19 April 2017, morning. Four young French YouTubers12 have just had an extraordinary experience. I have brought them to meet the spiritual guide of the Tibetan people to discuss this book. Although they do not know much about the Dalai Lama, they are fascinated by him, and they know that he embodies a benevolent humanity. They had been inspired to meet him after they read the Charter of Universal Responsibility,13 which moved them to seek new ways of thinking, and gave them the keys to unlock the door so they could help create a better world. The Dalai Lama suggested that, since they are French, why don’t they start the revolution our world needs in France? Although he was addressing the young YouTubers, he turned towards me as he spoke. Afterwards he reached out to embrace me, calling me ‘my long-time friend!’
This reference to the French Revolution took me back to a few months earlier: 13 September 2016. In collaboration with the Paris Bar Association, I organised a meeting with the Dalai Lama and 350 lawyers and international environmental experts, to be held during the Global Forum on Environment.14 During my introductory speech, I mentioned the 1789 Revolution and the fact that lawyers spearheaded it. The next day, in the Senate, with a knowing smile in my direction, the Dalai Lama spoke of himself as a secular disciple of the French Revolution. So I interpreted his concluding words to the YouTubers as being an invitation to help focus his call to the youth of today for a revolution. He confirmed as much and a new meeting was arranged three months later.
July 2017. Ladakh, northern India. The Dalai Lama received me at Shewatsel Phodrang, ‘supreme palace of peace’. During our encounter he looked at me with great concentration, transferring a very particular intense energy to me – namely the energy of the Revolution of Compassion that so motivates him.
The Dalai Lama has himself undergone the Revolution of Compassion, and he has now entrusted me with its message. In preparation for our encounter, I had gathered together those mind-training aphorisms that make up the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual practice known as Lojong. This word encompasses a set of mental exercises which progressively refocuses consciousness so that it ceases to function in a self-centred manner and becomes spontaneously altruistic. Even so, the Dalai Lama insisted that for the young generation of the twenty-first century, training in compassion must be based on neuroscientific research that is validated by collective experience and common sense. First, because science is universalist in spirit, whereas religion is divisive. Second, because young people today have a scientific mindset. Third, because in order to change their way of thinking, they must know how the mind works, and have the tools of neuroscience at their disposal to rally all their knowledge and understanding.
The Dalai Lama could have drawn on Buddhist psychology – which is underpinned by 2,500 years of introspective phenomenology. Defining himself as part-Buddhist monk and part-scientist, over the last thirty years he has endeavoured to show how the collaboration between neuroscience and the Buddhist science of the mind gives a renewed understanding of the mind, medicine and instruction through the introduction of meditation to research laboratories, hospitals and schools. But when speaking to the millennial generation, he put himself in their place. What would be the best way to guide them through the current crisis? The answer came: by going beyond religion, and basing the learning of compassion on human reason and common sense, without reference to any belief system. As I listened to him, only too aware of the subversive nature of his message and the urgent need to pass it on, I measured how far we had come since we first worked together on his book, back in 2009: My Spiritual Autobiography. I thought about this in detail during the weeks that followed, as I replayed the highlights of our discussion in my mind so that I could internalise them and write this book.
The ethos of the Revolution of Compassion resonated strongly in me because my thinking has been nourished by discussions with lawyers and law-makers, initially during the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference when I presented the Dalai Lama’s message about ecology.15 That collaboration resulted in a series of seminars entitled ‘Law and Consciousness’, emphasising the link between a collective commitment based on law, and making a conscious individual commitment. The coming together of these two elements – a vital necessity, given the current environmental crisis – lies in the recognition of our multiple interdependencies with the earth’s ecosystem and the need to take universal responsibility for it.
One evening, after an encounter with the Dalai Lama, I experienced this in a very personal way, as I walked barefoot along the sandy riverbed of the Indus in Ladakh. The great Himalayan mountain range was on the horizon. Solid and massive, its giant flanks were whipped by the fury of the winds, while its peaks pierced the arc of the sky. But the vision of the mineral landscape faded at my contact with the flowing water, brimming with life at my feet.
I became one with the living water of the ‘Lion River’16 that springs from a snow-and-ice matrix near Mount Kailash, a sacred mountain scattered with votive shrines built by devout pilgrims.
I became one with the tremendous flow of this fifty-million-year-old body of water and its vertiginous gorges that stretch for over 3,000 kilometres from the Land of Snows, through Ladakh and Baltistan, along the Karakorum and the Hindu Kush, before veering south to irrigate the plains of Punjab and Sindh, and then finally embracing the Arabian Sea with all seven arms of its vast delta.
I became one with the water lapping at my ankles. I felt the pain of the Tibetans who live on the ‘Roof of the World’, an open-air prison where religious and secular children, teenagers, women and men of all ages regularly practise self-immolation as an act of resistance in defiance of the dictatorship of the People’s Republic of China. To date, over 150 human torches have burned in the face of the indifference of the world’s nations.
I became one with the powerful voice of the river as it swept along its irrepressible song of compassion, calling on humanity to find the loving, shining source of its original loving-kindness.
In these Himalayan landscapes, I discovered that existing means coexisting according to the unitary system of life. A few months earlier, on 21 March 2017, the state of Uttarakhand in northern India had granted the status of ‘living entity’ to the Ganges, its tributary the Yamuna, and all the rivers in its territory. The High Court gave rivers, streams, torrents and waterfalls the same status and legal rights as people, thus making them our brothers and sisters at the heart of the earth’s ecosystem. The Indian judges placed them under the protection of ‘parents with a human face’, responsible for guaranteeing their health and wellbeing.17
I felt this kinship with the Indus with an intimacy that was all the more poignant because the river is seriously under threat. Downstream, the industrial pollution and overpopulation on the outskirts of cities have transformed it into a giant open sewer. The aquatic fauna has all but vanished as dams ravage the ecosystems that form a single entity within the Indus. Only a thousand dolphins now survive in its waters. Its delta has been devastated by deforestation and rising sea levels as a result of global warming. Agricultural land and creeks of submerged mangroves have led to the forced migration of more than a million refugees. Along the entire length of the river, a dividing line is being drawn between the nourishing vitality of nature and the plundering by humankind that is causing a devastating ecocide.18
On my return flight from Ladakh, I was overjoyed to read in Air India’s Shubh Yatra in-flight magazine the words of Uma Bharti, Minister for Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation in the Union Government of India: ‘I believe that the issue of water should be approached with love not aggression. We are already cooperating with Nepal and Bangladesh, and it is in this spirit that we will work with our other neighbours.’ This declaration is part of a major revolution, based on the concept that nature itself has rights, which is now being ratified by legal practitioners. Governments are following suit. On 19 September 2017, French president Emmanuel Macron launched the Global Environment Pact19 at the UN General Assembly, a critical next step following on from the Paris Agreement.
Forty years ago, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss observed presciently that the rights of man would need to be limited at the point when privileging them would lead to the demise of animal or vegetable species.20 Today we need a new social contract that takes into account the current state of the law, which is only focused on the present and on humankind. This new social contract needs to anticipate future global devastation in a world where one person in every seven is predicted to be a climate change refugee by 2050.21
The Revolution of Compassion Has Dawned
‘We know about environmental problems. But are we mindful of them?’ wonders the lawyer Patricia Savin, presciently.22 This is where the Revolution of Compassion takes on its full significance. The legal transition needs to be accompanied by an inner transition that changes our whole way of thinking, placing altruism at the heart of our lives. The reforms that are being developed may be very pertinent in themselves, but they are not enough. It is imperative that we move on from a culture of performance, competition and rivalry towards a culture of sharing and solidarity. This calls for a revolution: the Revolution of Compassion. It has already begun. It has other names, other spokespersons.
Matthieu Ricard calls it the Altruistic Revolution. He theorises it in his book Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World,23 supported by over a thousand scientific references demonstrating that compassion modifies the structures, chemistry and functions of the brain. He translates these insights into action through his humanitarian work in Asia24 and his commitment to the cause of animal rights.25
According to the philosopher Abdennour Bidar, the Revolution of Compassion is the Fraternity Revolution; he calls on us to ‘repair together the damaged fabric of the world’.26 Noting the crisis in interpersonal relationships, ‘the mother of all crises’, in ‘a world that is multidamaged and polyfractured’, he describes it as the need to ‘transform friendship into a political project’.
The Revolution of Compassion is also an intrinsic part of the Earth Democracy movement, according to Indian physicist and ecologist Vandana Shiva.27 She sets out ten principles of human sovereignty over seeds, water, food, land and forests, so that humanity can practise a genuine and profound form of democracy in tune with all of life.
The Revolution of Compassion is also known as ‘a million quiet revolutions’,28 breathing hope into the concept of an engagement with civil society and, more specifically, with young people, in favour of more environmentally aware, participative and compassionate societies.
The Revolution of Compassion has dawned. It is not a dream. A compassionate world exists. It is hiding within the world around us.29
In the course of my conversations with the Dalai Lama in Ladakh in July 2017, I promised him that I would do everything I could to ensure his appeal would be heard by as many people as possible. I recalled the pride of the four young YouTubers to whom I had introduced him three months earlier, their attention and emotion when in the presence of the Dalai Lama, who addressed both their hearts and their minds. These young people discovered another world, far from their frenetic Western lives. Even time was different. This book is my contribution to their world in the process of being born.
Dharamsala, 2 October 2017