What a Ceasefire cannot End

A ceasefire in the Middle East may yet lead to a wider cessation of hostilities. After weeks of dread, even a pause feels like grace. But pauses can deceive. Relief is not peace. The harder question remains: does a ceasefire end the real war? It can suspend the firing. It cannot, by itself, undo the inward work that made the firing possible.

War does not begin only when the first missile is launched. By then, much of the work has already been done. Fear has thickened. Grievance has been cultivated. Another people have ceased, somewhere in the mind, to seem fully human. And war does not end simply because the firing stops. It lingers in memory, in humiliation, in public language, in the habits of feeling by which the intolerable becomes tolerable.

For decades, the Dalai Lama has argued that peace cannot rest on arrangements alone. Without what he calls inner disarmament, outer peace is brittle. The phrase can sound soft to ears trained by strategy, deterrence and war. It is anything but. It asks us to see that war is not only a military event or a diplomatic collapse. It is also the outward flowering of inward states. Fear. Anger. Wounded pride. Humiliation. Self-righteousness. The intoxication of grievance. He has only insisted that hatred is a disastrous instrument with which to confront it.

His resistance to war does not arise only from exile and loss. It also grows out of an unusually spacious cast of mind. He has long suggested that different religions answer to different human temperaments, and that science, too, is not the enemy of spiritual life but another disciplined way of approaching reality. That breadth matters. It helps explain why he does not instinctively divide the world into sealed camps, each authorised only by its own suffering. Reality, as he has often reminded us, has to be seen from different angles. One must take account of interdependence.

That, perhaps, is part of what distinguishes him. Not that he is untouched by suffering, but that he has not allowed suffering to become a licence for dehumanisation. Injury usually seeks an enemy. It wants the satisfaction of blame. It wants moral permission to harden. The Dalai Lama’s authority has long lain in resisting oppression without teaching hatred of the oppressor as a people.

The recent US-Israel-Iran confrontation throws that practicality into relief. The asymmetry of power was unmistakable. Yet overwhelming force does not guarantee moral clarity. For those of us in India, the crisis is not only moral. It is economic too. Oil, currencies, inflation, shipping. The effects travel quickly. But to begin there is already to have accepted the wrong scale of importance.

War can distort incentives in quieter ways as well. It can extend political time for those in office, postpone scrutiny, silence dissent by making it appear disloyal, and turn emergency into a shelter for power. These effects are real. Yet the deeper scandal is elsewhere. It is that other people then live destruction in forms that no balance sheet can hold.

War is first suffered in the body and the mind. Only later is it entered in the ledger.

Most of us know what it is to lose one person we love. We know the stunned days that follow. The hand that still reaches for the telephone. The brief impulse to share some small thing, and then the recollection that there is no one there to receive it. War takes that private grief and multiplies it beyond measure. UNICEF reported in February that 71,803 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza since October 2023, including at least 21,289 children. The same month, UNICEF said that 25,89,900 Ukrainian children remained displaced as the war entered its fifth year. Before such numbers become arguments, they are lives dislocated or ended. They are biographies interrupted in childhood.

Then there is displacement, which is grief made geographic. To be displaced is not only to lose shelter. It is to lose the unnoticed grammar of belonging: the road one knew in the dark, the schoolyard, the neighbour’s voice, the language one heard in the market, the confidence that one’s life is taking place where it should. For a child, that rupture enters the self early. Safety becomes provisional. Home becomes something remembered, or imagined.

And then comes the second bill. Not only the dead, terrible as they are, but the living who must go on carrying a life broken out of shape. The reconstruction estimates for Ukraine run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. For Gaza, too, the figures are staggering. Yet even these sums understate the truth, because they count damaged roads, schools, hospitals and power systems better than they count damaged trust, damaged nerves, damaged memory, and damaged childhood. They do not measure what it means to rebuild a human being.

This is one reason the Tibetan case still matters. Tibet too is a story of radical asymmetry. Loss, dispossession, cultural diminishment, exile. Following his arrival in India in 1959, around 1,50,000 Tibetans came into exile. It remains one of the least acknowledged political achievements of the last century: a displaced people preserving dignity without turning grievance into an ethic. That was not passivity. It was resistance of a demanding kind.

Which is why the Dalai Lama’s voice on war cannot be dismissed as the softness of a peacenik. He has never treated violence as morally simple. There is an even harder nuance in the Buddhist tradition that he has sometimes invoked. A compassionate person may, in an extreme and tragic circumstance, use force to prevent a far greater harm, but only if the act is free of hatred, undertaken for others, and accompanied by a willingness to bear the moral cost oneself. The point is not to create a loophole through which states can drive armies. It is almost the opposite. It sets the bar so high that it becomes a warning against self-deception. Governments invoke necessity as a matter of routine. Buddhism does not let them off so lightly.

Non-violence, in his hands, belongs to a larger discipline. It is not simply the refusal of war. It is the refusal to let fear harden into hatred, injury into identity, or asymmetry into a moral licence for anything whatever.

What he resists, above all, is the idea that humiliation can produce peace. Modern war still clings to that illusion. Break the enemy. Restore deterrence. Make them kneel. But force can compel submission without a real settlement. What it cannot do, by itself, is reconcile. It cannot create trust. It cannot persuade the defeated that they still have a place in the world that remains. Peace built on humiliation is not peace. It is war postponed.

The Dalai Lama’s authority has never rested on severity. It rests, paradoxically, on warmth. On that familiar laughter of his. On the smiling face that has come to signify not innocence about suffering, but freedom from being inwardly conquered by it.

War destroys lives. It also alters the consciousness of those who watch it. We now consume war first as an image. Smoke columns. Shattered buildings. Running children. Bodies under sheets. Maps lit with arrows. Studio arguments about escalation and response. After a while, something in us shifts. Death becomes a number. Rubble becomes footage. Language then takes over. The dead remain dead. The bereaved do not grieve in abstraction.

That is why the Dalai Lama’s contribution lies less in policy than in diagnosis. Violence begins in simplification. Before a people are bombed, they are reduced. Before exceptional force is used, exceptional moral claims are made on its behalf. Every war is presented as necessary. Every escalation as regrettable but unavoidable. Each side summons history, injury and righteousness. The vocabulary changes. The dead do not.

This is why inner disarmament is not a private spiritual hobby for calm times. It is a civilisational necessity. It asks whether people, and the states they build, can face danger without being inwardly deformed by it. Can we protect without exulting? Can we resist without worshipping enmity? Can we remember injury without making grievance the centre of identity?

For if we do not ask what war is making of us, at the same time, as we watch it, defend it, justify it or merely endure it on our screens, then war has already secured a victory beyond the battlefield. It has taught us to live with the unacceptable. It has colonised not only land, but conscience.

That is the war, a ceasefire cannot end. And it is why the Dalai Lama, at age 90 still matters.

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

Rajiv Mehrotra is an old friend of mine from my New Delhi days - Robert Tyabji