Seeing clearly the pain, our part in it

Heavy monsoon rains have triggered widespread flooding and devastating landslides across northwestern India. In Himachal Pradesh, entire villages have been cut off. The tourism sector, already fragile, faces ruin.

The road to McLeodganj has collapsed. From his residence above Dharamsala, if the clouds permit, the Dalai Lama can see the scarred hills. Each time when I visit, more is lost, slopes denuded, streams clogged, roads cutting deeper wounds. This scale of suffering demands more than sympathy or relief operations. It demands what he calls “the harder teaching”.

The Dalai Lama does not avert his gaze from suffering. Nor does he rush to explain it. “When tragedy strikes,” he has taught me, “the first human response must be compassion, not philosophy.” Yet, in his presence, one learns that true compassion requires something harder than sympathy. It requires seeing clearly both the pain and its causes, the loss and our part in it.

“We are not separate from nature,” he reminds us, though the reminder seems almost too gentle for what we have done. Every choice, to build closer to the river, to clear another patch of forest, to ignore the warming signs, becomes part of the conditions from which disaster springs. Buddhism speaks of dependent origination, the web of causation that connects all things. The flood is not merely weather. It is history, economics, desire, neglect, all flowing together toward this moment of reckoning.

Even as we reckon with causes, people suffer in the present tense. Children wake up terrified of rain. Families divide their remaining rice, calculating how many days it will be before help arrives. The elderly sit outside houses that exist now only in memory, unable to comprehend the new geography of loss. To them, philosophy is no comfort. They need food, shelter, and the basic architecture of survival.

Here, the Dalai Lama’s teaching takes its most practical form. “If you can help, help. If you cannot help, at least do not harm.” In the relief camps, in the sharing of whatever remains, and in the young men forming human chains to clear blocked roads, we see compassion as a necessity, not a virtue. No one calls it heroism. It is simply what humans do when the alternative is unthinkable.

However, I believe the Dalai Lama would press us further. Not toward guilt — he has little use for guilt — but toward what he calls “universal responsibility”. The floods reveal our interconnection in the starkest terms. The forests we stripped upstream become the mudslides downstream. The warnings we ignored become the casualties we mourn. “We must accept,” he says, “that our actions have consequences beyond our intentions.”

This is not abstract ethics. Look at what remains of the Khada Danda route — cracked, subsiding, declared unsafe for vehicles over a certain weight. It was widened three times in the last decade, each time cutting deeper into the hillside, each time praised as development. Now it is neither developed nor developing; it is only dangerous.

For those who mourn, and they are many, the Dalai Lama would say: grieve fully. Do not hurry past sorrow in search of meaning. “Tears are not weakness,” he insists. “They are proof that we have loved.” But he would also say: do not let grief become bitterness, or sorrow become isolation. The same pain that separates us can, if we permit it, connect us to the suffering of others.

There is work ahead, beyond relief and rebuilding. The Dalai Lama speaks of “inner disarmament”, the dismantling of the greed, indifference, and ignorance that make such disasters not just possible but increasingly probable. The outer landscape reflects our inner one. The debris we clear from the roads is easier to shift than the habits that created the conditions for catastrophe.

“Change,” he says, “is not only possible but certain. The question is whether we direct it with wisdom or let it proceed through suffering.” The floods will recede. The roads will be rebuilt, probably wider than before. The question is whether we will rebuild them differently, understanding at last that the mountain’s limits are our own.

In the end, perhaps this is what the Dalai Lama offers, not consolation but clarity. The dead cannot be returned. The disappeared rivers will not resume their old courses. But we can still choose how we respond to loss, whether we let it teach us or merely endure it.

This is the harder teaching: that such devastation — lives lost, lands destroyed, livelihoods vanished — is not just tragedy, but instruction about who we are and what we might yet become.

— The writer is the Managing Trustee of The Foundation for Universal Responsibility of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The views are personal