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.

Actually, we all know each other quite well. We all want happiness and do not want suffering. It seems to be a platitude, not worth saying. But it is worth saying and contemplating, because we don’t remain in constant recognition that just as I want happiness and don’t want suffering, so you want happiness and don’t want suffering. Rather, we might think: “Oh yeah, I want happiness and don’t want suffering, and yes, these people want happiness and don’t want suffering.” But then our next thought is, “How can you serve me?”

My usual habits draw me into thinking, “How can you serve my quest for pleasure and my quest to get rid of pain?” However, if I remembered that I want happiness and don’t want suffering and that you equally have the same aspiration, I could not possibly ask you to serve me.

From noticing my unwillingness to live within constant recognition of this basic quality of a sentient being - this includes animals - I’ve tried to think about what prevents such constant recognition. We’re all so similar, yet somehow, it’s so easy to cross that line and use other people for one’s own happiness. Far from making myself available for others’ happiness, everyone should be available - from my point of view - for my happiness. If you don’t work for my happiness, watch out!

What is it about our minds that keeps us from this recognition, that makes it so easy to forget it? One factor is that we generally meet with other people through our visual consciousness, our eyes. We mainly see other people, but feel ourselves and remain primarily concerned with our own feelings of heat, cold, hunger, thirst, breathing in, breathing out, having this pleasure or that pain.

Because we are so reliant on the medium of sight, we see persons in categories such as black, white, yellow, and red. In Tibetan monastic education, one of the first things that young monastics are asked in the debating courtyards is: “Is a white horse white?” The proper answer is “No, the color of a white horse is white.” A horse, like a human, is a being, and beings are not colors. Colors are material. Persons are not material. Persons are designated in dependence upon mind and body, but they are neither mind nor body, nor a collection of mind and body.

Once I understood how much our own focus remains on ourselves, I realized why earlier, when the Dalai Lama went to Europe for the first time, he would arrive in a city and announce, “Everyone wants happiness and doesn’t want suffering.” In India I had attended long lectures by him - four to six hours a day, sixteen days running - on complicated philosophy and psychology; but when he came to Europe, what did he have to say? “Everyone wants happiness, doesn’t want suffering.” He would come to the airport and announce that everyone wants happiness, doesn’t want suffering. He’d have a news conference and announce that everyone wants happiness, doesn’t want suffering. In city after city after city, I thought, “What’s wrong with him?” Yet to understand that others are so much like oneself creates a different perspective, a startlingly changed worldview. When this is internalized, you are not confronting another over a divide, but meeting someone with whom you have so much in common. You feel you know the person.