Tricycle | Awake in the World

During a lecture while I was interpreting for the Dalai Lama, he said in what seemed to me to be broken English, “Kindness is society.” I wasn’t smart enough to think he was saying kindness is society. I thought he meant kindness is important to society; kindness is vital to society; but he was saying that kindness is so important that we cannot have society without it. Society is impossible without it. Thus, kindness IS society; society IS kindness. Without concern for other people it’s impossible to have society.

The Dalai Lama is fond of saying that he feels he knows each individual just like his own brothers and sisters—even though, on lecture tours, he’s of a different religion, was brought up in a different part of the world, speaks a different language, and wears different clothes.