To begin, I invited the Archbishop to offer a prayer, since, in his tradition, that is the way to open any important conversation.
“Yes, thank you,” the Archbishop began. “I always need all the help I can get.
“Let’s be still for a moment. Come, Holy Spirit. Fill the hearts of thy faithful people and kindle in them the fire of thy love. Send forth thy spirit and they shall be made new and thou shalt renew the face of the earth. Amen.”
“Amen,” the Dalai Lama added. I then asked the Dalai Lama to share his hopes for our time together. He sat back and rubbed his hands. “Now we are in the twenty-first century. We are improving on the innovations of the twentieth century and continuing to improve our material world. While of course there are still a lot of poor people who do not have adequate food, generally the world is now highly developed. The problem is that our world and our education remain focused exclusively on external, materialistic values. We are not concerned enough with our inner values. Those who grow up with this kind of education live a materialistic life and eventually the whole society becomes materialistic. But this culture is not sufficient to tackle our human problems. The real problem is here,” the Dalai Lama said, pointing to his head.
The Archbishop tapped his chest with his fingers to emphasize the heart as well.
“And here,” the Dalai Lama echoed. “Mind and heart. Materialistic values cannot give us peace of mind. So we really need to focus on our inner values, our true humanity. Only this way can we have peace of mind—and more peace in our world. A lot of the problems we are facing are our own creation, like war and violence. Unlike a natural disaster, these problems are created by humans ourselves.
“I feel there is a big contradiction,” the Dalai Lama continued. “There are seven billion human beings and nobody wants to have problems or suffering, but there are many problems and much suffering, most of our own creation. Why?” He was speaking now directly to the Archbishop, who was nodding in agreement. “Something is lacking. As one of the seven billion human beings, I believe everyone has the responsibility to develop a happier world. We need, ultimately, to have a greater concern for others’ well-being. In other words, kindness or compassion, which is lacking now. We must pay more attention to our inner values. We must look inside.”
He turned to the Archbishop and raised his hands, palms pressed together in a gesture of respect. “So now you, Archbishop Tutu, my longtime friend.” He extended his hand to the Archbishop, who took it tenderly between both of his. “I think you have great potential—”
“Potential?!” the Archbishop responded with feigned outrage, retracting his hand.
“Great potential, yes. I mean great potential, you see, to create a happier humanity.”
The Archbishop threw his head back, laughing. “Ah, yes.”
“When people just look at your face,” the Dalai Lama continued, “you are always laughing, always joyful. This is a very positive message.” Now the Dalai Lama reached over and took the Archbishop’s hand again and stroked it.
“Sometimes when you see political leaders or spiritual leaders, they have a very serious face—” He sat up in his chair frowning and looking very stern. “It makes one hesitant, but when they see your face—”
“It’s the big nose,” the Archbishop suggested, and they both giggled.
“So I really appreciate your coming to have this conversation,” the Dalai Lama said. “In order to develop our mind, we must look at a deeper level. Everyone seeks happiness, joyfulness, but from outside—from money, from power, from big car, from big house. Most people never pay much attention to the ultimate source of a happy life, which is inside, not outside. Even the source of physical health is inside, not outside.
“So there may be a few differences between us. You usually emphasize faith. Personally I am Buddhist, and I consider faith very important, but at the same time the reality is that out of seven billion people, over one billion people on the planet are nonbelievers. So we cannot exclude them. One billion is quite a large number. They are also our human brothers and sisters. They also have the right to become happier human beings and to be good members of the human family. So one need not depend on religious faith to educate our inner values.”
“It’s very difficult to follow your very profound pronouncements,” the Archbishop began. “I thought you were going to say that, in fact, when you are pursuing happiness, you are not going to find it. It’s very, very elusive. You don’t find it by saying, I’m going to forget about everything and just pursue happiness. There’s a title of a book by C. S. Lewis called Surprised by Joy, which I think expresses how it works.
“Many people look at you,” the Archbishop continued, “and they think of all the awful things that have happened to you. Nothing can be more devastating than being exiled from your home, from the things that are really precious to you. And yet when people come to you, they experience someone who has a wonderful serenity . . . a wonderful compassion . . . a mischievousness—”
“That’s the right word,” the Dalai Lama added. “I don’t like too much formality.”
“Don’t interrupt me,” the Archbishop elbowed back.
“Oh!” The Dalai Lama laughed at his reprimand.
“It’s wonderful to discover that what we want is not actually happiness. It is not actually what I would speak of. I would speak of joy. Joy subsumes happiness. Joy is the far greater thing. Think of a mother who is going to give birth. Almost all of us want to escape pain. And mothers know that they are going to have pain, the great pain of giving birth. But they accept it. And even after the most painful labor, once the baby is out, you can’t measure the mother’s joy. It is one of those incredible things that joy can come so quickly from suffering.
“A mother can be dead tired from work,” the Archbishop continued, “and all of the things that have worried her. And then her child is ill. That mother will not remember her exhaustion. She can sit at the bedside of her sick child the night through, and when the child gets better you see that joy.”
• • •
What is this thing called joy, and how is it possible that it can evoke such a wide range of feelings? How can the experience of joy span from those tears of joy at a birth to an irrepressible belly laugh at a joke to a serenely contented smile during meditation? Joy seems to blanket this entire emotional expanse. Paul Ekman, famed emotions researcher and longtime friend of the Dalai Lama, has written that joy is associated with feelings as varied as:
pleasure (of the five senses)
amusement (from a chuckle to a belly laugh)
contentment (a calmer kind of satisfaction)
excitement (in response to novelty or challenge)
relief (following upon another emotion, such as fear, anxiety, and even pleasure)
wonder (before something astonishing and admirable)
ecstasy or bliss (transporting us outside ourselves)
exultation (at having accomplished a difficult or daring task)
radiant pride (when our children earn a special honor)
unhealthy jubilation or schadenfreude (relishing in someone else’s suffering)
elevation (from having witnessed an act of kindness, generosity, or compassion)
gratitude (the appreciation of a selfless act of which one is the beneficiary)
In his book on happiness, Buddhist scholar and former scientist Matthieu Ricard has added three other more exalted states of joy:
rejoicing (in someone else’s happiness, what Buddhists call mudita)
delight or enchantment (a shining kind of contentment)
spiritual radiance (a serene joy born from deep well-being and benevolence)
This helpful mapping of the kingdom of joy conveys its complexity and its subtlety. Joy can span from the pleasure of others’ good fortune, what Buddhists call mudita, to the pleasure in others’ misfortune, what the Germans call schadenfreude. Clearly what the Archbishop was describing was more than mere pleasure and closer to the relief, wonder, and ecstasy of birth. Joy certainly does embrace all of these human experiences, but lasting joy—joy as a way of being—that one witnesses in the Archbishop and the Dalai Lama is probably closest to the “shining contentment” or the “spiritual radiance” born from deep well-being and benevolence.
I knew this complex topography of joy was what we were here to discover. Research conducted at the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow suggests that there are really only four fundamental emotions, three of which are so-called negative emotions: fear, anger, and sadness. The only positive one is joy or happiness. Exploring joy is nothing less than exploring what makes human experience satisfying.
• • •
Is joy a feeling that comes and surprises us, or is it a more dependable way of being?” I asked. “For the two of you, joy seems to be something much more enduring. Your spiritual practice hasn’t made you somber and serious. It’s made you more joyful. So how can people cultivate that sense of joy as a way of being, and not just a temporary feeling?”
The Archbishop and the Dalai Lama looked at each other and the Archbishop gestured to the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama squeezed the Archbishop’s hand and began. “Yes, it is true. Joy is something different from happiness. When I use the word happiness, in a sense I mean satisfaction. Sometimes we have a painful experience, but that experience, as you’ve said with birth, can bring great satisfaction and joyfulness.”
“Let me ask you,” the Archbishop jumped in. “You’ve been in exile fifty-what years?”
“Fifty-six.”
“Fifty-six years from a country that you love more than anything else. Why are you not morose?”
“Morose?” the Dalai Lama asked, not understanding the word.
As Jinpa hurried to translate morose into Tibetan, the Archbishop clarified, “Sad.”
The Dalai Lama took the Archbishop’s hand in his, as if comforting him while reviewing these painful events. The Dalai Lama’s storied discovery as the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama meant that at the age of two, he was swept away from his rural home in the Amdo province of eastern Tibet to the one-thousand-room Potala Palace in the capital city of Lhasa. There he was raised in opulent isolation as the future spiritual and political leader of Tibet and as a godlike incarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion. After the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, the Dalai Lama was thrust into politics. At the age of fifteen he found himself the ruler of six million people and facing an all-out and desperately unequal war. For nine years he tried to negotiate with Communist China for his people’s welfare, and sought political solutions as the country came to be annexed. In 1959, during an uprising that risked resulting in a massacre, the Dalai Lama decided, with a heavy heart, to go into exile.
The odds of successfully escaping to India were frighteningly small, but to avoid a confrontation and a bloodbath, he left in the night dressed as a palace guard. He had to take off his recognizable glasses, and his blurred vision must have heightened his sense of fear and uncertainty as the escape party snuck by garrisons of the People’s Liberation Army. They endured sandstorms and snowstorms as they summited nineteen-thousand-foot mountain peaks during their three-week escape.
“One of my practices comes from an ancient Indian teacher,” the Dalai Lama began answering the Archbishop’s question. “He taught that when you experience some tragic situation, think about it. If there’s no way to overcome the tragedy, then there is no use worrying too much. So I practice that.” The Dalai Lama was referring to the eighth-century Buddhist master Shantideva, who wrote, “If something can be done about the situation, what need is there for dejection? And if nothing can be done about it, what use is there for being dejected?”
The Archbishop cackled, perhaps because it seemed almost too incredible that someone could stop worrying just because it was pointless.
“Yes, but I think people know it with their head.” He touched both index fingers to his scalp. “You know, that it doesn’t help worrying. But they still worry.”
“Many of us have become refugees,” the Dalai Lama tried to explain, “and there are a lot of difficulties in my own country. When I look only at that,” he said, cupping his hands into a small circle, “then I worry.” He widened his hands, breaking the circle open. “But when I look at the world, there are a lot of problems, even within the People’s Republic of China. For example, the Hui Muslim community in China has a lot of problems and suffering. And then outside China, there are many more problems and more suffering. When we see these things, we realize that not only do we suffer, but so do many of our human brothers and sisters. So when we look at the same event from a wider perspective, we will reduce the worrying and our own suffering.”
I was struck by the simplicity and profundity of what the Dalai Lama was saying. This was far from “don’t worry, be happy,” as the popular Bobby McFerrin song says. This was not a denial of pain and suffering, but a shift in perspective—from oneself and toward others, from anguish to compassion—seeing that others are suffering as well. The remarkable thing about what the Dalai Lama was describing is that as we recognize others’ suffering and realize that we are not alone, our pain is lessened.
Often we hear about another’s tragedy, and it makes us feel better about our own situation. This is quite different from what the Dalai Lama was doing. He was not contrasting his situation with others, but uniting his situation with others, enlarging his identity and seeing that he and the Tibetan people were not alone in their suffering. This recognition that we are all connected—whether Tibetan Buddhists or Hui Muslims—is the birth of empathy and compassion.
I wondered how the Dalai Lama’s ability to shift his perspective might relate to the adage “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.” Was it truly possible to experience pain, whether the pain of an injury or an exile, without suffering? There is a Sutta, or teaching of the Buddha, called the Sallatha Sutta, that makes a similar distinction between our “feelings of pain” and “the suffering that comes as a result of our response” to the pain: “When touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed, ordinary person sorrows, grieves, and laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical and mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, were to shoot him with another one, so that he feels the pain of two arrows.” It seems that the Dalai Lama was suggesting that by shifting our perspective to a broader, more compassionate one, we can avoid the worry and suffering that is the second arrow.
“Then another thing,” the Dalai Lama continued. “There are different aspects to any event. For example, we lost our own country and became refugees, but that same experience gave us new opportunities to see more things. For me personally, I had more opportunities to meet with different people, different spiritual practitioners, like you, and also scientists. This new opportunity arrived because I became a refugee. If I remained in the Potala in Lhasa, I would have stayed in what has often been described as a golden cage: the Lama, holy Dalai Lama.” He was now sitting up stiffly as he once had to when he was the cloistered spiritual head of the Forbidden Kingdom.
“So, personally, I prefer the last five decades of refugee life. It’s more useful, more opportunity to learn, to experience life. Therefore, if you look from one angle, you feel, oh how bad, how sad. But if you look from another angle at that same tragedy, that same event, you see that it gives me new opportunities. So, it’s wonderful. That’s the main reason that I’m not sad and morose. There’s a Tibetan saying: ‘Wherever you have friends that’s your country, and wherever you receive love, that’s your home.’”
There was an audible gasp in the room at this poignant saying, and at its ability to ease, if not erase, the pain of a half century spent in exile.
“That’s very beautiful,” the Archbishop said.
“Also,” the Dalai Lama continued, “whoever gives you love, that’s your parent. So I consider you—although you are only four years older than me—as my father. I think you never could have had your children at the age of four, so you are not my real father. But I do consider you as a father.”
“What you said is quite wonderful,” the Archbishop began, still clearly moved by the Dalai Lama’s response to exile. “I think I would just add to it by saying to our sisters and brothers out there: Anguish and sadness in many ways are things that you cannot control. They happen. Supposing somebody hits you. The pain causes an anguish in you and an anger, and you might want to retaliate. But as you grow in the spiritual life, whether as a Buddhist or a Christian or any other tradition, you are able to accept anything that happens to you. You accept it not as the result of your being sinful, that you are blameworthy because of what has happened—it’s part of the warp and woof of life. It’s going to happen whether you like it or not. There are going to be frustrations in life. The question is not: How do I escape? It is: How can I use this as something positive? Just as you, Your Holiness, have just described. Nothing, I think, can be more devastating in many ways than being turfed out of your own country. And a country is not just a country, I mean it is part of you. You are part of it in a way that is very difficult to describe to other people. By rights, the Dalai Lama should be a sourpuss.”
The Dalai Lama asked Jinpa for a translation of sourpuss.
The Archbishop decided to explain it himself: “It’s when you do that face.” He was pointing at the Dalai Lama’s quizzical expression and pursed lips, which did look a little like he had bitten into a lemon. “Just that face, just like that, you look like a real sourpuss.”
The Dalai Lama was still trying to understand how one’s puss could look sour, and Jinpa was still trying to translate.
“And then when you smile your face lights up. And it is because in a very large measure you have transmuted what would have been totally negative. You’ve transmuted it into goodness. Because, again, you have not said, ‘Well how can I be happy?’ You’ve not said that. You’ve said, ‘How can I help to spread compassion and love?’ And people everywhere in the world, even when they don’t understand your English, they come and they fill stadiums. I’m not really jealous. I speak far better English than you, and I don’t get so many people coming to hear me as they come to you. And you know what? I don’t think they come to listen. They may be doing that a bit. What they’ve come for is that you embody something, which they feel, because some of the things that you say, in a sense, are obvious. Yet it’s not the words. It’s the spirit behind those words. It is when you sit and you tell people that suffering, frustration, are not the determinants of who we are. It is that we can use these things that are seemingly negative for a positive effect.
“And I hope we can convey to God’s children out there how deeply they are loved. How deeply, deeply precious they are to this God. Even the despised refugee whose name no one seems to know. I look frequently at pictures of people fleeing from violence, and there’s so much of it. 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.” The Archbishop was now beaming, and he whispered the word smile as if it were the holy name of God.
“He wants to ask another question,” the Archbishop said, seeing that I was leaning forward. It was extraordinary to hear how deeply they were engaging with joy and suffering, but at the rate we were going, we wouldn’t get through one-tenth of the questions we needed to ask.
The Dalai Lama slapped the Archbishop’s hand and said, “We have several days, so it’s not a problem. If our interview is only thirty minutes or one hour, then we have to shorten our answers.”
“You must shorten your answers,” the Archbishop said. “I am brief.”
“First let’s have tea, and then I will be brief.”