Yangten Rinpoche – What Makes Us Valuable is Our Love & Compassion

April 2026

Yangten Rinpoche answers a question regarding the war in the world during one of our Introduction to Buddhism course in March 2026. Please find the video and the transcript below:

Student: 

My papa is from Ukraine, my mama is from Russia and I am suffering because of this war. I cannot do anything to stop it. I want to ask the top management of Buddhism what the Dalai Lama is doing to prevent the world from the wars, from this particular war, and from wars in the future and what should I, as a small human, do to prevent other people from this kind of suffering? 

Yangten Rinpoche: 

Thank you for your question. The responses from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who has always been saying again and again and explaining again and again, how our peace and happiness are extremely important and how our happiness and peace come from within, from our minds. Our peace and happiness are related to love and compassion. His Holiness says that for humans to live in peace and happiness, we need love and compassion. His Holiness has been saying this throughout his life, teaching this for his whole life and saying that the main source of our happiness is love and compassion. And the human value, what makes a human valuable, is our love and compassion. Our love and compassion. 

What His Holiness has been trying to promote and establish for many years, for a long time, is that, along with general education, we need to have education of the mind, education of the heart. So this needs to go together with the general education, so that in schools and education systems, they need to change to bring in this education of love and compassion. So this has been established. For a long time, His Holiness has not only been saying about it but actively bringing this education of the heart into the general education. This is His Holiness’s long-term vision and his big vision as a way to avoid wars. 

Getting directly to your point. His Holiness has said again and again that humans are the cause of these problems. So the humans can be the ones to overcome those problems. How? Another quality about being human is that we can engage in dialogue. Right? When we engage in fighting, then we’re no different from animals. The animals, when they confront a difficult situation, fight. They don’t discuss and resolve things with dialogue. They fight. But we as humans are able to engage in dialogue. And so in this way His Holiness has been working his whole life extensively to try and promote love and compassion, and trying to bring that education of the heart into our general education system in order to prevent wars,  bring about the peace and happiness of humanity.

If you ask what the Buddhist perspective on war is, then in general we think that through war we might bring about a resolution or a solution, but actually, from the Buddhist perspective, that’s so not in line with reality that war cannot bring about a resolution and from the Buddhist perspective, hatred can never overcome hatred. Only love and compassion can overcome hatred. When we look at violence, violence cannot be overcome with more violence. Actually, nonviolence is the way to overcome violence, and when we draw on nonviolence to overcome violence, it’s actually the most powerful way to overcome violence.

The war between Ukraine and Russia is not just between Ukraine and Russia. It’s not just the problem of Ukraine and Russia. It’s actually a problem of the whole world, and the whole world should be looking at ways to overcome it. It affects all of us, and it’s a responsibility of all of us. 

If we look on a personal level, like what we can do as individuals, one’s own family is like one’s own country, isn’t it? It’s like our own small little country, our own small little world, and so in the way when we engage in anything, we rely on 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, like more and more people and whatever we do affects these people around us, right? And so Rinpoche is saying that if we are able to look after our own culture, if we’re able to think long term, think what can I do to help to contribute towards overcoming this war to help what can I do to contribute long term towards bringing more peace and happiness here and in this world. Then if you spend your life thinking like whatever good is in the culture, to preserve that. To try and preserve what is good in the culture, what is positive. Then, sort of dedicating our time and our life to be able to preserve those things and looking after those things and upholding those things, then that is going to bring benefit. That’s what would be worthwhile to do. 

So this world that we live in is not a big world, is it? It’s a small world that we’re all sharing as our home. It is not that whatever happens here doesn’t affect over there. It’s not that there are some people over there who are happy and some people over there who are unhappy. Actually, it’s all just a matter of time. If I’m experiencing a problem today, maybe it’s your problem tomorrow. If you’re experiencing a problem today, maybe it’s my problem tomorrow. So, this world is small, and the things that happen in it are not isolated. Whatever happens to one now can happen to another at a different time. We definitely need to know that.