Crystal Lim

“There are ways to give even beyond our time and our money. Jinpa explained that in Buddhist teachings there are three kinds of generosity: material giving, giving freedom from fear (which can involve protection, counseling, or solace), and spiritual giving, which can involve giving your wisdom, moral and ethical teachings, and helping people to be more self-sufficient and happier.”
― Dalai Lama XIV, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World

“I hope that books such as this one will awaken in us that sense of being human. And then we will realize just how obscene it is for us to spend the billions or trillions that we spend on what we call a budget of defense. When a very small fraction of those budgets would ensure that . . . I mean, children die daily, die because they do not have clean water. That should not be the case if we were aware of our interconnectedness. And there’s no way in which one nation is going to be able to prosper on its own. It can’t. That’s not how we were made. We were wired for this complementarity, this togetherness, this being family. And even if you think it is sentimental, it isn’t sentimental. It’s for real.”
― Dalai Lama XIV, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World

“Acceptance means not fighting reality. Gratitude means embracing reality. It means moving from counting your burdens to counting your blessings, as the Archbishop had recommended, both as an antidote to envy and a recipe for appreciating our own lives.”
― Dalai Lama XIV, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World

“Generosity is so important in all of the world’s religions because it no doubt expresses a fundamental aspect of our interdependence and our need for one another. Generosity was so important for our survival that the reward centers of our brain light up as strongly when we give as when we receive, sometimes even more so. As mentioned earlier, Richard Davidson and his colleagues have identified that generosity is one of the four fundamental brain circuits that map with long-term well-being. In the 2015 World Happiness Report, Davidson and Brianna Schuyler explained that one of the strongest predictors of well-being worldwide is the quality of our relationships. Generous, pro-social behavior seems to strengthen these relationships across cultures. Generosity is even associated with better health and longer life expectancy. Generosity seems to be so powerful that, according to researchers David McClelland and Carol Kirshnit, just thinking about”
― Dalai Lama XIV, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World