T

“You are wise,” the Archbishop said. “I wouldn’t just say wise selfish.
You are wise.”

•           •           •

he Buddhist practice of mind training, called lojong in Tibetan, is an
important part of the Dalai Lama’s tradition. One of the fundamental
messages in the original twelfth-century lojong text echoes what the
Dalai Lama and the Archbishop were saying about looking away from
oneself: “All dharma teachings agree on one point—lessening one’s self-
absorption.”
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.”
So what, then, is this joyful mind? Jinpa, who wrote a translation and
commentary on this revered text, explained as we were preparing for the
trip that joy is our essential nature, something everyone can realize. 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. As we were
hearing, so much depends on where we put our attention: on our own
suffering or that of others, on our own perceived separation or on our
indivisible connection.
Our ability to cultivate joy has not been scientifically studied as
thoroughly as our ability to cultivate happiness. In 1978, psychologists
Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman published a
landmark study that found that lottery winners were not significantly
happier than those who had been paralyzed in an accident. From this and
subsequent work came the idea that people have a “set point” that
determines their happiness over the course of their life. In other words,