The key ideas

The Art of Happiness

The Dalai Lama, Howard C. Cutler, 1998

Can happiness be learned, the way you learn a language or a craft? For years the American psychiatrist Howard Cutler asked the Dalai Lama about the most ordinary things: anger, anxiety, loneliness, love and loss. Their conversations grew into a book about how happiness depends more on the state of your mind than on your circumstances, and how that mind can be trained, step by step.

Who it is for

For anyone tired of waiting for happiness to arrive with the next purchase, the next job title or the next big change. And for anyone curious how a Buddhist monk answers a Western psychiatrist's questions without mysticism and without preaching.

I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness.

A monk who starts with happiness

A Buddhist monk whom millions see as the living embodiment of compassion could have opened a conversation about life with prayer, karma or rebirth. The Dalai Lama starts somewhere else. He says the very purpose of life is to seek happiness. Believers or not, whatever our religion, we are all looking for something better in life, and the whole motion of our lives is toward happiness.

The American psychiatrist Howard Cutler first met the Dalai Lama in 1982 in Dharamsala, a town in India, where he had come to study Tibetan medicine. Years later he began long conversations with him about the most ordinary human troubles: anger, anxiety, loneliness, loss. Cutler asked as a Western doctor, used to diagnoses and research. The Dalai Lama answered as a monk who had spent his whole life training his own mind. In 1998 those conversations became a book, The Art of Happiness.

Its main idea sounds simple, even naive at first. Happiness depends more on the state of your mind than on outside events. And the mind can be trained as patiently and steadily as you would master a profession. This is not faith and not magic. It is work: figuring out which states of mind lead to happiness and which lead to suffering, then day after day strengthening the first and weakening the second.

You will see a monk argue with a psychiatrist about human nature, find out why an enemy can be a teacher, and learn what to do with anxiety. The book does not promise endless joy. It promises something else: to show you where your unhappiness comes from, and how to stop multiplying it.

Pleasure fades fast, happiness stays

The Dalai Lama draws a distinction that is easy to miss. There is pleasure, and there is happiness. Pleasure is mostly about the senses: good food, a new purchase, a nice evening out. It arrives quickly and leaves just as quickly, and sometimes it leaves trouble behind. Happiness, as he understands it, lives in the mind and the heart, so it is steadier and does not vanish at the first twist of fate.

Cutler puts his idea this way: happiness is the joy and contentment that grow out of a calm, stable mind rooted in affection and compassion. Notice the end of that sentence. Here happiness is tied to warmth toward others, not just to your own gain.

This leads to a practical question the book suggests asking before you choose: will this bring me happiness, or only pleasure? Put to that test, plenty of temptations quickly lose their shine. Not because pleasure is bad, but because sometimes we pay for it with something worth more.

The Dalai Lama does not ask you to give up life's joys. He asks you to tell them apart. Once you can tell the fleeting from the lasting, you stop chasing every flash and start choosing what will still leave you warm tomorrow.

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About the author

The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, is the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists. He has lived in exile in India since 1959 and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. Howard Cutler is an American psychiatrist from Phoenix who has co-written several books with the Dalai Lama.

All books by this author: The Dalai Lama, Howard C. Cutler

Terms from the book

  • Mother Teresa
  • Frankl
  • Empathy
  • Anderson
  • Tibet
  • Attachment
  • Buddhist monk: A monk who has devoted his life to Buddhism, the teaching founded by the Buddha in India about two and a half thousand years ago.
  • Dharamsala: A town in northern India, in the foothills of the Himalayas. Since 1960 it has been home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile.
  • Sem: A Tibetan word usually translated as “mind”. It covers both thinking and feeling, the head and the heart.
  • Antidote: An image from the book: a helpful state of mind that weakens its harmful opposite, such as patience against anger.
  • Calcutta: A large city in eastern India, officially called Kolkata today.
  • Namgyal: The monastery regarded as the Dalai Lamas' personal monastery. After 1959 it was rebuilt in exile, in Dharamsala.
  • Shantideva: An eighth-century Indian Buddhist monk and philosopher, author of the treatise A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life.
  • Basic spirituality: The Dalai Lama's idea, not a religious term: kindness, compassion and care for others, open to people of any faith or none.
  • Hezbollah: A Shia militant group and political party in Lebanon that emerged in the early 1980s.
  • Lebanon: A small country in the Middle East, on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea.

All terms

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