“The art of happiness” is a writing exposition of some Dalai Lama speeches in Arizona and several interviews from the psychiatrist and doctor Howard C Cutler to the same Dalai Lama, first published in 1999.

As a main idea, i would say that this book talks about how to get happines according to Tibetan Buddhism and its phylosophical appliction to the western way of life. What it exposes as well, is the different points of view between East and West about, for example, how to define and understand the mind’s behaviour and brain function, being the western one more technical and scientific and the eastern one much more spiritual and humanistic.

Another remarkable aspect of this work are the two main and only characters named before. They establish a very interesting and deep conversations about subjects like: training the mind for happiness, facing suffering, finding meaning in pain and suffering, or reflections on a spiritual life. They first met in Dharamsala when one of them, concretely the doctor Howard C Cutler, visited India on a research trip to study Tibetan Medicine in 1982. Some years later he proposed to the tibetan leader to write a self-help book taking advantage of his knowledge about Buddhism and meditation. However, as a result of this collabotation, they finally got not only a self-help book but also a work full of deep reflections about life and how to improve it.

In my opinion, the best of this book are the very interesting, useful and helpful chats between the two co-authors as well as the detailed descriptions of the scenes to introduce the reader in the atmospher in order to make it more enjoyable.

Ferran Costa