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“Gautama Siddartha, you may recall, decided the world was a place of unmitigated suffering and unhappiness, to be escaped at all costs, after he first encountered old, sick and poverty-stricken people. Only recently did a sharp American psychologist, Robert Biswas-Diener, say, ‘But hang on—did he ever get down from his gilded chariot and ask those people if they were unhappy?’”
In India, “He even questioned sex workers in the back streets of Calcutta, surely the most wretched of the earth. ‘No,’ they said, ‘we’re mostly quite happy, thanks.’ How can this be? Well, compare it with the experience of paraplegia. Calcutta’s prostitutes are dirt poor, but then money doesn’t make you happy. Having intense friendships, close-knit families and neighbourhoods certainly does: and that’s just what they have. Bye-bye Buddhism.”
