The Strange Gravity of Compassion

The Dalai Lama’s audiobook, recently recognised with a Grammy, is not framed as a political intervention. It is a work of reflection, oriented toward compassion, ethical responsibility, and the cultivation of inner steadiness. Yet the figure of the Dalai Lama does not circulate in a neutral field. His public presence remains entangled with a long and unresolved history involving Tibet, sovereignty, and competing narratives of legitimacy. From that perspective, official criticism of the award can be read not as a response to the book’s content, but as an effort to manage symbolic meaning in an international media environment where cultural recognition can easily be reinterpreted as political signal.

What becomes interesting is the effect such responses tend to produce. When attention is forcefully directed toward an artefact that would otherwise pass quietly, awareness often expands rather than contracts. Curiosity grows. The object acquires weight precisely because it has been marked as sensitive. This dynamic is not unique to China. It appears across contemporary politics wherever identity is stabilised through simplified descriptions and belief systems that rely on visible opposition. Power, in these cases, is sustained by repeatedly articulating what it stands against. The question this raises is not moral but structural: how durable is a system that depends on continually regenerating its own antitheses? Such strategies may offer short-term coherence, but they strain over time, because the world itself is not organised around these oppositions. They are provisional arrangements, useful in context, yet fragile when treated as enduring limits on a far more continuous and plural reality.

It is also possible to read the moment differently: that the elevation of this audiobook says as much about the current cultural and political climate of the United States as it does about any enduring geopolitical tension, and that responses from elsewhere, characteristic as they may be, function indirectly as commentary on that climate rather than as attempts to resolve older disputes. This may not be the intention, and there is no claim to certainty here, but it is a reminder that recognition, reaction, and meaning now circulate through a single shared field, where gestures aimed in one direction often register most strongly somewhere else entirely.