Nonviolence as Ethical Spirituality: The Case of the Dalai Lama

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Lloyd Steffen
Lloyd Steffen is Professor of Religion Studies, University Chaplain and Director of the Center for Dialogue, Ethics and Spirituality at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA. He can be reached at: LHS1@lehigh.edu

Abstract

The Dalai Lama is a political and spiritual leader who, like Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. before him, has voiced strong opposition to violence and oppression while also calling for resistance to injustice. Unlike Gandhi and King, the Dalai Lama has not been on site with his people to protest oppression. In a unique move necessitated by exile from Tibet, he has taken to the world stage to expose the suffering of the Tibetan people while advocating justice, for preservation of Tibetan culture, and for a peaceful solution to the Tibet-China conflict. This paper analyzes the Dalai Lama’s understanding of violence as grounded in afflictive emotions that create suffering both in the spiritual as well as in the political realm. The Dalai Lama’s analysis of “anger-hatred” as a destructive afflictive emotion requiring spiritual attention underwrites his moral argument for nonviolent resistance. This paper argues that the Dalai Lama not merely examines violence as a problem of spiritual affliction but that he addresses peace and nonviolence as an ethic. Rather than seeking public validation in terms of religious particulars, the Dalai Lama presents an ethic that can be universalized, that is benevolent and otherregarding, and that employs the language of normative action guides and rational principles.

Article Details

Issue
Vol. 10 No. 1-2 (2009): January-December, 2009
Section
Articles

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