Sunflower Symposium By Tenzin Gyatso Essay

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, is a spiritual leader of Buddhists. He writes an article in the “Sunflower Symposium” (129), in which he claims that one should forgive but should not forget the atrocities of one person or persons. In his article, Gyatso shares two stories, one is about the China’s invasion of Tibet which costed 1.2 million of Tibetans, and the other is about a Tibetan monk who had been in the Chinese prison for eight years. Both of them explain the “Buddhist culture of nonviolence and compassion” (130), when the Dalai Lama claims that it is easy to become angry at these tragic events and atrocities, but “that is not the Buddhist way” (130), and when the Tibetan monk shares his biggest fear during the prison was losing his compassion for the Chinese. These two stories follow a chronological order, from the time when the invasion of Tibet happened and killed more than one million people, to …show more content…
We should keep this to ourselves as an experience, so we can be aware of what would happen again in the future. As Gyatso says, “it would be easy to become angry at these tragic events and atrocities”, which means if this happens to us many times, we could not forgive everything easily. That is the reason why we should keep these experiences, so in the future we can decide what would be the right reaction for these tragedies.
Although I agree with Gyatso that we should forgive the people who have admitted their sins, I believe sometimes we would not have the ability to do so. In “The Sunflower”, the soldier only admits his sins to a Jew, who he thinks represent the whole Jewish population. This Jew does not represent every Jew in the world, included who the soldiers has killed, so he does not have the right to forgive the soldier for what he did to other Jews. Because of those reasons, I would not forgive the soldier if I were the