The Art of Happiness by Dalai Lama XIVMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book contains extensive conversations with Dalai Lama to present his views on leading happier life augmented by the author's observation and commentary from a Western psychiatrist. It touches on different aspects of our lives and the other emotions, good and evil, and the effective way of dealing with them. Such as greed, inner worth, anger, anxiety, hatred, guilt, fear, suffering, and other behavior, i.e., human nature, discipline, compassion, dependency, self-reliance, and so on...
Firstly I'd like to repeat what others have said... this isn't a book by the Dalai Lama. It is a book by Howard Cutler.
My main reason for giving such a low rating is that this was passed off as a self-help book that it isn't. It may well give you a warm fuzzy feeling after reading it, but it does not provide any of the tools necessary. There are nuggets of wisdom here, and I do not deny that.
The Dalai Lama is a celibate monk from a particular tradition and culture. His specific branch of Buddhism employs some rather fancy philosophical arguments... why for example, you shouldn't be angry with, but instead happy for, someone when they do you physical harm. It's all tied into concepts of rebirth and karma etc... if you believe you are being reborn, it doesn't matter if you are stabbed to death. Most of us would be better off getting pretty damn angry with an attacker. Having read a few books by the Dalai Lama (not this one), I'm convinced that he's not the person to turn to for advice on how to, concretely, change our lives.
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