The Art of Happiness

A Monk in a Locker Room

In 1993, Howard Cutler wandered into the basketball locker room at Arizona State University and found the Dalai Lama sitting alone. In a few minutes, this man would walk out and speak to six thousand people. He looked completely at ease. Not a press secretary in sight. No notes. No nerves. Just a Tibetan monk in maroon robes, present and unhurried.

That image is the seed of *The Art of Happiness*. Cutler, an American psychiatrist, had first met the Dalai Lama a decade earlier in Dharamsala, the Himalayan village that had served as the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile for forty years after the Chinese invasion. About a hundred thousand Tibetans had fled with him. He had every reason to be miserable. Yet when Cutler asked, plainly, "Are you happy?", the answer came back quiet and certain: "Yes. Definitely."

The book that grew out of their conversations is built around a single, contrarian claim. Happiness is not the byproduct of luck or wealth or romantic love. It is a skill. You can train for it the way an athlete trains for a sport, and most of the training happens between your own ears.

That claim sets the Dalai Lama against a lot of Western intellectual tradition. Freud, after all, declared that "the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of Creation." The English word "happy" itself comes from the Icelandic *happ*, meaning luck or chance. The Tibetan word the Dalai Lama uses for mind, *Sem*, is wider than its English cousin. It folds intellect, feeling, heart and spirit into one. When he talks about training the mind, he means training all of that.