Compassion and Empathy - Pt. 1 - Mind & Life Institute

Dialogue 19|Session 5

Overview

The discussion focuses on how schools, teachers, parents, and communities can intentionally cultivate empathy, compassion, resilience, and emotional well-being alongside academic learning. Linda Lantieri emphasizes the importance of “inner preparedness,” arguing that children and educators need practices such as quiet reflection, mindfulness, and emotional self-regulation so they can remain calm, compassionate, and effective during stress, and that teachers must first embody these qualities themselves. Nancy Eisenberg distinguishes empathy, sympathy, and personal distress, explaining that well-regulated children are more likely to respond to others’ suffering with concern and helpful behavior, especially when they experience warm relationships, compassionate role models, opportunities to help, constructive reasoning rather than punishment, and guidance in managing emotions. Matthieu Ricard adds that genuine altruism is possible and can be strengthened through practice, cooperation, mentoring, service, and the deliberate cultivation of loving-kindness, while the Dalai Lama stresses developing a stable form of compassion that does not depend on how others behave. Across the session, the speakers argue for a secular, evidence-informed approach to teaching compassion—drawing useful insights from contemplative traditions without promoting religion—and suggest that education should nurture both the inner lives of adults and the social-emotional capacities of children so that caring, ethical behavior becomes a natural response in everyday life.

Dialogue 19
7 sessions
October 9, 2009
DAR Constitution Hall, Washington, DC, USA
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Speakers

Tenzin Gyatso, the14th Dalai Lama, is the leader of Tibetan Buddhism and a spiritual leader revered worldwide. He was born on July 6, 1935, in a small village called Taktser in northeastern Tibet. Born to a peasant family, he was recognized at the age of two, in accordance with Tibetan tradition, as the reincarnation of his predecessor, the 13th Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lamas are manifestations of the Buddha of Compassion, who choose to reincarnate for the purpose of serving human beings. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1989, he is universally respected as a spokesman for the compassionate and peaceful resolution of human conflict. He has traveled extensively, speaking on subjects including universal responsibility, love, compassion and kindness. Less well known is his intense personal interest in the sciences; he has said that if he were not a monk, he would have liked to be an engineer. As a youth in Lhasa it was he who was called on to fix broken machinery in the Potala Palace, be it a clock or a car. He has a vigorous interest in learning the newest developments in science, and brings to bear both a voice for the humanistic implications of the findings, and a high degree of intuitive methodological sophistication.

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Matthieu Ricard, PhD, is a Buddhist monk at Schechen Monastery in Kathmandu, Nepal. Born in France in 1946, he received a PhD in cellular genetics at the Institut Pasteur under Nobel Laureate FrancoisJacob. As a hobby, he wrote Animal Migrations (1969).He first traveled to the Himalayas in 1967 and has lived there since 1972, studying with Kangyur Rinpoche and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, two of the most eminent Tibetan teachers of our times. Since 1989, he has served as the French interpreter for His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He is the author of The Monk and the Philosopher (with his father, the French thinker Jean-Francois Revel); The Quantum and the Lotus (with the astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan); Happiness, A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Import-ant Skill; and Why Meditate?. He has translated several books from Tibetan into English and French, including The Life of Shabkar and The Heart of Compassion.As a photographer, Matthieu has published several albums, including The Spirit of Tibet, Buddhist Himalayas, Tibet, Motionless Journey, and Bhutan. He devotes all of the proceeds from his books and much of his time to 120 humanitarian projects in Tibet, Nepal, and India—and to the preservation of the Tibetan cultural heritage—through his charitable association, Karuna-Shechen. Ricard has been deeply involved in the work of the Mind & Life Institute for many years.

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Nancy Eisenberg received her B.A. from the University of Michigan and her M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. She currently is Regents Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University. She has published nearly 200 books, chapters, and empirical journal articles on children's and adult's social and moral development. She has been a recipient of 5-year Research Scientist Development Awards from the National Institute of Health and the National Institutes of Mental Health (and will soon be starting a Research Scientist Award from the National Institutes of Mental Health). She is President of the Western Psychological Association, has been associate editor of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and is editor-elect of the journal Psychological Bulletin.

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