What Tibetan Buddhism Can Teach Us About Happiness

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San Francisco, CA (USA) -- One of the most geographically isolated cultures in the world may contain the secrets to happiness that the rest of us have been looking for. Perhaps in part because of the country's remote location, the Tibetans have become the guardians of a deep, well-preserved wisdom tradition that modern science is only now catching up to.

But with the "mindful revolution" spreading in the West and a growing amount of research funding being dedicated to the study of contemplative practices and the science of compassion and altruism, the secrets of this ancient tradition are finally being recognized globally.

"Tibet has probably the greatest treasure trove of ancient contemplative knowledge, science and wisdom about how to influence the mind from the inside out," Joe Loizzo, founder of the Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science, told The Huffington Post. "The Tibetans have an unbroken lineage of oral knowledge and technical expertise ... both in medicine and in psychology."

Early Indic cultures developed public systems of training in mindfulness -- including the Hatha Yoga tradition and Tibetan Buddhist mind training -- to ensure that the skills of contemplation and positivity were taught to everyone, explains Loizzo.

A Harvard-trained psychiatrist and a Columbia-trained Buddhist scholar, Loizzo has spent his career merging "the scientific and the spiritual," bringing ancient teachings on contemplative practice to modern Western psychotherapy and preventive medicine.

"There's a growing understanding that we need to move back in the direction of the contemplative traditions -- the ancient wisdom that says slow down, pay attention, be kind, be at peace -- whereas our modern wisdom has said that we need to just push forward and move into the future. We're realizing that's not sustainable for us either as a civilization or for our individual minds and brains. It's wearing and tearing us down just like it's wearing and tearing the planet down."

Loizzo spent years studying with Tibetan teachers in exile in India and in the West, and is convinced that the Tibetan Buddhist tradition -- which emphasizes training in mindful awareness and compassion -- has something to teach us all about how to live better lives.

Here are four essential lessons from Tibetan Buddhism that can help in your own pursuit of happiness.

Get intimate with your own mind.

We need two main things to become happy, according to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition: mindful awareness and loving compassion. The theory goes that the combination of attention and loving-kindness -- both of which can be built through contemplative practices like meditation -- can help bring the brain into its most plastic, growth-oriented state and support the development of a greater state of consciousness, Loizzo says.

Meditation -- "the quiet, humble work it takes on a daily basis," as Loizzo puts it -- is the cornerstone of the Tibetan contemplative science. Through a meditation practice, we can begin to overcome negative thoughts and habitual emotional responese, and start to live from a more calm, centered place, he says.

“Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature," Sogyal Rinpoche advised in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, a guide to meditation and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. "Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation."

The research is now there to back up the benefits of this time-worn strategy for stabilizing emotions and boosting the brain's capacity for joy. Studies have shown meditation may be effective in reducing anxiety and depression, lowering stress levels, reducing loneliness and boosting emotional well-being.

"Twenty years and a thousand stories that have given me an unshakable confidence in the truly boundless potential we human beings have to heal ourselves and transform our lives," Loizzo wrote in his 2012 book, Sustainable Happiness.

Practice compassion, at every moment.

Most Eastern spiritual traditions involve some form of practice around compassion, or "loving-kindness." In Buddhism, there is a meditation for loving-kindness,“metta bhavana”, which involves sending kindness to yourself, loved ones, community members, people you may dislike, and eventually, all beings. In the Tibetan tradition, monks practice tonglen, which consists of breathing in suffering and breathing out happiness, so as to reduce pain and spread peace among all beings.

"What's unusual about the Tibetans is that they have what I call an industrial-strength version of this discipline," Loizzo says of loving-kindness practice. "These practices allow us to turn our sense of life as a battle, a struggle for survival against everybody else, into a communal experience of connecting with friends and the larger world. That, we've learned, is so important to our quality of life and our personal sense of meaning in life."

The Tibetans have devised powerful ways of helping people learn how to become more compassionate that are now being used in the Western world. A 2012 Emory University study suggested that compassion training derived from ancient Tibetan practices may boost empathy, and other studies have shown that loving-kindness meditation could increase positive emotions and lead to more positive relationships over time.

Connect with others who support your journey.

The traditional "Three Jewels" of Buddhism consist of the Buddha (the example), the Dharma (the path) and the Sangha (the community). In this tradition, the community is just as important an element as any other in living a happy, purposeful life. Increasing your happiness and well-being is a difficult thing to do alone. It requires the support and love of others, and a sense of belonging to a community.

"Modern neuroscience is showing us that we're really wired to be extremely social creatures," Loizzo says. "We're happier and healthier when we do that in a committed way ... We need to learn to connect with others with mindful openness and positivity, and to deal with the daily slings and arrows and work through those and maintain a sense of connection that's positive. This is something we practice in spiritual communities."

Strong social support networks have also been linked to a number of health benefits, including lower stress levels and increased longevity.

Embrace death -- don't fear it.

In Western cultures, our attitude toward death is largely characterized by fear and denial -- and this can, consciously or unconsciously, cause a great deal of suffering throughout our lives. But a central aspect of the Tibetan Buddhist philosophy is the belief that death should be embraced, and the concept that dying can be the "crowing achievement" of a life well lived. Although this attitude stems in part from a strong belief in reincarnation, you don't have to believe in an afterlife in order to better accept the impermanence of life in the here and now. The Tibetans believe that meditation can help us to come to terms with the nature of life and death.

When Loizzo is working with patients who are suffering from chronic or terminal illnesses, in addition to practicing meditation and loving-kindness, he goes through a traditionally Tibetan practice of asking some of life's big questions: What has been meaningful to you in your life? How do you face the impermanence of your life and the inevitability of death?

"Being able to embrace the idea of death and being present ... some of the women say it gives them a new lease on life," says Loizzo. "The ancient traditions made a science of trying to understand the death process and make meaning out of it ... This kind of approach of facing reality, even the parts that scare us, has tremendous potential for healing."

Asking these questions can help bolster an acceptance of things that can't be changed or controlled, which Buddhist teachings have long touted as a key to reducing suffering. Now, this ancient doctrine has science on its side: A recent study from Australian researchers showed that during the difficult changes of later life -- moving into residential care and losing independence -- an acceptance of what can't be changed may be a significant predictor of life satisfaction.

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Bhutan counts the cost of trying to buy happiness

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THIMPHU, Bhutan -- They say you can't buy happiness - and it's something Bhutan is finding out the hard way.

The tiny, mostly-Buddhist Himalayan kingdom won a world voice for adopting a happiness index to measure its economy. But its prime minister says it promptly forgot its own lesson, and let a sudden rush of prosperity go to its head.

"Wealth creates increased desire," Prime Minister Jigmi Thinley told Reuters in an interview in the capital Thimphu, surrounded by tree covered mountains dotted with prayer flags.

"There are families with four or five cars. There are luxury vehicles being imported that can hardly drive on our roads and are made for far better roads than we have here."

A country that was closed to foreigners until 1974 and only recently opened up to the forces of globalisation lacked the tools to cope with new-found economic growth and the wealth it brought.

Debt-fuelled consumerism that far outpaced economic output has now led, inevitably, to a rude awakening.

The government has cut expenditure and is considering raising taxes on imported vehicles. The central bank, the Royal Monetary Authority of Bhutan, has rationed the main trading currency, the Indian rupee, squeezing private businesses.

Youth unemployment is over 9 percent and people are drifting away from the countryside, and traditional values, to the towns.

Worst of all, Bhutan's most recent Gross National Happiness GNH.L index, in 2010, found only 41 percent qualified as "happy".

BECOMING MORE MATERIALIST

"We have been moving away from GNH values and, like many countries, becoming more materialist," said Thinley.

"When such tendencies come at a cost to the economy, like we are suffering now, the government has to take difficult measures," he said. "We have to accept that the rupee is not our currency."

Thinley's Druk Phuensum Tshogpa government won power in Bhutan's first democratic election in 2008 and heads to the polls again next year.

He said the crisis highlighted the need to focus once more on the happiness index, which uses nine criteria: psychological well-being, ecology, health, education, culture, living standards, use of time, community vitality and good governance.

"Our economic problems are the result of being opened to the world and being part of the globalisation process."

Despite its boom, Bhutan remains one of the world's least developed and poorest nations, where 70 percent of 700,000 people live on subsistence farming. But economic growth led to a surge in imports of industrial and consumer goods from neighbouring India.

Almost one in eight of the 65,000 vehicles on its roads were imported last year.

Thinley said the cost of importing fuel to keep these cars on the roads wiped out the earnings that Bhutan made from its major industry, selling hydro-electric power to India.

"The revenue we earn from exporting clean energy is the same as the cost for the dirty fuel that we import from India," he said, sipping Bhutan's traditional butter-and-salt tea in a timber-clad room dominated by portraits of Bhutan's five kings.

HAPPINESS OR DEVELOPMENT?

But it seems to be getting harder to convince people to put a holistic sense of happiness ahead of raw economic development.

In parliament on Thursday the government forecast economic growth of 7-8 percent next year and said it hoped to reach its target of cutting poverty to 15 percent from 23 percent. The electricity grid covers 77 percent of the country.

"It's sad but true that the roads we are building to take services to villages are the roads by which villagers leave and some set up shanty towns around the cities," said Thinley, dressed in Bhutan's traditional knee-length, belted robe.

He said the government must prioritise policies that promoted the appreciation of rural life and stop the drift into urban areas, which was decimating villages and making the country more dependent on imported produce.

"In many ways, life in the rural setting is better and the possibility to find happiness is far greater than living in a city where you don't even know your next-door-neighbour and violence is rising," he said.

"We need to create a conscious desire in our people to continue to live in rural areas or move back from urban areas. Rather than live in a stuffy apartment, go back to the farm!"

It may be a hard message to sell to the young people heading for the towns, abandoning traditional dress for jeans, and looking for civil service jobs rather than manual work.

"People across Bhutan need to realise that we need to be more independent," he said, "(relying) on our own farming and resources."

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"Peace to our Mind. Happiness to our World"

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Slogan for Buddha's Birthday 2012

Seoul, South Korea -- The celebration committee of the Jogye Order of Korea Buddhism announced this year’s slogan to be Peace to our Mind. Happiness to our World as they opened the Buddha’s Birthday celebration poster and art installation by Lim Ok Sang.

The Jogye Order had a contest in February and chose the slogan created by Ahn Ho Suk, “Peace to Our Mind. Happiness to our World” and the artist and installation artist Lim Ok Sang created two posters based on the slogan.

In the book “The Life of an Artist: For the artist Im Ok Sang” by poet Kim Jong Hwan, states, “...Although Im Ok Sang is known to be an artist of great societal knowledge, he has the ability to pinpoint the darkness and light of current times..”

The Yeondeunghoe Lantern Festival will be from May 18th to the 20th, 2012.

Below is the full schedule:

May 18 ~ 28 (Fri ~ Mon) Exhibition of Traditional Lanterns at Bongeun-sa Temple and Jogye sa temple.
May 19 (Sat) 7:00 ~ 9:30 pm Lotus Lantern Parade at Jongno Street (Dongdaemun ~ Jogye-sa Temple)
May 19 (Sat) 9:30 ~11:00 pm Hoehyang Hanmadang (Post-Parade Celebration) at Jonggak Intersection
May 20 (Sun) Noon ~ 6:00pm Traditional Cultural Performance at front of Jogye-sa Temple

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Bhutan and the pursuit of happiness

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Bhutan, sandwiched between India and China, is proof that happiness does not necessarily come with high income.

Timphu, Bhutan -- BHUTAN is still buzzing in elation over a royal wedding. Its hugely popular, Oxford-educated King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, 31, has just presented them with his new queen, the beautiful commoner Jetsun Pema, 21.

The Oct 13 ceremony was colourful and steeped in tradition and Buddhist religion at a monastery in the ancient capital of Punakha.

Noticeably, there were no foreign princes, no visiting heads of state at the ceremony. Just the royal family, thousands of nearby villagers and the rest of the country's 700,000 people watching the live telecast of the ceremonies on their television sets.

For the Bhutanese, the wedding was very personal. They love their young king and the kings before him and totally believe their kings love them back. Their faces flush with pride and joy when they talk of them and they directly attribute their happiness to the "humble, kind and wise" kings who have always placed their people's welfare and well-being at the top of their agenda.

The Bhutanese have much to be proud about.

Their Druk Yul (Land of the Thunder Dragon) has mountains that are still thick with trees. Their glacier-fed rivers are teeming with fish. The air is clean and, in many places, naturally pine-scented. Breathtaking mountain scenery is common.

They still grow their food in traditional ways. While we call it organic and pay a premium, it's everyday fare for the mostly vegetarian Bhutanese. The nation is an environmentalist dream.

Visitors are unlikely to see beggars or homeless people. The Bhutanese sense of family takes care of that.

Crime is rare even though many people live in poverty and have to trek hours on foot to get from one place to another.

Sexual norms are considered fairly liberal but Bhutanese are raised to observe decorum in dress and behaviour in public.

A couple come together as man and wife once they get their parents' blessings. No fuss. A man can have more than one wife. And in this fair-minded land, a woman can have more than one husband, even though this is less common.

And the surprises continue. Children streaming out of schools in traditional dress give visitors friendly grins and are quite happy to chat - in English. Yes, English is the medium of instruction.

For tourists, shopping and sightseeing is easy. There's no need to struggle in the local Dzongkha as guides and shopkeepers speak English, albeit with a heavy Indian accent as many teachers are from India.

Education and health care is free.

The Bhutanese know they have something special and they plan to keep it.

Clearly, it's a country with a unique view of life and living. Pure economic growth is not the end but just one of the means to achieve a more important objective - happiness.

This philosophy, clearly enunciated by former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, an absolute monarch who voluntarily abdicated after drawing up a roadmap to democracy, underpins Bhutan's push forward into modernisation.

Bhutan's government has taken this beyond a philosophy and beyond the usual conventional markers for GDP.

The Centre for Bhutan Studies, the government's think tank, did an exhaustive sample survey and determined that a happy society involves the four pillars of economy, culture, environment and good governance measured by 72 indicators clustered under nine domains.

A Gross National Happiness Commission (GNHC) has been formed and this commission reports directly to the prime minister and bears a heavy and two-fold responsibility.

It conducts surveys once every two years based on the indicators, crunches the results to establish where the nation's well-being is at that point and then screens all policy initiatives to ensure they enhance GNH. The first survey was conducted in 2008 and the next one in 2010.

"Every policy in the government, irrespective of where it originates, goes through the GNHC," said Karma Tshiteem, the commission's secretary in an interview while he was on a visit to Malaysia.

He said the nine domains included four - health, education, living standards, and to some extent, environment - found in conventional policy-making frameworks.

But the survey found five more domains that people care deeply about - psychological well-being, time use, community vitality, culture and good governance - often overlooked by governments but included in the unique Bhutanese approach to development.

Each of these was then broken down into indicators that total 72. Psychological well-being, for instance, includes general psychological distress indicators, emotional balance indicators, and spirituality indicators.

The community vitality, for instance, consists of family vitality, safety, reciprocity, trust, social support, socialisation and kinship density.

The first survey offered up interesting revelations, said Tshiteem.

Among others, the survey in this deeply Buddhist land discovered that 90% of Bhutanese don't meditate at all. Meditation is an indicator under psychological well-being.

Tshiteem said: "So what did we do with that knowledge? We introduced a whole set of activities which we call education for GNH in schools. One of these activities is meditation.

"It's not that our children have to sit in the lotus posture like some accomplished practitioner. The idea is to get them to experience stillness every day in their lives because that stillness is very powerful to stop all the distractions that life is made up of.

"It's been proven that this activity builds calmness.

"Like many habits that children carry into their adult lives, we hope that it will become part of their lifestyle. We feel that, irrespective of religious background, meditation has proven to be a very healthy activity for psychological or mental well-being - particularly with dealing in problems related to stress that people face in this modern work environment.

"In this case, it was just a policy response that we needed and we have introduced this throughout all schools."

However, some matters needed responses that required resource allocation, creative ideas and lengthy discussions with relevant sectors, he said.

"From the survey we saw that the indicator of trust among neighbours is poor in urban areas. We have to get creative and come up with ideas on what we need to do to build trust.

"So we look at what we used to do in our villages, which was what Bhutan really was until we started modernisation.

"In a village setting, the soul of the village is the temple. It is not only a place for worship, but the most important social space where people meet.

"So we could apply similar strategies in the urban areas. But this will require money - one of our responsibilities is identifying priorities and allocating resources - so we allocate resources to good ideas that we think about and leads to this. And of course, a lot of that will be learning whether we achieved what we want," he said.

Sometimes, the challenge is not just a direct response, strategy or resource allocation.

It's about "creating incentives for the types of choices we think are desirable," said Tshiteem who then used time use as an example.

"We have 24 hours in a day. We want to keep as a policy the use of these 24 hours equal among the three aggregates - work, leisure and rest.

"And we believe that for a truly sustainable and happy life, you cannot compromise these three for an extended time. You can go without sleep for one night, maybe, but after the second night I think it will have a tremendous impact on your well-being if you continue.

"Similarly, if you work too hard, however meaningful your work is, it will have a detrimental impact. GNH is about balance - leading a very balanced life.

"The policies involved in these new domains require time and not money. And you know, time is the only thing even money can't buy.

"If you look at the five new domains, you can see that you have to take the work-life balance very seriously.

"If you do not have enough time, then you cannot work on these areas because these areas, like the relationship between friends, will only flourish if you invest the time. There is no substitute for that," he said.

"We have created a GNH policy screening tool. It's almost like wearing spectacles. We put on this glass and look at the policy in question and we make sure all these other domains that are normally not considered in policy are given due weight.

"So, for instance, if the policy we're debating is joining WTO, we'll say 'what is the likely impact of joining WTO on stress levels in society? Is it likely to increase it, decrease it, be neutral, or do we not know what its effects might be?

"The tool is very simple but what it does is it fosters debate. Because it fosters this debate, I believe that, hopefully, the choices we make will be better and more sustainable ones. But it's still very early," he said.

Tshiteem is "absolutely" sure that Bhutan is on the right path as determined by the former king's logic of why happiness should be the object of development policy.

"Just look at every country. They are pursuing a model of development where they want double-digit growth. Everybody wants to become rich. Can you imagine what will happen if every country achieves this? I think there will be no planet left.

"It is just not sustainable. There is something badly wrong with the model of development that we have been taught, which is basically about endless and high growth, but in a world with very definite and finite resources. And yet we all continue to take this path.

"What we hope with GNH is, because you look at things in its entirety, you make different choices. And our hope is that as small as we may be, maybe we can influence development and hopefully change the agenda and the way people look at development.

"As our fourth King always said, 'You cannot divorce development from what people want from life. They are one and the same thing'.

"But somehow, we are pretending that what people want from life can be very different from development.

"Eventually, development must be about a happy life, a life where people evolve. I guess that would be a genuine measure of progress. The wealth of experiences, family, relationships and not money are the true measure of progress," he said.

However, Tshiteem was frank about the challenges ahead, pointing out that Bhutan remained dependent on development assistance from abroad.

For decades, India has been its primary donor in terms of money and the source of skilled workforce needed in many sectors, including construction, road building and hydroelectricity projects. The Indian rupee is used side-by-side with the local Ngultrum in Bhutan.

In return, Bhutan sells its hydro-electricity to India. Ironically, electricity revenue provided no less than 60% of the government's entire revenue in 2009, dramatically boosting its GDP, but only 66% of Bhutanese households and 39% of its villages are electrified.

Other donors are the Scandinavian countries, Japan and institutions such as the World Bank, United Nations and the Asian Development Bank.

Good repayment

According to the Royal Monetary Authority's annual report 2009, Bhutan's external debt was at US$779.9mil, 61% of GDP, mostly tied to hydropower projects, which have good repayment capacity.

"We still have high levels of poverty in Bhutan which is why, even as we talk about GNH, you can be sure our focus is very much on reducing poverty. Poverty reduction is the number one objective and our target is to reduce it from its current 23% to 15% or less in five years.

"And towards this end, we have a number of interventions such as building roads, irrigation, the usual conventional investment activities like drinking water, electricity, mobile activity," he said.

In addition, the young constitutional king, who retains the authority to grant land to people, had already gone "literally door-to-door" through many of the 20 provinces in the country giving out land to those who need it, Tshiteem said.

"Fortunately, land is something we have in plenty. So with all this, we have confidence that we will be able to address poverty reduction quickly," he said.

Each Bhutanese is entitled to own at least five acres but cannot own more than 25 acres.

Tiny Bhutan's GNH has already received much international interest and appears to have inspired the 34-member Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) happiness index, more tentatively called YourBetterLife Index, which was launched in May as the OECD celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.

The index covers 11 areas - housing, incomes, employment, social relationships, education, the environment, the administration of institutions, health, general satisfaction, security and the balance between work and family - and is the first concrete result of a report by former Nobel economics prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz.

The Paris-based OECD hopes to make the index applicable to other countries soon, beginning with emerging economies such as Brazil, according to OECD officials quoted by news reports.

In July, the United Nations General Assembly passed, without dissent, a Bhutanese-initiated resolution recognising the pursuit of happiness as a fundamental human goal and noting that this goal is not reflected in GDP.

Modernisation means change. But change is what the GNHC has to manage by continuing to tweak its GNH model to keep track of what the Bhutanese people care about and make sure the fledgling democratic government continues to deliver well-being to its people.

As Tshiteem puts it, "we are in the early stages of this very exciting journey".

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