What The Dalai Lama And Archbishop Desmond Tutu Can Teach Us About Joy

Insights from their remarkable conversation about how to be joyful in troubled times

Photo by Yuyang Liu on Unsplash

The Dalai Lama and the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu spent a week together in 2015 to celebrate the Dalai Lama’s 80th birthday. They discussed their lives and how they can be so joyful when they’ve each endured very traumatic experiences. That remarkable conversation was captured on video for the movie Mission: JOY, which my husband and I recently watched.

I was so touched by their wise words, joyful laughter, and close friendship that I also read The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World (affiliate link). The Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu co-wrote that best-selling book, which is about the same historic meeting and discussion presented in the film.

I highlighted many passages in the book, but these three insights stood out for me:

1. The ultimate source of happiness

The Dalai Lama said that we all desire joy, but it is often fleeting. One reason for that is that we look for happiness in the wrong places. He explained the problem this way:

The ultimate source of happiness is within us. Not money, not power, not status. … Outward attainment will not bring real inner joyfulness. We must look inside. Sadly, many of the things that undermine our joy and happiness we create ourselves. Often it comes from the negative tendencies of the mind …

We create most of our suffering, so it should be logical that we also have the ability to create more joy. It simply depends on the attitudes, the perspectives, and the reactions we bring to situations and to our relationships with other people.

His belief that we create most of our suffering and can create more joy simply by changing our attitudes, perspectives, and reactions may seem naive or even cruel. How can people create more joy by changing their reactions when their country is invaded and they must flee for their lives? What about children forcibly taken from their loving parents? What about people who receive death threats or get assaulted because of their ethnic background, religious or political beliefs, or gender identity?

The Dalai Lama has experienced those things, so his assertion is not a pious platitude from someone who has never suffered. His website includes a chronology of events in his life. When he was four years old, he was officially declared the 14th Dalai Lama and taken away from his parents. The journey to his new home took three months and he began his monastic training at the age of five. He became Tibet’s political leader in 1950, when he was 15, after China invaded the country in 1949. He fled to India in 1959 and has lived in exile there ever since.

Yet he talked about how he has benefited from his forced exile. He has met with world leaders and inspired thousands of people who would not have sought or valued his advice had he remained in Tibet. He has encountered cultures, beliefs, and spiritual practices he would not have known about.

Archbishop Tutu pointed out that discovering more joy does not save us from hardship or grief. But he noted what it can do:

Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles us rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreak without being broken.

2. The difference between hope and optimism

I’ve read elsewhere that when we tie our joy to a specific outcome we set ourselves up to be unhappy. There are always variables we can’t predict or control that could make our desired outcome impossible.

So I was fascinated by Archbishop Tutu’s comments about how hope is not the same as optimism. Here’s how he explained the distinction he makes between the two:

Hope is quite different from optimism, which is more superficial and liable to become pessimism when the circumstances change. Hope is something much deeper.

He gave a powerful example to illustrate his point. As negotiations about the transition from apartheid to democracy were underway in South Africa, anti-apartheid leader Chris Hani was assassinated. His killer was a right-wing extremist hoping to provoke violence that would derail the negotiations.

F. W. de Klerk, South Africa’s white president at the time, asked Nelson Mandela to address the nation, and Mandela’s speech included these words:

Chris has spent his life fighting for a just society. Consistent with this, he has been playing a central role in the common effort to arrive at a negotiated settlement of the problems facing our country. …

He is a martyr to the cause of justice and peace. His death demands of us that we pursue that cause with even greater vigour and determination.

It also demands that, as Chris has been saying, we should refuse to be provoked into any acts of violence, even if this is motivated by a desire to avenge his death.

The Archbishop then said, “What made people want to go on going on—holding on by the skin of their teeth—was not optimism but hope—dogged, inextinguishable hope.” He added that he is not an optimist because optimism depends on feelings more than the actual reality.

He acknowledged that resignation and cynicism are “easier, more self-soothing postures that do not require the raw vulnerability and tragic risk of hope.”

Then he compared hope to love, and the risky decision to marry despite the lack of evidence that the relationship will last. I could relate to that, since my husband and I got engaged less than six weeks after we met. We celebrated our 32nd wedding anniversary on May 26, so I’m very glad we chose to take that risk!

3. The connection between generosity and joy

Would it surprise you to learn that researchers found that people are happier when they spend money on others than when they spend it on themselves? Or that volunteering reduces the risk of death by 24 percent? Those are two of the many health benefits of generosity researchers have discovered that were mentioned in The Book of Joy.

Research studies and my own experience also demonstrate that helping others can elevate the mood of someone who is depressed. When we help someone else, we also help ourselves.

Increased happiness as a result of generosity was discussed by Archbishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama at length. The Archbishop shared the story of a township in South Africa with many orphaned children. One mother opened her three-room home to about 100 abandoned kids. As word of her generosity spread, other people helped by building a dorm or providing food. The community was healthier and residents were happier as a result.

Archbishop Tutu also said that our innate nature is to be compassionate and generous, but modern life dehumanizes us. It teaches us to be ruthlessly competitive instead of cooperative and to deny the reality that we are all interconnected.

In response to a question about how to help the world heal without becoming overwhelmed by crises and losing our joy, the Dalai Lama emphasized the need to “create a new generation of citizens with a different kind of mind-set.” He said public education must include “some teaching of compassion and basic ethics, not on the basis of religious belief but on the basis of scientific findings and our common sense and our universal experience.”

Archbishop Tutu said no one can solve the world’s massive problems alone, but if we each do what we can we will inspire others to come forward and help. He added this wise advice:

It helps no one if you sacrifice your joy because others are suffering. We people who care must be … filled with joy, so that others recognize that caring, that helping and being generous are not a burden, they are a joy. Give the world your love, your service, your healing, but you can also give it your joy. This, too, is a great gift.

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Please share your thoughts about and experiences of joy in the comments. And please share this newsletter with anyone you know who might want to read Archbishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama’s wise words about joy!