‘The Dalai Lama is a global icon for compassionate leadership’: Kaveri Gill

Studying and later teaching economics and development at the University of Cambridge, I soon came to question neoclassical economics, with its central hypothesis of selfish individualism, and neoliberal orthodoxy, with its worship of the market. A heterodox political economy approach appealed far more, but over time it, too, did not yield completely satisfactory answers as to why we continue to remain asymptotically far from the goal of greater equality. I came to observe that in reality, the left—both liberals and radicals—often mirror the right in their lived structural prejudices and the ends-justify-any-means methods.

Joining an international relations department, it became impossible to deny the dominance of realism, with a multipolar and unstable world order dominated by isolationist and expansionist great powers. Keynesian economics, the concept of the welfare state and the liberal, rules-based post World War II Bretton Woods alliances and institutions, which formed the backbone of my graduate study, teaching and worldview, lie in ruins today. We have highly transactional, authoritarian populist leaders in many parts of the globe, who are ever ready to bend facts to serve their ends in a post-truth truly dystopian reality.

The question that increasingly came to my mind is whether such a state of affairs is inevitable. Could fallibility rather be traced to a lack of probity in public life? To what degree is it true that if we do not ourselves practice and embody ethics, it is impossible to change the outer world? To then come across the embodiment of Nalanda philosophy in the personhood of the Dalai Lama was a revelation.

Here is a world leader who has consistently not only propounded but actually lived the philosophy of radical compassion for the other, on the basis of reason-based conviction in the ontological reality of profound interdependence. The means, i.e. non-harm based on a recognition of the nature of our interdependent reality, are seen to determine the ends. These are two non-negotiables that form the core of the entire corpus of the Buddha’s teachings, with neither requiring blind faith. Indeed, I would not even categorise them as religion at all.

Why radical compassion? Because the depth and stability of compassion that can be trained and generated not just for the biologically related or affectively chosen few, but for ever increasing concentric circles of anonymous unknown beings based on such a view—of the emptiness of objective existence because all phenomena are dependently originated—is of an altogether different order to the kindness a lucky few may be imbued with from birth, or the compassion championed as virtuous by all religions.

A fitting illustration would be the degree to which the Dalai Lama has upheld non-violence as a principled stance, and compelled his people, who, contrary to common perception, have not always been pacifist, to follow suit. That the Tibetans have premeditatedly chosen non-violent resistance thus far, in the face of ever increasing violence and repression by the Chinese state, in the form of unconscionable colonial boarding schools; illegal DNA-testing; mass displacements and dislocations; arbitrary and illegal detentions; and much else of pervasive cultural, religious, linguistic, genocidal intent, is a powerful product of such refined thought and sustained practice.

More broadly, the Nalanda philosophy enables the Dalai Lama to do with ease what Judith Butler is self-confessedly unable to in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), i.e., to theorise fundamental interdependency as a basis for a global political community. The philosophy’s essence—a recognition of our common humanity with a shared desire for happiness and to avoid suffering, coupled with our inevitable interdependency—is all that is required to advocate for universal ethics, the Dalai Lama’s first and foremost life commitment.

The Dalai Lama would like to see such universal ethics mainstreamed into modern education systems, so that future generations can actually bring into being a better world and have a fair chance at ‘the good life’, in the Aristotelian sense. In an anthropocene age, such a perspective fundamentally accommodates ecology and the climate, too.

What Jacinda Ardern is terming ‘empathetic leadership’ today, is what the Dalai Lama has practised and advocated his entire life. His recently published political autobiography, Voice for the Voiceless: Over Seven Decades of Struggle for My Land and My People (2025), a classic for all posterity on non-violent resistance, is a paean and guide to such an approach.

For me, meeting the profound and expansive Nalanda philosophy as embodied by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and studying it in great depth with Ven. Geshe Dorji Damdul at Tibet House, Delhi, has been life altering. It has answered many questions I have harboured in my academic journey and irrevocably convinced me of the importance of teaching about and living an ethical life, for my own well-being and that of others, as well as our planet.

The author is senior fellow at the Centre of Excellence for Himalayan Studies, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Delhi-NCR.