THE ART OF HAPPINESS: A Handbook for Living
by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, M.D.

Nearly every time you see him, he's laughing, or at least smiling. And he makes everyone else around him feel like smiling. He's the Dalai Lama, the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet, a Nobel Prize winner, and an increasingly popular speaker and statesman. Why is he so popular? Even after spending only a few minutes in this presence you can't help feeling better.

If you ask him if he's happy, even though he's suffering the loss of his country, the Dalai Lama will give you an unconditional yes. What's more, he'll tell you that happiness is the purpose of life, and that "the very motion of our life is towards happiness." How to get there has always been the question. He's tried to answer it before, but he's never had the help of a psychiatrist to get the message across in a context we can easily understand.

Through conversations, stories, and meditations, the Dalai Lama shows us how to defeat day-to-day anxiety, insecurity, anger, and discouragement. Together with Dr. Cutler, he explores many facets of everyday life, including relationships, loss, and the pursuit of wealth, to illustrate how to ride through life's obstacles on a deep and abiding source of inner peace. Based on 2,500 years of Buddhist meditations mixed with a healthy dose of common sense, The Art of Happiness is a book that crosses the boundaries of traditions to help readers with difficulties common to all human beings.


"The Art of Happiness"
Original title: The Art of Happiness. A Handbook for Living William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York
@ 1998 HH Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, M.D.
@ 1999 of the edition in spanish for Spain and America: GRIJALBO MONDADORI, S.A.

Words of the author Howard C. Cutler

This book gathers the extensive conversations maintained with the Dalai Lama. The private interviews that I had with him in Arizona and India obeyed to the intention to collaborate in the project to present their points of view about how to have a happier life, complemented with my observations and commentaries from the perspective view of a western psychiatrist. Kindly, the Dalai Lama allowed me to transmit the ideas that I thought were more suitable. I considered also that the narrative should favour the reading and the understanding of the reader, and allow to show how the Dalai Lama incorporates his ideas to his own daily life. Therefore, and having the approval of the Dalai Lama, I have organized this book according to the content, which has taken me time to combine and integrate extracted materials of different conversations. It was necessary to me, in order to clarity the integration of this, to introduce material coming from the conferences pronounced by him in Arizona, counting with his approval. Doctor Thupten Jinpa, interpreter of the Dalai Lama, kindly reviewed the final manuscript to make sure no distortions of the ideas of the Dalai Lama had taken place, as a result of the publishing process. I have presented personal histories to illustrate the ideas that are analyzed here. In order to maintain the confidentiality and to protect the privacy, I have changed in each case, the names and altered details and identification characteristics of the actual people.