Dalai Lama

Tenzin Gyatso (born 1935) is the fourteenth Dalai Lama, recognised as a child in Amdo, enthroned in Lhasa, and in exile in India since 1959, where he has led the Tibetan community from Dharamsala. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for a resistance conducted without violence. Across decades of books, teachings and interviews he has returned to one idea with unusual consistency: that compassion is not a luxury or a sentiment but the practical basis of a happy life, for the person practising it as much as for anyone receiving it. His widely quoted sayings mostly derive from that recorded body of talks and from The Art of Happiness (1998).