By JAMES MCCARTEN
TORONTO, April 27 – The Dalai Lama continued to charm audiences with his playful sense of humour and message of peace and tolerance Tuesday as he accepted an honorary law degree from the University of Toronto.
The key ingredients of a happy life – compassion, tolerance and a warm heart – need not always be framed as religious or spiritual values, he told a rapt audience of more than 1,700 academics, dignitaries and students. “We can promote these human values without talking in religious faith,” the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader said, encouraging institutions like the University of Toronto to do precisely that with its students.
“I hope they pay more attention (to) promotion of human values in the way (of) secular ethics.”
The Dalai Lama said both spiritual and secular people need to have a “calm mind” to see the world around them objectively and accurately.
A person experiencing negative emotions or with a negative outlook will have a clouded and distorted perception of the world, he said.
“That person could be very intelligent, very educated, very experienced, but because of the negative emotion . . . that person may not judge properly the reality.”
Those with a narrow, self-centred focus who dwell on their own problems and shortcomings tend to see those problems as larger than they really are, the Dalai Lama said.
“Sometimes, if your inner self (is) weak, then I think sometimes due to fear, you can’t see the reality more objectively,” he said in what he self-deprecatingly described as “broken English.”
The university also presented the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize winner with the International Acharya Sushil Kumar Peace Award – an honour the crowd recognized with a sustained standing ovation.
The Dalai Lama said people with a wider, “holistic” perspective tend to be less preoccupied with a particular problem because it appears relatively small, he said.
Compassion, forgiveness and tolerance are the source of inner strength, and with inner strength comes more self-confidence, he said.
“With that, less fear, less doubt . . . and can see objectively, because you have self-confidence.”
During his hour on stage, the Dalai Lama’s every move seemed to delight the crowd.
As he signed his name to the university’s register on stage, he paused for a moment to carefully move a pitcher of water perched precariously close to the edge of the table.
When he stood at the lectern to speak, he playfully chided his translator for standing on the wrong side of the microphone.
In his speech, the Dalai Lama also cited a number of recent scientific studies, including one that examined the brain activity of Buddhist monks during meditation.
Those studies found that meditation stimulated activity in the left side of the brain in the area responsible for emotions like happiness, enthusiasm and joy.
In another case, when researchers compared the behaviour of monkeys that had been separated from their mothers to those who remained in a family, the separated monkeys were more prone to fighting, he said.
He also cited a case in which researchers examined people who frequently used personal pronouns like “I,” “me” or “mine.”
“Such people have greater risk of heart attack,” he said to the delight of the crowd.
“(They’re) narrow-minded and self-centred.”
