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The Burkean Dalai Lama

Political science professor Gary Gregg, a Christian and a conservative, went to hear the Dalai Lama speak in Kentucky, and came away impressed by how much the Tibetan Buddhist leader’s words indicate that he is a man who lives within C.S. Lewis’s conception of “the Tao” — a natural law that exists independently of humanity, […]

Political science professor Gary Gregg, a Christian and a conservative, went to hear the Dalai Lama speak in Kentucky, and came away impressed by how much the Tibetan Buddhist leader’s words indicate that he is a man who lives within C.S. Lewis’s conception of “the Tao” — a natural law that exists independently of humanity, and that is woven into our hearts and our nature. Gregg writes:

The end goal of modern education, Lewis instructed, was to create “men without chests;” to undermine the imaginative and emotionally noble part of the human soul that situates man somewhere between the brutish animals and the angels.  The Dalai Lama seemed to understand just this point as he pointed over and over again through his burgundy robes to his own chest as he instructed the students on the virtues of a life lived in community and with compassion.

Not just once did he sound like Russell Kirk or Wendell Berry when he gently introduced the highly subversive idea that our current educational system emphasizing practical and commercially viable skills should be augmented once again by a more full understanding of what an education is—including moral education. Though the quiet and subtle word is his method of teaching, one can see the same concern as those of us railing more aggressively over our schools’ obsession with commercial relevance and S.T.E.M. rather than developing whole human children.

In 1791 Edmund Burke talked of the “wardrobe of the moral imagination” which helped keep humanity from collapsing into its baser animalism.  C. S. Lewis would talk of his own imagination being “baptized” by a fairy tale when he was on his road from atheism to Christianity. Today the Dalai Lama seemed to be making a similar point.  He took today’s obsession with bodily health and asked us to consider caring just as much for “the hygiene of our emotions.”  One is left ruminating on just what such a disinfection regimen would look like.

The most traditionalist conservative could not have channeled Edmund Burke better than when the Tibetan leader explored how true compassion was demonstrated from one person to another and the good deed reflected back into the heart of the person acting on compassion. In such a way communities are built in these acts of affection and to work they must be among real persons, not abstractions or distant bureaucrats.  The modern welfare state of the government forcibly taking from one group to give to another seems arbitrary and shallow next to the Dalai Lama’s vision of organic and free community. At one point he even said education in such virtues as compassion could not be handed down by government but must be passed on in local schools, families, and communities.

Read Gregg’s full report from the audience with the Dalai Lama.

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