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

Is there a place in the Davos World Economic Forum for a Buddhist monk who dedicates his time to humanitarian work? The forum organizers seemed to think so and kindly invited me to attend the conferences and share some ideas.

Spiritual practice can be enormously bene?cial. The fact is, it is possible to undergo genuine spiritual training by devoting some time every day to meditation. More people than you might think do so, while leading regular family lives and doing

Usually, we all experience thoughts of loving kindness, generosity, inner peace and freedom from conflicts. But these thoughts are fleeting and will soon be replaced by other thoughts, including afflictive ones such as anger and jealousy. To fully integrate altruism

Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his notebooks: ‟The time will come when people like me will think of the murder of an animal just as they think today of the murder of a man.” And George Bernard Shaw said, ‟Animals

Many western friends live nearby the monastery. They study Buddhism with teachers who live around and participate to some of the activities of the monastery. There are major teachings given by great masters every year or two, which may last