The Book of Joy

The trouble it addresses

In April 2015 Archbishop Desmond Tutu travelled to Dharamsala, in northern India, to spend a week with the Dalai Lama for the Dalai Lama’s eightieth birthday. Tutu was eighty-three and had lived with prostate cancer for many years. The two men had been friends for years, and they had agreed to use the visit to talk about a single subject: joy. The writer Douglas Abrams was with them throughout, recording the conversations, and he shaped them into The Book of Joy, published in 2016.

The setting matters. The Dalai Lama had lived in exile since 1959, when he fled Tibet after a failed uprising against Chinese rule. Tutu had spent decades opposing apartheid in South Africa and had chaired the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Neither could be accused of finding joy easy. The trouble the book addresses is the one both men had faced: how to remain joyful, and not bitter, when the world has given good reason for despair.

The book alternates between their dialogue, Abrams’s narration of the week and summaries of research in psychology and neuroscience.

The exercises

Meet the obstacles honestly. Before the pillars of joy, the book takes the obstacles seriously: fear, stress and anxiety; frustration and anger; sadness and grief; despair; loneliness; envy; suffering; illness and fear of death. Neither man claims to be free of them. Tutu describes his own impatience and anger. The Dalai Lama speaks of the sadness of exile. The first exercise is to admit the obstacles rather than pretend to be above them.

Take a wider perspective. When something upsets us, the Dalai Lama suggests stepping back and seeing it from many angles, including over a longer time and from other people’s position. Most events look less final from further away, and some reveal opportunities that were invisible up close. He describes his exile as having brought him into contact with the wider world in ways he would otherwise never have known.

Practise humility and humour. The two men laugh constantly through the week, often at themselves. Tutu argues that the ability to laugh at oneself is a sign of humility, and that both make it harder to take offence. Humour, used kindly, reduces the distance between people.

Accept what is. Acceptance does not mean resignation. It means seeing a situation clearly before acting on it. The Dalai Lama often cites a teaching of the eighth-century Indian Buddhist Shantideva: if a problem can be solved, there is no need to worry, and if it cannot be solved, worry does no good.

Forgive. Tutu speaks from the experience of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Forgiveness, he argues, is not forgetting or excusing, and it does not mean the absence of justice. It means releasing oneself from the cycle of resentment, which keeps the injured person bound to the person who hurt them. He describes forgiveness as a gift to oneself as much as to the other.

Give thanks. Gratitude, both men argue, turns attention from what is missing to what is present. Tutu describes it as a recognition that everything we have came to us from others.

Cultivate compassion and generosity. The last two pillars, and in many ways the culmination, turn outward. Both men argue that the deepest source of joy is concern for others. The Dalai Lama describes a meditation practice in which one imagines taking in others’ suffering and sending out one’s own happiness, as a way of loosening the hold of self-concern.

The picture of a life behind them

The book brings together two traditions, Tibetan Buddhism and Christianity, and finds much common ground. Both men believe that human beings are fundamentally interconnected, and that self-centredness is the root of much suffering. Joy, in this view, is not a feeling one pursues directly but a result of living well with others. It can coexist with sadness, and even deepen through it.

The research Abrams includes supports parts of this picture. Studies by Richard Davidson and others on meditation suggest that practices of compassion can change patterns of brain activity associated with emotion. Positive psychology has found that gratitude and generosity are associated with higher well-being. Some of the specific figures that circulated in popular psychology at the time, such as the claim that about forty per cent of happiness depends on intentional activity, have since been questioned by researchers, including Nicholas Brown and Julia Rohrer in a 2020 analysis. The book’s broader claims do not rest on such numbers.

Desmond Tutu died in December 2021. The book has become, among other things, a record of a friendship between two men from different faiths, who agreed that the purpose of life is to be joyful and to help others be so.

Carrying it into ordinary work

The pillars suit working life better than one might expect. Perspective is useful in a crisis: ask what this will look like in a year, and from the other person’s side. Humour, used carefully, defuses tension. Acceptance is the first step in any serious problem-solving. Forgiveness matters in teams, where old grievances can poison collaboration long after their cause is forgotten.

Gratitude has a practical form: thank people specifically, and often. And the book’s final lesson, that joy comes from turning toward others, suggests a test for anyone who leads: how much of your attention, in a given week, goes to helping others succeed?