Dialogue Nights on Compassion

by Lillian Koizumi
Special to the Tribune 

On Friday, May 15, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Ikeda Center held its second Dialogue Nights of 2026 on the theme of compassion. Titled “Compassion: The Practice of Restoring Human Connection,” the event explored Daisaku Ikeda’s perspectives on compassion from his 1996 address at Teachers College, Columbia University, “Thoughts on Education for Global Citizenship.” To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the lecture, the Ikeda Center organized a three-part series exploring the three essential qualities of global citizenship that Ikeda presents in the speech: wisdom, courage and compassion.

Preandra Noel, the Center’s program and office coordinator, welcomed the more than 50 youth in the room, many of whom were attending an Ikeda Center event for the first time. In her remarks, Preandra introduced Ikeda’s articulation of compassion as “[maintaining] an imaginative empathy that reaches beyond one’s immediate surroundings and extends to those suffering in distant places.” She shared the Center’s hopes that the evening’s dialogue would inspire everyone to consider what this perspective on compassion could mean for us as individuals and also for society. 

As an opening activity, attendees participated in a gallery walk where they reflected on different prompts with a partner. The questions were: 1) What does compassion mean to you? 2) Who or what is easy to have compassion for? 3) What compassionate act have you taken or received recently? 4) What makes extending compassion challenging for you? 

Later in the evening, participants gathered in small groups and engaged with a quote from the same address by Ikeda where he describes compassion as the “sustained and courageous effort to seek out the good in any person, whoever they may be, however they may behave. It means striving, through sustained engagement, to cultivate the positive qualities in oneself and in others.”