Exploring Two Routes to Happiness

We humans have engaged in the elusive pursuit of happiness far longer, surely, than the 2,500 years or so since the Buddha propounded his First Noble Truth, to the effect that we are all fated to experience suffering in our lives. Here in the Western world we engage in it somewhat desperately these days and with remarkably limited success despite the material well-being that surrounds us.

Howard C. Cutler, a psychiatrist who set out to explore this paradox with the exiled spiritual and secular leader of Tibet, the Dalai Lama, believes that “a critical shift in perception” has taken place in our society: As “suffering becomes less visible,” he writes, “it is no longer seen as part of the fundamental nature of human beings, but rather as an anomaly, a sign that something has gone terribly wrong, a sign of ‘failure’ of some system, an infringement on our guaranteed right to happiness!”

Cutler first envisioned “a conventional self-help format in which the Dalai Lama would present clear and simple solutions to all life’s problems,” and in which Cutler himself would use his skills as a psychiatrist to “codify [these] views in a set of easy instructions on how to conduct one’s daily life.” But the Dalai Lama’s approach “encompassed a much broader and more complex paradigm, incorporating all the nuance, richness and complexity that life has to offer.”

As a result, the book expands into a comparative study of two ways of looking at the workings of the human mind, as Cutler pursues a probing inquiry into the Dalai Lama’s world view and how it differs from the Western paradigm. It is also a sometimes emotional inner struggle, a chronicle of the author’s growth. With acute, sometimes wry, intelligence, Cutler counterpoints the knowledge and experience of a Westerner trained in rational, scientific methodology--and in the sobering school of contemporary mental and emotional disorders--with the broader, more hopeful, more fully human understanding of a great Buddhist teacher.

The mutually accepted premise of their debate is that the purpose of life is to achieve happiness. At issue is how we go about it. The Western approach--the drive to achieve and acquire in the belief that the more we can satisfy our desires the happier we shall be--has reached an all-too-obvious state of bankruptcy. “We don’t need more money,” Cutler concludes; “we don’t need greater success or fame, we don’t need the perfect body or even the perfect mate--right now, at this very moment, we have a mind, which is all the basic equipment we need to achieve complete happiness.”

Buddhism, of course, teaches us that happiness “involves an inner discipline, a gradual process of rooting out our destructive mental states and replacing them with positive, constructive states of mind, such as kindness, tolerance and forgiveness.” It results not from the satisfaction of desires, but rather from the ability to detach the mind from the importunate demands of the “self” that we Westerners have come to hold in such high esteem and to observe that grasping self from the wider, kinder perspective of genuine compassion for all sentient beings in the world around us.

The subtitle of this book is misleading: There are more readily practicable “handbooks for living” on the market, reflecting the enormous popular appetite for guides to Buddhist thought and practice in the United States today. As Cutler says, this is not the “self-help” book he had planned on writing; rather, it has more to do with the quality of thoughtfully, often elegantly, exchanged ideas in the literary tradition of the Platonic dialogue.

Indeed, despite Cutler’s frequent requests for techniques to implement the kind of mind-training that the Dalai Lama proposes, he devotes remarkably little space to meditation, the key practice of all varieties of Buddhism, which is barely mentioned until the last pages of the book.

I take issue too with the billing of His Holiness as co-author, which seems more like a marketing strategy than a true reflection of his role in this work. While his voice remains predominant throughout in the form of transcriptions from interviews and public presentations, Cutler is the guiding presence here. That said, “The Art of Living” is a valuable and engaging addition to the growing body of literature around Eastern thought and the healing insights it can bring to bear on personal and moral dilemmas in our contemporary American society.

Peter Clothier is the author of, most recently, “While I Am Not Afraid: Secrets of a Man’s Heart.”