Happiness E-Book

Matthieu Ricard

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

This step-by-step guide to achieving Happiness is the most significant book of its kind since Daniel Goleman's runaway bestseller, Emotional Intelligence. 'A remarkable book. It is hard to imagine a more convincing guide to that elusive thing: Happiness' Pankaj Mishra. Although we are materially better off than ever before, surveys show that we are depressed and listless. In his revolutionary book, Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard shows that Happiness is not just an emotion, but a skill that can be developed. Free of jargon, Happiness contains simple exercises that will train the mind to recognize and pursue Happiness by concentrating on the fundamental things in life, and in doing so change the way we view the world. Matthieu Ricard exhorts us to realize the toxic, self-harming nature of anger and envy, get off the roller coaster of alternating Happiness and unhappiness, and instead experience the pleasure of being calmly alive and aware. - Sunday Times

Leseprobe

Happiness

MATTHIEU RICARD is a Buddhist monk who had a promising career in cellular genetics before leaving France to study Buddhism in the Himalayas over forty years ago. He is the bestselling author of The Art of Meditation and Altruism, as well as a writer, translator, photographer, and an active participant in current scientific research on the effects of meditation on the brain. He lives and works on humanitarian projects in Tibet and Nepal.

JESSE BROWNER is a novelist and translator living in New York City. He has translated works by Jean Cocteau, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Éluard, and others.

‘With compassion, incisive logic, and infectious good humour, Matthieu Ricard exposes the false and limited assumptions we have about our potential as human beings and shows us that true and lasting happiness is not only possible, it is our birthright. This is a remarkable book from one of our wisest and most trustworthy spiritual friends.’

RICHARD GERE

‘The readers of this book will find themselves in the presence of an extraordinary human being, one who is equally at home in the culture and science of the West and in the poetry and wisdom of Tibetan Buddhism, and who has made a clear choice. Ricard’s compelling personal story beautifully illustrates his message that happiness is to be found in controlling the mind, not circumstances.’

DANIEL KAHNEMAN,

BESTSELLING AUTHOR OFThinking, Fast and Slow

‘Matthieu Ricard reveals the keys to happiness with a clarity, a wisdom, a beautiful spirit and a sense of calm that are themselves the proof of the program for clearer living he outlines with such radiant (such rigorous) simplicity. To read him is to be, for a while, in his hermitage amidst the Himalayas, looking at the world as it really is, but with a warm and transformative sense of possibility.’

PICO IYER,

AUTHOR OFThe Global Soul

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Art of Meditation

Altruism

First published in France in 2003 by NiL éditions, part of Les Éditions Robert Laffont, as Plaidoyer pour le bonheur.

This translation first published in the United States of America in 2006 by Little, Brown and Company, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First published in Great Britain in 2007 byAtlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2015 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Matthieu Ricard 2003Translation copyright © Jesse Browner 2006

The moral right of Matthieu Ricard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

The moral right of Jesse Browner to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 481 5E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 636 9

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn Imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

To Jigme Khyentse Rinpoche

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

1. Talking About Happiness

2. Is Happiness the Purpose of Life?

3. A Two-Way Mirror: Looking Within, Looking Without

4. False Friends

5. Is Happiness Possible?

6. The Alchemy of Suffering

7. The Veils of the Ego

8. When Our Thoughts Become Our Worst Enemies

9. The River of Emotion

10. Disturbing Emotions: The Remedies

11. Desire

12. Hatred

13. Envy

14. The Great Leap to Freedom

15. A Sociology of Happiness

16. Happiness in the Lab

17. Happiness and Altruism: Does Happiness Make Us Kind or Does Being Kind Make Us Happy?

18. Happiness and Humility

19. Optimism, Pessimism, and Naïveté

20. Golden Time, Leaden Time, Wasted Time

21. One with the Flow of Time

22. Ethics as the Science of Happiness

23. Happiness in the Presence of Death

24. A Path

Afterword

Notes

Happiness does not come automatically. It is not a gift that good fortune bestows upon us and a reversal of fortune takes back. It depends on us alone. One does not become happy overnight, but with patient labor, day after day. Happiness is constructed, and that requires effort and time. In order to become happy, we have to learn how to change ourselves.

LUCA AND FRANCESCO CAVALLI-SFORZA

FOREWORD

The first time I met Matthieu Ricard he was huddled over a computer monitor in a back room of Shechen Monastery in Kathmandu, Nepal. Matthieu was overseeing a group of monks who were laboriously copying texts word by word from the traditional long rectangles of woodblock-printed pages, typing them into a computer program with a specially designed Tibetan font.

What had been tall stacks of yellowing handmade paper between hand-carved covers was now stored digitally, in an electronic space the size of the palm of a hand. The digital age had entered the monastery. Now anyone with computer access could tap into texts that for centuries had only been found stored away in hermitages and monasteries in the high, hidden valleys of Tibet. Matthieu was helping to preserve for the modern world wisdom from the ancient.

Matthieu seems the perfect candidate for that task. His background includes one of the finest educations the modern world can offer. He holds a doctorate in biology from the prestigious Pasteur Institute, where his main adviser was a Nobel laureate. And yet he has spent more than a quarter century as a Buddhist monk in the Himalayas, learning from some of the most fully realized Tibetan teachers of our day.

More recently I’ve worked with Matthieu as part of the Mind and Life Institute, which brings scientists together in dialogue with Buddhist scholars. That ongoing conversation has resulted in remarkable findings that show how meditation can reshape the brain, strengthening the centers that undergird good feelings and compassion.

Here Matthieu speaks with unparalleled authority. I witnessed him work in collaboration with Professor Richard J. Davidson, head of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, as they prepared to pilot a series of brain tests that would be used with advanced meditators. Matthieu was both a key collaborator in considering what measures would make the most sense, and the first experimental subject.

For the first tests, Matthieu lay within the noisy maws of a magnetic resonance imager (MRI), the diagnostic imaging device that uses huge magnets that whirl around a person’s body as he or she lies within the machine. The MRI offers a precise image of a person’s brain (or other internal tissues), but it is also an ordeal for many people, some of whom panic at being trapped inside the monstrous machine. Matthieu endured his captivity for more than three hours while going through the paces of several kinds of meditation: concentration, visualization, and compassion.

At the end of that grueling session, we rushed into the room to see how Matthieu had held up, slightly apprehensive about the effects of his ordeal. But Matthieu emerged from the machine smiling. His comment: “That was like a miniretreat!”

That reaction to what most people would find overwhelming bespeaks a special state of mind, a capacity for confronting life’s ups and downs with equanimity, even joy. And Matthieu, I realize, has that joie de vivre in full measure.

The psychoanalyst C. G. Jung once described the role of a “Gnostic intermediary” as someone who himself plunges into spiritual depths and emerges to bring the vision of that inner possibility to the rest of us. Matthieu fills that role.

Beyond his well-cultivated temperament, Matthieu brings a quiet brilliance and always quick mind. I’ve witnessed him in sessions of the Mind and Life meetings, where the Dalai Lama explores in depth a scientific topic with a panel of scientific experts. Matthieu often represents the Buddhist perspective, speaking with a fluid intelligence that easily weaves together spiritual and scientific paradigms.

In Happiness he draws on both his ease in the world of scientific studies and philosophy and his intimate familiarity with the wisdom traditions of Buddhism, bringing these streams together in a seamless offering. The resulting insights are both inspiring and pragmatic. The vision of happiness conjured here challenges our everyday notions of joy, making a convincing argument for contentment over collecting “good times,” for altruism over self-centered satiation. And beyond that, Matthieu suggests how we can all cultivate the very capacity for such happiness.

On the other hand, Matthieu offers no quick fixes, for he knows well that training the mind takes effort and time. Instead he goes to the root of the mechanisms that underlie suffering and happiness, offering refreshing insights into how the mind functions and strategies for dealing with our most difficult emotions. The result is a sound road map, one based on cultivating the conditions for genuine well-being.

A few days after my wife and I first met Matthieu, we happened to share some hours together in the Kathmandu airport, waiting for endlessly delayed flights. Those hours sped by in minutes due to the sheer pleasure of being in Matthieu’s orbit. He is without doubt one of the happiest people I know — and happiness is contagious. I wish the reader a similar contagion, enjoying the pleasures to be found in these pages.

Daniel Goleman

Mendocino, California

October 2005

Happiness

INTRODUCTION

When, in the early morning, I sit in the meadow in front of my hermitage, my eyes take in hundreds of miles of lofty Himalayan peaks glowing in the rising sun. The serenity of the scenery blends naturally and seamlessly with the peace within. It is a long way indeed from the Pasteur Institute, where, thirty-five years ago, I performed research on cell division, mapping genes on the chromosome of Escherichia coli bacteria.

This would seem to be a pretty radical turnabout. Had I renounced the Western world? Renunciation, at least as Buddhists use the term, is a much-misunderstood concept. It is not about giving up what is good and beautiful. How foolish that would be! Rather it is about disentangling oneself from the unsatisfactory and moving with determination toward what matters most. It is about freedom and meaning — freedom from mental confusion and self-centered afflictions, meaning through insight and loving-kindness.

When I was twenty I had an idea of what I did not want — a meaningless life — but could not figure out what I wanted. My adolescence had been far from boring. I remember the excitement I felt when, at sixteen, I had the opportunity to join a journalist friend of mine at lunch with Igor Stravinsky. I drank in everything he said. He autographed for me a copy of the score of Agon, a then lesser-known work that I was especially fond of. He wrote these words: “To Matthieu, Agon, which I like very much myself.”

There was no shortage of enthralling encounters in the intellectual circle in which my parents moved. My mother, Yahne Le Toumelin, a well-known painter, full of life, poetry, and human warmth, who became a Buddhist nun herself, was friends with the great figures of surrealism and contemporary art — André Breton, Leonora Carrington, Maurice Béjart, for whom she painted vast theatrical sets. My father, who, under his pen name, Jean-François Revel, became one of the pillars of French intellectual life, held unforgettable dinners for the great thinkers and creative minds of the time: Luis Buñuel; Emmanuel Cioran, the despairing philosopher; Mario Suares, who liberated Portugal from the yoke of fascism; Henri Cartier-Bresson, the “eye of the century”; and many others.

In 1970 my father wrote Without Marx or Jesus, in which he expressed his rejection of political and religious totalitarianisms alike. The book stayed on the U.S. bestseller list for a whole year.

I was hired in 1967 as a young researcher at the Institut Pasteur, in the cellular genetics lab of François Jacob, who had recently won the Nobel Prize for medicine. There I worked with some of the great names of molecular biology, including Jacques Monod and André Lwoff, who lunched together every day at the communal table in a corner of the library, along with scientists from all over the world. François Jacob had only two doctoral students; he confided to a mutual friend that he had taken me on not only because of my university work, but also because he’d heard that I had plans to build a harpsichord, a dream I never brought to fruition but which earned me a place in a highly coveted laboratory.

I also loved astronomy, skiing, sailing, and ornithology. At the age of twenty, I published a book on migratory animals.1 I learned photography from a friend who was a professional wildlife photographer, and spent many a weekend stalking grebes and wild geese in the Sologne marshes and along the beaches of the Atlantic. I spent winters coursing the slopes of my native Alps and summers on the ocean with friends of my uncle, the navigator Jacques-Yves Le Toumelin, who, shortly after World War II, undertook one of the first solo trips around the globe on his thirty-foot sailboat. He introduced me to all sorts of unusual people — adventurers, explorers, mystics, astrologers, and metaphysicians. One day we went to pay a call on one of his friends and found a note pinned to the door of his Paris studio: “Sorry to miss you — I’m off to Timbuktu on foot.”

Life was far from dull, but something essential was missing. In 1972, when I was twenty-six and fed up with life in Paris, I decided to move to Darjeeling, in India, in the shadow of the Himalayas, to study with a great Tibetan master.

How had I reached this crossroads? The striking individuals with whom I’d crossed paths each had his or her own special genius. I’d have liked to play the piano like Glenn Gould or chess like Bobby Fisher, to have Baudelaire’s poetic gift, but I did not feel inspired to become what they were at the human level. Despite their artistic, scientific, and intellectual qualities, when it came to altruism, openness to the world, resolve, and joie de vivre, their ability was neither better nor worse than that of any of us.

Everything changed when I met a few remarkable human beings who exemplified what a fulfilled human life can be. Prior to those meetings, I was inspired through my readings of great figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi, who by the sheer strength of their human qualities were able to inspire others to change their way of being. When I turned twenty, I saw a series of documentaries made by a friend of mine, Arnaud Desjardins, on the great spiritual masters who had fled the ruthless invasion of Tibet by communist China. They were now living as refugees in India and Bhutan. I was taken aback. They all had very diverse physical appearances, but there emanated from all of them a strikingly similar inner beauty, compassionate strength, and wisdom. I could not go and meet Socrates, listen to Plato debating, or sit at Saint Francis’s feet, yet suddenly here were two dozen of them before my very eyes. It did not take me very long to decide to travel to India and meet them.

How to describe my first encounter with Kangyur Rinpoche, in June 1967, in a small wooden cottage a few miles from Darjeeling? He radiated inner goodness, sitting with his back to a window that looked out over a sea of clouds, through which the majestic Himalayas rose to an altitude of more than twenty-four thousand feet. Words are inadequate to describe the depth, serenity, and compassion that emanated from him. For three weeks, I sat opposite him all day long and had the impression that I was doing what people call meditating — in other words, simply collecting myself in his presence, trying to see what lay behind the screen of my thoughts.

But it was only after my return from India, during my first year at the Institut Pasteur, that I realized how important that meeting with Kangyur Rinpoche had been. I became aware that I’d found a reality that could inspire my whole life and give it direction and meaning. It was over the course of subsequent journeys I made every summer between 1967 and 1972 that I realized that I forgot all about my life in Europe every time I reached Darjeeling. Conversely, during the rest of the year, when I was at the Institut Pasteur, my thoughts were constantly flying off to the Himalayas. My teacher, Kangyur Rinpoche, had advised me to finish my doctoral studies, so I didn’t rush things. But though I waited several years, it was not difficult for me to make a decision that I’ve never regretted: to go and live where I wanted to be.

My father was sorely disappointed to see me abruptly put an end to a career whose beginnings, he felt, were promising. Moreover, as a convinced agnostic he did not take Buddhism very seriously, even though, as he wrote, “I had nothing against it, for its unadulterated and straightforward approach give it a distinctive position among religious doctrines and have earned it the respect of some of the most exacting Western philosophers.”2 Although we did not see each other very often for many years — he came to visit me in Darjeeling and later in Bhutan — we remained close, and when asked by journalists, he remarked: “The only clouds that ever passed over our relationship were those of the Asian monsoon.”

What I discovered never called for blind faith. It was a rich, pragmatic science of mind, an altruistic art of living, a meaningful philosophy, and a spiritual practice that led to genuine inner transformation. Over the past thirty-five years, I have never found myself in contradiction with the scientific spirit as I understand it — that is, as the empirical search for truth. I have also met human beings who were enduringly happy. More, in fact, than what we usually call happy: they were imbued with a deep insight into reality and the nature of mind, and filled with benevolence for others. I have also come to understand that although some people are naturally happier than others, their happiness is still vulnerable and incomplete, and that achieving durable happiness as a way of being is a skill. It requires sustained effort in training the mind and developing a set of human qualities, such as inner peace, mindfulness, and altruistic love.

All the ingredients for allowing me to find a way to a fulfilled life had come together: a profound and sane way of thinking and the living example of those who embodied wisdom in their words and actions. There wasn’t any of the “do what I say, not what I do” that discourages so many seekers all over the world.

I remained in Darjeeling for the next seven years. I lived near Kangyur Rinpoche until his death in 1975 and then continued to study and meditate in a small hermitage just above the monastery. I learned Tibetan, which is now the language I mostly speak in my everyday life in the East. It was then that I met my second main teacher, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, with whom I spent thirteen unforgettable years in Bhutan and India. He was one of the great luminaries of his time, revered by everyone from the king of Bhutan down to the humblest farmer, and became a close teacher to the Dalai Lama. He was someone whose inner journey led him to an extraordinary depth of knowledge and enabled him to be, for all who met him, a fount of loving-kindness, wisdom, and compassion.

There was a constant stream of other teachers and disciples who came to meet and study with him, so when I began translating Tibetan scriptures into Western languages, there were always living treasure-houses of knowledge from whom I could seek clarifications about the texts. I also served as Khyentse Rinpoche’s interpreter and traveled with him to Europe and to Tibet when he first returned to the Land of Snows after thirty years in exile. In Tibet, all that was left was ruins. Six thousand monasteries had been destroyed, and many of the people who had survived — unlike the million Tibetans who died of famine and persecution — had spent fifteen or twenty years in labor camps. Khyentse Rinpoche’s return was like the sun suddenly rising after a long, dark night.

In India and then in Bhutan, I lived a simple life. I would receive a letter every few months, had no radio, and knew little of what was going on in the world. In 1979 Khyentse Rinpoche began building a monastery in Nepal to preserve the Tibetan heritage. Artists, scholars, meditators, philanthropists, and many others flocked to Shechen Monastery. I have lived there more or less permanently since Khyentse Rinpoche’s death in 1991, helping his grandson, Rabjam Rinpoche, the abbot of Shechen, to fulfill our teacher’s vision.

One day someone called me from France to ask if I would like to publish a dialogue with my father. I did not take the proposal very seriously and replied: “That’s fine with me. Just ask my father.” I thought that would be the last I’d hear of it. I could not imagine my agnostic father agreeing to do a book of dialogue with a Buddhist monk, even one who was his son. I was wrong. At a lunch, the publisher proposed several book ideas to my father which he promptly rejected, remaining focused on the art of gastronomy. But when, over dessert, the publisher proposed the dialogue, my father froze and, after a few seconds of silence, replied: “I cannot refuse that.” That was the end of my quiet, anonymous life.

When I learned of his answer, I was a little concerned that my father, famous for his relentless demolition of views that he considered wrongheaded, would tear me to pieces. Fortunately the encounter occurred on my turf. My father came to Nepal, and we spent ten days in a forest inn above Kathmandu Valley, recording our conversations, an hour and a half in the morning and another hour in the afternoon. The rest of the day we strolled together through the woods. He too must have been a bit worried, perhaps that the debate would not be up to his intellectual standards, since at the end of the first day he immediately faxed our publisher, Nicole Lattès, to say: “Everything is going well.” From my side, I had drafted an exhaustive list of topics. When he first looked at it he exclaimed: “But that’s everything philosophers have discussed for the past two thousand years!” Anyway, we went on, days passed, and at the final session he came back with the list and, pointing to a few remaining topics, said: “Well, we haven’t discussed these yet.”

Our book, The Monk and the Philosopher, was an instant success. Over 350,000 copies were printed in France, and it was translated into twenty-one languages. I was invited onto countless TV shows and swept up in a whirlpool of media activity. Although I was glad to share some ideas that I deeply valued and that had brought so much to my life, this episode also made me realize how artificial the making of celebrity is. I was the same old guy, but suddenly I had become a public figure.

It also dawned on me that much more money than I had ever envisioned having was going to come my way — quite a change from my many years living in India on $50 a month. Since I could not see myself getting a big house and a swimming pool, I decided to donate all the proceeds and rights of that and all subsequent books to a foundation that carries out humanitarian and educational projects in Asia. The decision eased my mind. Humanitarian projects have since become a central focus of my life, and with a few dedicated volunteer friends and generous benefactors, under the inspiration of my abbot, Rabjam Rinpoche, we have managed to build and run more than thirty clinics and schools in Tibet, Nepal, and India. We do this spending barely 1 percent on overhead expenses.

Then came the return to science. It happened in two steps: first physics and the nature of outer reality, then cognitive sciences and the nature of mind.

When Trinh Xuan Thuan, a renowned astrophysicist from the University of Virginia, suggested we have a dialogue on Buddhism and science, I could not resist, since I had many questions at the ready for a physicist about the nature of the world of phenomena. Thuan and I met at the Summer University, in Andorra, in 1997. During our long walks together through the majestic Pyrenean scenery, we had a series of fascinating conversations. Are atoms “things” or mere “observable phenomena”? Does the notion of a “first cause” to the universe stand up to analysis? Is there a solid reality behind the veil of appearances? Is the universe made of “interdependent events” or of “autonomous entities”? We found striking philosophical similarities between the Copenhagen school’s interpretation of quantum physics and the Buddhist analysis of reality. Further encounters followed, and The Quantum and the Lotus was born.

This dialogue had mostly to do with the philosophical, ethical, and human aspects of science. The next step, in which I am still fully engaged, was to collaborate in scientific studies about the heart of Buddhist practice: transforming the mind.

My late spiritual friend Francisco Varela, a pioneer neuroscientist, had always told me that the collaboration between cognitive sciences and Buddhist contemplatives was the way to go, since it held vast potential not only for understanding the human mind but also for conducting actual scientific experimentation. Francisco himself had cofounded the Mind and Life Institute with the American businessman Adam Engle to facilitate and organize meetings between top scientists and the Dalai Lama, who has always been extremely interested in science.

I first joined the Mind and Life meetings in 2000, in Dharamsala, the seat of the Dalai Lama in India. The subject was “destructive emotions.” It was a most fascinating meeting, with some of the best scientists in the field, including Francisco Varela, Richard J. Davidson, Paul Ekman, and others, and was chaired by Daniel Goleman. The five days of dialogue were pervaded with a unique brilliance, openness, and deeply felt aspiration to contribute something unique and beneficial to humankind. I was asked to present the Buddhist perspective on the various ways of dealing with emotions. Like a schoolboy taking an exam, I felt odd doing this in the presence of the Dalai Lama, who knew the subject matter a hundred times better than I did. I had been acting as the Dalai Lama’s French interpreter for a decade, so I assumed in my mind my usual role of interpreter and tried to concentrate on the audience, the scientists and over fifty observers, and to convey the essence of what I had learned from my teachers. As the meeting progressed, it became clear that a research program could be put together. One could invite expert meditators to the labs and study the effect of years of mind training. How would their ability to deal with emotions and even their brains have changed? This kind of study had always been one of Francisco’s dreams. An agenda was set with Richard Davidson and Paul Ekman. The story of that ongoing collaboration, of which I became an intimate part, is related in Daniel Goleman’s Destructive Emotions and in Chapter 16 of the present book.

It was very exciting to return to science after some thirty years of absence, and to do so with such great scientists. I was intrigued to see if the latest methods of scientific investigation would reveal whether different meditative states, such as focused attention or compassion, would have distinct brain signatures. I was also very keen to find out if a group of experienced meditators would yield similar results and how they would differ from untrained subjects. Since then, I have thoroughly enjoyed the uplifting and warm atmosphere in which this collaboration is taking place. With the first scientific papers now coming out, I think that we are on the threshold of groundbreaking research.

I have also become increasingly involved in photography and have published five photography books over the years. I feel fortunate to be able to share through images the inner beauty of those with whom I live and the outer beauty of their world, and to offer a little hope for human nature.

Why now a book on happiness? It began with a typical example of the “French exception.” Some French intellectuals despise happiness and are very vocal about it. I debated one of them for a French magazine and thought that if I ever wrote another book, I would include a chapter on the subject. In the meantime Paul Ekman, Richard Davidson, Alan Wallace, and I spent two days at a northern California coastal wilderness, writing an article titled “Buddhist and Psychological Perspectives on Emotions and Well-Being.”3 I realized that the subject was so central to human life that it deserved an in-depth exploration. For a year I read everything I could get my hands on about happiness and well-being in the works of Western philosophers, social psychologists, cognitive scientists, and even in the tabloid press, which regularly reports peoples’ views on happiness, such as that of one French actress: “For me, happiness is eating a tasty plate of spaghetti”; or “Walking in the snow under the stars,” and so on. The many definitions of happiness that I encountered contradicted one another and often seemed vague or superficial. So in the light of the analytical and contemplative science of mind that I had encountered through the kindness of my teachers, I embarked on trying to unravel the meaning and mechanism of genuine happiness, and of course of suffering.

When the book came out in France, it sparked a national debate. The same intellectuals confirmed that they were not interested in happiness and discarded the idea that it could be cultivated as a skill. One author wrote an article asking me to stop bugging people with the “dirty works of happiness.” Another magazine did a feature on “the sorcerers of happiness.” After spending a grueling month in Paris engaged in these debates and with the media, I felt like the scattered parts of a puzzle. I was happy to return to the mountains of Nepal and put the pieces back together.

Although my life has become more hectic, I am still based at Shechen Monastery in Nepal and spend two months a year in my hermitage facing the Himalayas.

I doubtless have a lot more practice and effort ahead of me before I achieve genuine inner freedom, but I am fully enjoying the journey. Simplifying one’s life to extract its quintessence is the most rewarding of all the pursuits I have undertaken. It doesn’t mean giving up what is truly beneficial, but finding out what really matters and what brings lasting fulfillment, joy, serenity, and, above all, the irreplaceable boon of altruistic love. It means transforming oneself to better transform the world.

As I write in the conclusion of this book, when I was twenty words like happiness and benevolence did not mean much to me. I was a typical young Parisian student, going to see Eisenstein and Marx Brothers movies, playing music, manning the barricades in May ’68 near the Sorbonne, loving sports and nature. But I didn’t have much sense of how to lead my life except playing it by ear, day in and day out. I somehow felt that there was a potential for flourishing in myself, and in others, but had no idea about how to actualize it. Thirty-five years later, I surely still have a long way to go, but at least the sense of direction is clear to me and I enjoy every step on the path.

That is why this book, though Buddhist in spirit, is not a “Buddhist” book as opposed to a “Christian” or an “agnostic” book. It was written from the perspective of “secular spirituality,” a theme dear to the Dalai Lama. As such it is intended not for the Buddhist shelves of libraries, but for the heart and mind of anyone who aspires to a little more joie de vivre and to let wisdom and compassion reign in her or his life.

Shechen Monastery, Nepal

May 2005

1

TALKING ABOUT HAPPINESS

Every man wants to be happy, but in order to be so he needs first to understand what happiness is.

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

An American friend of mine, a successful photography editor, once told me about a conversation she’d had with a group of friends after they’d finished their final college exams and were wondering what to do with their lives. When she’d said, “I want to be happy,” there was an embarrassed silence, and then one of her friends had asked: “How could someone as smart as you want nothing more than to be happy?” My friend answered: “I didn’t say how I want to be happy. There are so many ways to find happiness: start a family, have kids, build a career, seek adventure, help others, find inner peace. . . . Whatever I end up doing, I want my life to be a truly happy one.”