The Book of Joy

by Dalai Lama XIV

Look at the children. I say that God is crying, because that is not how God wanted us to live. But you see again even in those circumstances, you have these people who come from other parts of the world to try to help, to make things better. And through

the tears, God begins to smile. And when God sees you and hears how you try to help God’s children, God smiles.”

Nothing Beautiful Comes Without Some Suffering

As we were saying, if you are setting out to be joyful you are not going to end up being joyful. You’re going to find yourself turned in on yourself.

It’s like a flower. You open, you blossom, really because of other people. And I think some suffering, maybe even intense suffering, is a necessary ingredient for life, certainly for developing compassion.

The suffering in prison helped him to become more magnanimous, willing to listen to the other side. To discover that the people he regarded as his enemy, they too were human beings who had fears and expectations. And they had been molded by their society.

And so without the twenty-seven years I don’t think we would have seen the Nelson Mandela with the compassion, the magnanimity, the capacity to put himself in the shoes of the other.”

“it is how we face all of the things that seem to be negative in our lives that determines the kind of person we become. If we regard all of this as frustrating, we’re going to come out squeezed and tight and just angry and wishing to smash everything.

Stress and opposition turn out to be exactly what initiate our development in utero. Our stem cells do not differentiate and become us if there is not enough biological stress to encourage them to do so. Without stress and opposition, complex life like ours would never have developed. We would never have come into being.

It’s one thing to understand the value of suffering, and quite another to remember it when you are angry or frustrated or in pain.

“The thing is, don’t feel guilty. We have no control over our feelings. Emotions are spontaneous things that arise.”

It does help you not to be too self-centered. It helps you to some extent to look away from yourself. And it can help make that anguish bearable. You don’t have to be a believer in any faith to be able to say, Oh, aren’t I blessed that I have doctors, that I have nurses qualified to look after me, and that I can be in a hospital? That might just be the beginning of moving away from being so self-centered and concentrating too much on me, me, me, me. You begin to realize, Hey, I’m not alone in this. Look at all the many others, and there may be some who are in greater pain. It’s like being put into a fiery furnace to be refined.”

“Too much self-centered thinking is the source of suffering. A compassionate concern for others’ well-being is the source of happiness. I do not have as much experience with physical pain as you have.

By simply shifting my focus to another person, which is what compassion does, my own pain was much less intense. This is how compassion works even at the physical level.

We have to take care of ourselves without

If we don’t take care of ourselves, we cannot survive. We need to do that.

Foolish selfishness means you just think only of yourself, don’t care about others, bully others, exploit others. In fact, taking care of others, helping others, ultimately is the way to discover your own joy and to have a happy life. So that is what I call wise selfishness.”

The text clarifies that when we focus on our ourselves we are destined to be unhappy: “Contemplate that, as long as you are too focused on your self-importance and too caught up in thinking about how you are good or bad, you will experience suffering. Obsessing about getting what you want and avoiding what you don’t want does not result in happiness.” The text includes the admonition: “Always maintain only a joyful mind.”

We could say that our desire for happiness is, in a way, an attempt to rediscover our original state of mind. It seems that Buddhists believe that joy is the natural state but that the ability to experience joy can also be cultivated as a skill.