Can You Really Be Friends with the Dalai Lama?

men, most of which seem to end with the Lama being escorted off to his next appointment. Cutler seems to wants to sail across the seas of human connection; the Dalai Lama leaves him rocking on the waves in a tug boat.

The situation is all the more piquant because Cutler really seems to like him, and feel good around him. The question in my mind, though, isn’t so much about how someone like Cutler can connect with the Dalai Lama – I suspect has a satisfying social life – but rather how the Dalai Lama can connect with ordinary folks like Cutler.

Human Happiness

 

This isn’t just a random question. For the Dalai Lama, a lot of human happiness revolves around our relationships with other people. So how does someone revered as the Boddhisatva of compassion since he was a toddler, a leader of a nation absorbed into China, someone who has spent his life becoming a person unlike anyone else on the face of the earth, connect with people who are so unlike him, which, pretty much by definition, is everyone?

As he tells Cutler early on, he connects through the basic common humanness he finds in all people. His idea of that human nature: kindness and gentleness.

How does he achieve this? This is where his ideas differ from Cutler’s. Cutler’s psychiatric training taught him to look for repressed traumas in his conversations with his patients, and help them understand and release the pain to end the patterns that make their lives difficult.

The Dalai Lama doesn’t see things this way. Like Cutler, he thinks that much human unhappiness relates to “dispositions and imprints” that come from our experiences and shape our behaviors. Unlike Cutler, though, he believes in reincarnation, so some of the traumatic events that shape our perspectives could well have happened in other lifetimes. Good luck unearthing those with psychotherapy.

How do you deal with trans-existential traumas that happened on the other side of the death’s veil? Not with talk therapy. This is the first big recommendation of the book: it takes consistent self-awareness to recognize the negative patterns in your thoughts and actions, and self-discipline to change those habits. Doing this will help you get back in touch with that basic human nature that often gets hidden under our bad habits.

So this is one piece of advice the Dalai Lama offers: take on the challenges of your life directly even though they’re difficult, and see yourself honestly, even when it isn’t fun.

Or don’t do that all the time. Later on in the book, he points out that there are times when putting off dealing with things – psychologists call this suppression – makes more sense.

As I went through the book I found a bunch of little inconsistencies like this – tiny flaws in the theory that I figured would add up to something when I put them all together.

A Different Approach to life

 

And then I realized that if I was hankering for logical rigor, I was missing the point. Because in addition to advocating finding your inner gentleness, the Dalai Lama was also recommending flexibility. A central tenet of his dogma is a lack of dogmatism. Is he ever rigid in his thinking? “No, I don't think so, “ he explains. “…Someone will come to me and present a certain idea, and I'll see the reason in what they are saying and agree, telling them ‘Oh, that's great’... But then the next person comes along with the opposite viewpoint, and I'll see the reason in what they are saying as well and agree with them also. Sometimes I'm criticized for this and have to be reminded, ‘We are committed to this course of action, so for the time being let's just keep to this side’.”[1]

A big part of the Dalai Lama’s strategy for connecting with people who are different involves this flexibility and accommodation. It’s key to his method of relating with other people, and of rolling with the punches to find peace and contentment. You can see him working this strategy throughout The Art of Happiness.

And Yet…

 

At times this goes a little too far. Cutler spends a good portion of the book explaining how Western science backs up the ideas that the Dalai Lama has laid out – and the Lama himself seems eager to see those connections. But it would be easy for a reader to miss the idea that he really is serious about traditional Tibetan Buddhism, a religion that recognizes not only karma and reincarnation but a wide variety of spirits, gods, and entities that just don’t play nicely with neuroscience and experimental psychology.[2]

The idea of being flexible to find connections with other people has value – there’s no denying that. And this brings me back to my original question: how does someone with experiences as unusual as the Dalai Lama connect with more ordinary people? One again, the answer involves looking for that basic human kindness and gentleness.

This way of connecting is both profound and shallow. Basic trust is undeniably important, but that’s not all there is to our relationships. It’s our rough edges, our differences and even at times our conflicts that make relationships rich and keep them interesting. And it’s often not just from differences that we learn, but through conflicts. Practicing kindness and gentleness teaches one kind of strength. Balancing those with our other less positive traits gives us another.

I would really have enjoyed reading about a blowout between Howard Cutler and the Dalai Lama – mothers dissed, wine thrown in faces - but that doesn’t happen here, or if it did it didn’t make the final cut. Short of that, I would also have liked to see them hash out the differences in their ideas rather than simply respecting them. Forms of Buddhism popular among recent American converts are very different from the forms traditionally practiced in Asia, for many reasons.

The Connection Question

 

The chapters usually take the same basic form: Cutler sets out a question, the Dalai Lama answers, Cutler asks for elaboration or pushes back on some details or confusions, and sagely, wisely, the Lama replies. Then, he leaves and Cutler explains the connections to modern science. Cutler uses science to support the Lama’s ideas when he can; he bows to his authority when he can’t. There is never enough conflict to get at the underlying ideas or reveal the assumptions that keep the men from seeing fully eye-to-eye.

The science vs more-traditional-religion gap is one example of this disconnect. But there’s at least one more that really matters. Fairly early on the Lama claims that the point of babies is to make people happy.[3] They are programmed to be lovable – that is, to make adults happy so they’ll look after them. If we think of babies the way we think of turtles – little creatures instinctually driven to look out for themselves – then they seem understandably selfish. But if we look at them as parts of a family or community, elements of a social system where each part contributes something to the greater whole, then it doesn’t really seem like selfishness at all, any more than your liver is being selfish when it demands calories and nutrients in exchange for cleaning your blood.

Cutler recognizes that this is different from Western ideas about human nature – that babies are just living out their instinctual, selfish, animal selves – but he doesn’t pick up the underlying idea that the Lama is laying down: if babies are programmed to make adults want to care for them, then adults must also be programmed to have that desire. And if that’s the case – and I suspect that it is – it doesn’t always make sense for to think about the parts of families as entirely separate beings. They are symbiotically interconnected. The Dalai Lama suggests that the borders between people are much thinner than folks like Cutler generally assume. We’re more like ants, not cars.

So, why does this matter, exactly?

 

This is important for two reasons. First, it demonstrates the importance of flexibility in thinking. Not every way of seeing human existence makes sense. But there are more sensible ways to think about it than we often recognize.

This, I think, is what the Lama is getting at when he says that Western science is too rigid: it’s too focused on the here-and-now, on the individual and not their part in a larger entity – the sort of greater social whole that I often came across, in complicated ways, while I was doing my research among the Buddhists in Thailand. This is the second important take-away – the Dalai Lama’s critique of Western science.

Whether Cutler is right or not is a debate I won’t weigh in on here. It’s an important question, and a big one, too big for this book. But the difference never really gets explored. In the name of comity Cutler gives the Dalai Lama the last word and they just move on.

 

The Final Count

 

So there’s a lot to like in this book. The emphasis on human connection as a source of meaning is refreshing; I find that many books on happiness are all about me, and even if they don’t express it directly they promote a sort of self-centered orientation that eventually leads to nihilism. This one is delightfully free of that, and of the trust-me-I-know-it-all attitude that often colors books in the self-help genre as well. Both Cutler and the Dalai Lama present themselves as people looking for answers, and who may just have come a bit further on that journey than most of the rest of us.

So it doesn’t offer the final answer to the happiness question. And that’s fine.

That’s a plus, actually; they’re not selling any goods they can’t back up. The Art of Happiness works best as a series of conversations about happiness, between two men in the process of seeking it. And for that, in its lack of finality and hubris, it is well worth reading.

 

[1] p. 192

[2] See David McMahan’s 2008 book, The Making of Modern Buddhism for more information about the way the Dalai lama walks the line between traditional Tibetan Buddhism and reaching out to scientifically-minded audiences.

[3] p. 61