The Art of Happiness

A curious book, because it mingles some scientific approaches with Buddhism philosophy. It was actually my first contact with a book related to Buddhism. My main reason to pick up this book is that it brings some findings on the effects of meditation on our brains.

I think that the parts about meditation and inner peace were useful and enlightening. I was amazed at how the practice of meditation could result and significant changes in the brains of monks that meditate for long periods daily.

The main focus of the book is happiness, tho. And the author discusses many topics that usually can be related to our happiness: power, pleasure, wealth, etc. And the causes to our suffering: selfishness, ignorance, afflictive emotions, etc.

What I've learned from this book is that happiness is a skill, it must be learned and it resides in ourselves.

This was a very positive reading, and lead me to think about how violent and pernicious our society can be because of our state of mind. It is a book that encourages love, peace, and altruism.

Towards the end I felt it was becoming a little repetitive and the Buddhist content increased significantly.

It's hard to write a review about this one. While I liked the general idea that happiness is a skill that can be learned and would agree with it, the book itself doesn't seem to helpful with that.

Ricard has an interesting biography, but he seems pretty oblivious how this might have shaped him. In the introduction he gives a brief overview on his youth as the son of a renowned philosopher, doing his PhD in mol. genetics at the Pasteur Institute under a Nobel Laureate and how he left for Tibet afterwards, spending 8+ hours a day meditating. I'm glad that this worked for him, but somehow I doubt that this is something that is reproducible by many people.

Though Ricard states that he sees this book isn't 'Buddhist' but from a perspective of 'secular spirituality' it's pretty thick with Buddhism. Which wouldn't be too bad in itself, but it pretty often drifts away in some pretty useless metaphors (be water, my friend!) and the scientific perspectives presented are pretty undercited and I feel single studies are given pretty uncritically and it's probably not too surprisingly all support his views (well, I somehow would have expected a bit more critical thinking of someone who did a PhD).