Thupten Jinpa on rising above trolling and caring our way to courage

For decades, he was the Dalai Lama’s right hand man but now he’s taking on internet trolls as he believes greater empathy is crucial to our future says Deirdre Reynolds.

Cyber compassion is one of the greatest challenges facing humankind today, according to the Dalai Lama’s interpreter.

Former Tibetan monk Thupten Jinpa - who has been translating the spiritual leader’s teachings into English for 30 years - has just released his own guide to being kinder.

And speaking exclusively to the Irish Examiner, he revealed how he believes rising above trolling is set to be the biggest test for the plugged-in generation.

“At this point, we don’t really know what the larger social and cultural implications of the huge rise of social media is going to be,” says Jinpa, who now lives in Canada. “It’s going to be one of the important challenges of our time.” “Face-to-face, we respond to tone, facial expressions and things like that, but in social media, we don’t have access to any of those, so it is just pure text that goes back and forth. People often say nasty things in print they don’t actually mean and it gets out of hand very, very fast.” “In my own case, my younger daughter went through a difficult experience with texting going back and forth,” adds the married father of two teenage girls. “At one point, I said, ‘Just take a day or two off’.

“Someone has to stop, otherwise it’s tit for tat, tit for tat, and everything gets so confused people forget what the initial quarrel was about. So I think sometimes simply pressing pause makes a big difference.” In ‘A Fearless Heart: Why Compassion is the Key to Greater Wellbeing’, out now, Jinpa - as he is more simply known - explains how being big-hearted can be good for your health, and reveals the practical ways to put empathy into action.

After three decades as the Dalai Lama’s right-hand man, the McGill University professor admits it was nerve-racking delivering his own message to the world.

“I’ve been with His Holiness for almost 30 years now, and compassion alongside world peace are the two most important messages that he brings to the world,” tells the 56 year-old, who first developed his course in Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) at Stanford University Medical School. “One thing I try to do in this particular book is bring a lot more of the contemporary psychology of understanding [to Buddhist teachings].

“In a sense, my book is a kind of support material to his Holiness’s teachings, so that his message [can] be understood in a much more contemporary way.” “In Western society, we have a very strange relationship with compassion,” he continues. “On the one hand, it’s a very important value that people really admire. On the other, sometimes we make it unreachable for ordinary people.

“Sometimes we put it on such a high pedestal that we expect it just be something we can observe in people like the Dalai Lama or Mother Teresa and so on.” Growing up in a home for refugee children in India, Jinpa recalls learning about compassion - both receiving and giving - from an early age, and even now believes that humans are essentially selfless.

But the Fearless Heart author also urged stressed-out Irish followers to put the ‘I’ back into compassion too.

“One of the interesting discoveries I experienced in dealing with the question of compassion in contemporary Western culture is how so many people struggle when it comes to being kind to themselves,” tells Jinpa, “which is kind of surprising because from a traditional Buddhist understating of human nature, self-kindness is really seen as a basic default state.

“Sometimes when we talk about self-kindness and self-compassion, people confuse it with being self-absorbed and self-pity,” he adds. “But self-pity and self-compassion are completely different.

“When you have a degree of self-compassion, it’s not narrowly focused on yourself - there is room within that for others as well.”

“From an evolutionary viewpoint, compassion is part of our nature,” says the guru, who only became the Dalai Lama’s interpreter by accident when the scheduled interpreter didn’t turn up. “Children as young as six months, before they learn to speak, have a natural preference towards helping behaviour rather than hindering behaviour.

“The instinct for caring is really, really deep. In many cases, it’s a question of whether we make the choice to express that part of our nature or not.” “As a society, we have bought into a powerful narrative that says that ultimately we are self-seeking creatures,” he goes on. “One of the things that is interesting about compassion is that when we open our hearts [to others], we tend to see our own problems with greater perspective, and deal with them in a much more courageous way. People can find it paradoxical, but we ourselves stand a lot to gain by making compassion a big force in our lives.”

Not changing the channel when images of suffering from around the world flicker across the screen is a start, Jinpa believes: “When it comes to the acute experience of pain and suffering, it doesn’t really matter whether the person is known to you or not.

“Taking seriously an image of suffering of a total stranger is helpful because it keeps you reminded of [your] shared humanity. “It’s important not to turn your gaze away from suffering - to stay with it and try to feel concern . And if there’s anything practical that can be done, you should do it.”

A Fearless Heart: Why Compassion is the Key to Greater Wellbeing’ by Thupten Jinpa is out now, priced £13.99