The Art of Happiness

y deliberately cultivating greater kindness andcompassion, a person will experience increasedhappiness.It is easy to see how such principles couldhave a profound impact on any society if peopleadopted them on a widespread scale. However,since it is unlikely that most people in the Westwill “convert” to Buddhism as their primaryspiritual path, if these principles are to be widelyadopted in Western society they need to bepresented in a secular context, which generallymeans investigating them from a scientificperspective. Thus, in the following pages you willfind experimental evidence showing that happypeople tend to be kinder and morecompassionate. At the time I was writing thebook, however, I could find no research showingthe reverse principle, that cultivating greater