and something that a lot of people lack. The author, Barbara Lazear Ascher, explains to us that compassion is not a character trait, but rather something that we learn along the way with the help of real life situations we encounter, such as the ones she encountered herself. Ascher persuades her audience that compassion is not just something you are born with by using anecdotes, rhetorical questions, and allusions.
“The Dalai Lama” in The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. New York:
In a world of suffering and pain the Dalai Lama said, “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive”. The Dalai Lama has become a figurehead for Buddhism worldwide for his compassion and warm smiles. Buddhism has extended beyond meditation and even monks such as the Dalai Lama. The basic concepts of compassion and mindfulness in Buddhism are being applied in the daily lives of lay people who need it the most.
In Jasmine Syedullah “The Abolition of Whiteness”, she confesses to her readers that “one of the things that had drown me into buddhism was the notion of no self. I was fascinated by the prospect of being Jasmine and not being Jasmine.” (16) Most of the times we suffer so much with trying to find ourselves that we become something else. We lost the feeling of wholeness, the feeling of belonging to our own bodies, and the feeling of happiness. Self compassion can often be misunderstood as not being aware of anything else rather than our own dignities. But the importance of self-compassion is treating ourselves gently instead of being harsh and self-critical to please others expectations for them. It’s common to beat ourselves up for faults big and small. But being kind to yourself is not only providing comfort in the moment, it is also committing, whenever possible, to acknowledging that some things are past our control, we become better at coping with failure and whatever consequences our actions may have caused because we learn to have compassion towards ourselves no matter the
Critical Essays on Alice Walker. Ed. By Ikenna Dieke. Greenwood Press, Westpoint, Connecticut, London, 1999
Alice Munro’s ancestry traces back to Scottish-Presbyterian and Anglican roots which made a large impact on her outlook of the world. Anglicans were very strict and believed that using the wrong fork at dinner could be considered in itself a sin--these roots made her well behaved and very aware of her actions.The other half of Munro’s ancestry led to Scottish Presbyterians which made her explicitly aware of social class, what separated each class, how higher classes acted towards lower classes, and where she and everyone else belonged. The Presby side also led to her constantly examining her own deeds, emotions, and motives and analyzing if they could be considere...
Alice Walker is an African American essayist, novelist and poet. She is described as a “black feminist.”(Ten on Ten) Alice Walker tries to incorporate the concepts of her heritage that are absent into her essays; such things as how women should be independent and find their special talent or art to make their life better. Throughout Walker’s essay entitled “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” I determined there were three factors that aided Walker gain the concepts of her heritage which are through artistic ability, her foremothers and artistic models.
• Alice Walker herself has said: “I believe it is from this period – from my solitary, lonely position, the position of an outcast – that I began really to se people and things, really to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out...”
Alice Walker’s writing is encouraging, for it empowers individuals to embrace their culture, human decency, and the untold stories of those who were forgotten. She slays gender roles while fighting for the rights of everyone, and frequently describes how one can impact the life of another and how much control one should have over another’s fate in her themes. Walker’s sublime style exhibited within her works goes lengths to display her themes which are based mainly off of the passionate women she was raised around and the circumstances they overcame. She uses symbolism and metaphors to highlight the themes within her works. Transition needed. carefully cultivates texts that demonstrate her ability to appeal to the minds of the common populace.
Thesis Statement: Alice Walker, a twentieth and twenty- first century novelist is known for her politically and emotionally charged works, which exposes the black culture through various narrative techniques.
Rinpoche, Samdhong. Uncompromising Truth for a Compromised World: Tibetan Buddhism in Today’s World; forward by 14th Dalai Lama. (Tibet: World Wisdom, 2006), 264.
Whitted, Qiana. "Alice Walker (b. 1944)." New Georgia Encyclopedia. 26 November 2013. Web. 02 May .
Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944. She grew up in Eatonton as the youngest child out of eight. Her parents, Minnie Grant and Willie Walker, were poor sharecroppers. Alice was raised with in a family of poverty and a life of violent racism. Her environment left a permanent impression on her writing (“Alice Walker”). When she was eight, Alice and her brother were playing a game of “Cowboys and Indians” when she was blinded in her right eye. This incident occurred by a BB gun pallet. She was teased by her classmates and misunderstood by her family and became shy. She isolated herself from her classmates, and she explains, “ I no longer felt like the little girl I was. I felt old, and because I felt I was unpleasant to look at, filled with shame.” She had the amazing opportunity to have the cataract removed when she was fourteen. She had it removed, yet her sight in her right eye never returned.
Whitted, Qiana. "Alice Walker (b. 1944)." New Georgia Encyclopedia. N.p., 4 Sept. 2013. Web. 9 Oct. 2013.
The seven deadly sins lead us to a path we do not wish to take; however, the reality is that each and every one of us contain at least one of these characteristics. Sadly, these traits make up us, the human beings. Vanity causes us to be blind and turn our back towards the truth of ourselves. We turn a blind eye towards our flaws which prevents us from fixing them. We become in denial because we do not want to look at our weaknesses. Envy creates tension between two beings. When one desires another’s possession, there are two paths they may take. They may try to overrule the other and create something even better. They may also steal, cheat, and lie in order to obtain their possession. Sloth is the avoidance of physical or spiritual work. They