The Art of Happiness (2 page)

A
full decade has now passed since
The Art of Happiness
was first published. As I reflect on the course of events leading to the book's publication, I think back to the beginning of the nineties, when I first conceived of collaborating with the Dalai Lama on a book about happiness. The Dalai Lama's name was familiar to most Americans by that time, but beyond the Buddhist community, few had any sense of him as a real human being. The general public's image of him was often little more than a vague sketchy caricature, marred by misconceptions: the jolly giggling Buddha, “the Pope of Buddhism,” “the god-king of Tibet.” In fact, if you mentioned the Dalai Lama's name at that time, the most likely image to surface in the mind of an average American was probably Carl Spackler, the disheveled golf course groundskeeper in the film
Caddysback,
describing his brief stint as the Dalai Lama's caddy: “... So
we finish the eighteenth and he's gonna stiff me! And I say, ‘Hey, Lama! Hey, bow about a little something, you know, for the effort.' And be says, ‘Oh, uh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.' So I got
that
goin for me
—
which is nice.”

Of course, there were some whose mental portrait of the Dalai Lama was more finely drawn, those who recognized him as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a tireless advocate for human rights, one who remained committed to nonviolence despite living fifty years in exile as a result of the brutal invasion of Tibet by Chinese forces. But even among the more knowledgeable, perception of him was often one-dimensional-some people saw him as essentially a political figure, for example, unaware of his stature as one of the world's leading Buddhist scholars, a teacher with profound spiritual depth and wisdom. And many people at that time would have been surprised to learn that far from considering himself to be a great world leader, the Dalai Lama's personal identity was most closely tied to his role as a simple Buddhist monk—one who rose each morning at 3:30 to spend four or five hours in prayer and meditation.

So by the early 1990s, I began to think about a book that would dispel these misconceptions and add some human flesh to the cartoonlike image of him in the popular imagination. But that was not the main purpose of the book. The far more important objective was to present his ideas about how to find happiness.

I vividly recall the meeting when I first proposed the idea of the book to the Dalai Lama. I was feeling far from confident. Over the years I had noted his skill at deflecting such proposals—so, fully expecting that he would turn down my request, I had come prepared, ready to argue my case.

“Your Holiness, I know that you have already written two dozen books,” I began, “but this book will be quite different. The objective is to distill the essential principles that you live by, which have enabled you to achieve a happy life. And even though these underlying principles may be based on Buddhism, I hope to present your beliefs in a way that can be applied by individuals from any background or tradition, showing how to apply these principles in their daily lives to cultivate greater happiness....”

“Ah, very good!” he said with enthusiasm.

“And then from my perspective as a psychiatrist,” I continued, “I'd like to examine your views on happiness, on what makes life worthwhile, within the context of Western psychology, even looking for scientific evidence that might support your views.”

“Yes. Okay!” the Dalai Lama said decisively, nodding his head in agreement to my proposal.

Without taking a breath, I pressed on, driven by my preconceived belief that he would not readily agree. My mind was so focused on convincing him, so intent on dazzling him with my arguments, that I had no attention left over to actually attend to what he was saying or to register his response.

Looking a bit perplexed, the Dalai Lama suddenly interrupted me.

“Howard,” he said, starting to laugh, “I already agreed. Why are you still arguing the case?”

Finally grasping that he had agreed to my proposal, I felt a surge of elation—among my objectives and reasons for proposing this book, there was a more selfish motive that I had conveniently forgotten to mention: I wanted to learn from him how I myself could become happier.

We began work on the book in 1993, during the Dalai Lama's first visit to Arizona, my home state. That week he had an intensive teaching schedule, delivering a brilliant commentary on a classic text by Shantideva, the great eighth-century Indian Buddhist scholar. Despite his long daily teaching sessions, we managed to carve out some time to meet, aided by the fact that he was staying at the same place where his public teachings were being given, a resort hotel in the Sonoran Desert, outside Tucson. So every morning after breakfast, and in some late afternoons as well, we met in his suite, as I posed question after question, soliciting his views about life, about the things that truly make life worthwhile, the vital questions related to human happiness and suffering.

Over the months prior to our conversations, I had spent a great deal of time preparing a list of questions, carefully arranging their sequence according to a tightly organized outline that filled a thick three-ring binder. So when I showed up for our first meeting, I was ready. And it took only minutes for the Dalai Lama to relieve me of any illusions I might have had about controlling the direction of the discussion. I had planned on sticking with my set agenda in an orderly fashion, breezing through the questions one by one like knocking down a row of dominoes. But I quickly discovered that he apparently felt no compulsion to follow my agenda. His answers to my questions were often unanticipated, suddenly turning the conversation in a completely new direction. I might be following a certain train of thought, when suddenly that train would become derailed as he went off on an unexpected tangent. So I found our discussions to be challenging at times. At the same time, the Dalai Lama's quick mind and robust sense of humor kept the conversations lively, and riveted my attention throughout.

Those conversations, supplemented with material from his public talks, provided the core material for the book, which was later expanded by additional discussions at his home in India. Quickly becoming absorbed in the project, I decided to temporarily give up practicing psychiatry in order to devote my full attention to exploring human happiness, seeking an approach that bridged East and West. I estimated that it would take perhaps six months to complete the book, and with the Dalai Lama as a coauthor, I figured that finding a publisher would be easy.

As it turned out, I was wrong. Five years later, I was still working on the book. And the thick stack of rejection letters accumulating on my desk from literary agents and publishers was a growing testament to the prevailing wisdom in the publishing industry at that time: the belief that books by the Dalai Lama held no appeal to a mainstream audience. In addition, they claimed, the public simply didn't seem to be interested in the topic of human happiness.

By 1998, after years of continual rejections, and with my financial resources finally depleted, it seemed I had few options left. Still, determined to see that at least a few new readers could benefit from the Dalai Lama's wisdom, I planned to use the last of my retirement savings to self-publish a small number of copies. Strangely, however, it was right at that point that the mother of a close friend happened to make an offhand remark to a stranger on a New York subway—a stranger who turned out to be in the publishing industry—which initiated a series of connections that finally led to agreements with both a literary agent and a good mainstream publisher. And so, with a small first printing and modest expectations, the book was at last released.

That was ten years ago. And the Dalai Lama, the publisher, and I could never have imagined the subsequent course of events. Awareness of the book grew rapidly, spreading more by word of mouth than by advertising or publicity. Not expecting such an overwhelmingly positive response, I watched with wonder as the book soon appeared on the
New York Times
bestsellers list, where it remained for the next two years. It wasn't long before we started to see evidence that the book was truly becoming part of the cultural milieu in America, spontaneously showing up on TV sitcoms, game shows, even MTV—the very icons of popular culture in America at the time:
Friends, Sex and the City, Jeopardy!, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, MTV Cribs
—and even the season's opening game on
Monday Night Football,
when one of the quarterbacks attributed his preseason success, in part at least, to
The Art of Happiness.

Clearly, there was a kind of universal appeal to the Dalai Lama's basic message: Yes, happiness is possible—in fact,
we can train in happiness in much the same way that we train in any other skill,

directly cultivating it through effort and practice. Explaining how happiness can be achieved by reshaping our attitudes and outlook, the Dalai Lama shows us how the key to happiness is in our own hands. No longer do we need to rely on luck or chance to achieve happiness, waiting for the day when all the outer conditions of our lives finally fall into place—the day we finally lose weight, get rich, get married (or divorced!), or get that coveted promotion.

His fundamental message of hope seemed to strike a chord in people, resonating deep in the hearts of individuals not only in America but throughout the world—people from diverse backgrounds, perhaps, but who all shared the fundamental human aspiration for happiness, a yearning for something better in life. Ultimately, the book went on to be translated into fifty languages and was read by millions around the world.

The concept of happiness as an achievable goal, something we can deliberately cultivate through practice and effort, is fundamental to the Buddhist view of happiness. In fact, the idea of training the mind has been the cornerstone of Buddhist practice for millennia. Coincidentally, shortly after the publication of
The Art of Happiness,
this same idea began to take root in society from another direction—as a “new” scientific discovery—leading to a fundamental shift in many people's perception of happiness.

When I first began work on
The Art of Happiness
in the early 1990s, I discovered that there were relatively few scientific studies on happiness and positive emotions. These were not popular subjects for research. Although at the time there were a handful of researchers studying human happiness and positive emotions, they were the mavericks. But then, suddenly, human happiness started to become a subject of intense interest to the scientific community and the general public alike, as people began to abandon their previous notions of happiness as elusive, mysterious, and unpredictable, replacing that view with the perception of happiness as something that could be scientifically investigated. And over the past decade, as more and more people have rejected the idea of happiness as something that is merely a by-product of our external circumstances, in favor of seeing happiness as something that can be systematically developed, we have witnessed the exponential growth of a new movement—a
Happiness Revolution.

The watershed event for this new movement was the formal establishment of a new field of psychology involving the study of human happiness. The formal birth of this new branch of psychology took place in 1998, when a highly influential psychologist, Dr. Martin Seligman, the newly elected president of the American Psychological Association, decided to dedicate his term as president to the establishment of this new field, which he dubbed “positive psychology.” Pointing out that for the past half century clinical psychology had focused exclusively on mental illness, human weakness, and dysfunction, he called on his colleagues to expand the scope of psychology to include the study of positive emotions, human strengths, and “what makes life worth living.”

Seligman teamed up with another brilliant researcher, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, to lay the groundwork for this new field. They were soon joined by a core group of top researchers from universities in America and Europe, and positive psychology took off with tremendous momentum.
For the first time in human history, happiness had finally become a legitimate field of scientific inquiry.

Since that time, the Happiness Revolution has had a growing impact on all levels of society. Feature stories on happiness have inundated the popular media, while academic courses on positive psychology have been cropping up on college campuses across the United States and throughout the world. At Harvard University, for instance, “The Happiness Course” has now replaced Introductory Economics as the most popular undergraduate course, with enrollment quickly soaring to well over 1,400 students each semester. The impact is even being seen on the governmental level in nations around the world, with the country of Bhutan, for instance, replacing GDP with GNH (Gross National Happiness) as its most important measure of success as a nation. Policymakers in many nations are now even exploring the idea of shaping public policy based on happiness research. As one government official in Scotland exuberantly asserted, “If we can embrace this new science of positive psychology, we have the opportunity to create a new Enlightenment.”