When our meal was served on a recent international flight my neighbor, a young man, asked me with a touch of surprise:

— Are you vegetarian?

— Yes, I am.

— Do you feel that meat is dirty?

— Not

That’s a question the Dalai Lama’s frequently asked. His usual reply is to joke, ‟Poor Buddhism! Rejected by religions as an atheistic philosophy, a science of the mind; and by philosophers as a religion—there’s nowhere that Buddhism has citizen’s rights.

“Simplify, simplify, simplify…” These refreshing words written by Henry Thoreau remind us that much of our suffering comes from adding unnecessary and disturbing complications in our lives. We seem to be continually weaving elaborate conceptual webs around even straightforward

To imagine happiness as the achievement of all our desires and passions, is to confuse the legitimate aspiration to inner fulfilment with an utopia that inevitably leads to frustration.

Among all the clumsy, blind, and extreme ways we go about

Happiness is, to begin with, a love of life. To have lost all reason for living is to open up an abyss of suffering. As important as external conditions may be, suffering, like well-being, is essentially an state of mind.

This is really a joke. Of course, it is better than being called the unhappiest person in the world, but this assertion is absolutely not based on scientific findings.

Some years ago, the Australian television network ABC made a documentary

Empathy is to feel what others are experiencing and to resonate with them. When we meet someone filled with joy, we also experience joy. The same applies to suffering; though empathy we experience the suffering that another person is going

Meditation essentially means to train the mind. The purpose of meditation is to develop qualities such as loving-kindness and attention, as well as a correct understanding of reality. For 2500 years, Buddhists have used meditation to eliminate ignorance and mental