Thupten Jinpa's moving book about the possibilities of compassion
One of the great eddies that we are in the midst of these years is the one that arises in the meeting between the cultures of the East and the West.
On the one hand, the meeting is a clash, a clash. As we see when the major religions, fearful of the changes brought about by globalization, retreat into fundamentalist self-protection. Or when the Chinese and American economies initiate a trade war.
On the other hand, it is a massive cross-fertilization that is particularly visible where the East's knowledge about the nature of consciousness exchanges with the West's scientific clarity and understanding of the importance of avoiding dogmatism.
In September, Denmark will be visited by a significant figure and personality within this exchange when Danish Center for Mindfulness are hosts for Thupten Jinpa.
Jinpa was born in Tibet, raised and trained as a monk in the Gelugpa order, from which he has since resigned, as he writes, to have his own family. He holds a PhD from Cambridge and also holds what is equivalent to a high Buddhist university degree, and he was for many years the Dalai Lama's chief translator into English.
He is coming to Denmark to talk about, and hold a workshop in, CCT, Compassion Cultivation Training, the teaching and research format he has developed at Stanford University, with which he is affiliated. The workshop is held in conjunction with Nanja Holland Hansen from the Danish Center for Mindfulness.
He has given the background to CCT in the book A Fearless Heart from 2015 (Danish translation: A fearless heart, 2015).
The ability to have compassion, to feel the suffering of others in one's own system and from there to want to act actively and helpfully, is, Jinpa writes in the book, an innate competence. Which, like our innate ability to learn to speak, can be supported by conscious effort.
’'A Fearless Heart' is an intense, moving and well-argued call to work consciously to cultivate compassion, and it contains a description of a wide range of techniques that support such a process, descriptions that Jinpa substantiates with references to, in particular, recent neuropsychological research.
The practices recommended in the book are primarily attitude-building, meaning they consist of a wide range of different and inspiring ways in which we, in virtually any situation, have the opportunity to shift our attention from emotions and distractions to natural compassion.
To support and develop the ability for such shifts in consciousness, the book recommends and describes various forms of meditation, primarily the two that in Sanskrit are called shamatha, concentrative meditation, and vipassana, witness meditation (in the book, which is liberatingly free of technical terms, it is called 'focused attention' and 'meta-presence', Meta-awareness).
It is also a very personal book, Thupten Jinpa is also disarmingly straightforward and unguarded. Like when he talks about his gratitude to the uncle who took care of him and his siblings when they were orphaned at a far too early age. Or when he tells of the suffering in the orphanage. And in the sweetest way he confesses that as a Tibetan and a monk he grew up with very little touch and therefore entered into marriage with a Westerner without this basic skill. Which made his wife leave a book, 'The Art of Embracing', for him in the bathroom. 'And it helped', writes Jinpa.
