Interdependence and Compassion in Education: Venerable Geshe Legtsok
In continuation of the Buddhist teachings at Shikshantar, Venerable Geshe Tenzin Legtsok blessed us with his presence and wisdom through a Dharma talk on ‘Interdependence and Compassion in Education.’ A Buddhist monk, Venerable Geshe Legtsok was conferred with the title of Geshe in January 2023 by Sera Jey Monastic University in South India. He has studied classic Indian Buddhist treatises and their Tibetan commentaries in the tradition of ancient Nalanda University. He is in the nineteenth year of Buddhist studies. Venerable Geshe Legtsok was ordained by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama in 2001. For the past ten years he has tried to make basic Buddhist teachings accessible to various audiences in India and the US through lectures, essays, and instructions for meditation.
It was a packed audience of our school team and many school parents. There was absolute calm in the AV room called ‘Vajah Bevajah’. Venerable Geshe Legtsok enlightened us about how our existence depends on our interactions with others and is interdependent on the exposures and attitude towards life. Venerable shared that our minds are a clean slate and we are in an ever changing dynamic state, like plants that absorb and grow with exposure from our environment. We should always aspire for compassion and look to the ‘future’ to do things better. We as educators have to look at the child as a whole whose development is interdependent on the balance between her body and mind.
Venerable highlighted that we have a kind of interdependence on children too. We should be grateful and thankful to our children and students for having given us the opportunity to learn and be role models they can look up to. Interdependence and compassion in education helps us to understand that each child is different and unique. We as educators need to put ourselves in their shoes to realize that children often know what we as adults know simply because of purity and honesty of minds.Venerable spoke about making learning a two way process - we learn by ourselves, we learn from our peers and learn from each other all the time .We as parents and facilitators have to be like a friend to the children. If we are friendly as teachers and parents, children would be more happy and willing to learn from our experiences.
Facilitators and parents came up with thoughts and questions like- If we ponder too much to analyze our emotions, there is a fear of negative feelings getting magnified rather than ceasing. Also, How to manage that moment of anger with the children? Venerable Geshe Legtsok proposed that there are different strategies to deal with emotions like- ‘Do not think at all especially if it disturbs you.’ He also suggested that sometimes, ‘We have to think just enough to recognise the destructive thoughts and try deleting them from our minds.’ We have to keep trying to be better. As Buddha said, ‘It is inevitable that drops of water falling in the pot will eventually fill the pot’, it is therefore important to take pragmatic steps for the future. He closed the session with advice to all “Look at the future and you will make a difference. Make a lesson plan to understand situations that trigger anger and have a path for yourself to deal with them.Take small steps.”