The Art of Happiness

ooks by the Dalai Lama held no appeal to amainstream audience. In addition, they claimed,the public simply didn’t seem to be interested inthe topic of human happiness.By 1998, after years of continual rejections,and with my financial resources finally depleted, itseemed I had few options left. Still, determinedto see that at least a few new readers couldbenefit from the Dalai Lama’s wisdom, I plannedto use the last of my retirement savings to selfpublisha small number of copies. Strangely,however, it was right at that point that the motherof a close friend happened to make an offhandremark to a stranger on a New York subway—astranger who turned out to be in the publishingindustry—which initiated a series of connectionsthat finally led to agreements with both a literaryagent and a good mainstream publisher. And so,