Compassion and Altruism are the Virtues of Humanity
Compassion should not be limited by any boundary. As a human being, regardless of whether you are religious or a non-believer, you should always cultivate compassion in your heart. To do so, acting for the benefit of others is a best practice that should be incorporated into your daily life.
If we wish to benefit all sentient beings, we must cultivate the mind of compassion. By clinging to a certain religion, whether it be Buddhism or Christianity, your compassion will remain limited and trapped within an invisible sphere. On the other hand, compassion without religious boundaries enables you to completely benefit all sentient beings. This kind of compassion should be integrated into the educational curricula from primary school all the way up to the university level. This is an extremely important consideration, especially for today’s society.
Typically, we human beings possess selfish minds, even though we aren’t always aware of it. We tend to prefer our own religions and criticize others for having different belief systems. However, for the benefit of all sentient beings, I encourage everyone to work hard to help develop universal compassion and to spread the ideology of secular ethics in any way you can. Everyone in the world should make an effort to further this cause as this is precisely the teaching of Buddhism.
So before I wrap up my talk, I want to stress, as I also mentioned at Harvard University, regardless of whether we are scholars, professors or students, the cultivation of altruism is of great importance. Without altruism, even if you have superior skills and abundant knowledge, you will be unable to benefit either yourself or others. But with altruistic intentions along with the kind of knowledge that can be gained at such an elite university, you will be able to extensively benefit all sentient beings. So please integrate your knowledge with altruism and make efforts in this direction. This is my greatest hope.
