The Art of Happiness

A HAPPINESS REVOLUTIONThe concept of happiness as an achievable goal,something we can deliberately cultivate throughpractice and effort, is fundamental to theBuddhist view of happiness. In fact, the idea oftraining the mind has been the cornerstone ofBuddhist practice for millennia. Coincidentally,shortly after the publication of The Art ofHappiness, this same idea began to take root insociety from another direction—as a “new”scientific discovery—leading to a fundamentalshift in many people’s perception of happiness.When I first began work on The Art ofHappiness in the early 1990s, I discovered thatthere were relatively few scientific studies onhappiness and positive emotions. These were not