Tenzin Gyatso
The office is older than the man, and the man has held it since childhood. Tenzin Gyatso is the fourteenth Dalai Lama, head of Tibetan Buddhism and its highest spiritual authority. Until 1959 he was also the temporal ruler of Tibet, resident there; since then he has led the Tibetan government in exile from Dharamshala in northern India, and the exile has now lasted long enough to define the role as much as the tradition does.
As an author he is prolific and, unusually for a religious leader, mostly not writing about his own religion. The books gathered here argue for a secular ethics that requires no belief, put Buddhist psychology into conversation with neuroscience and physics, and package daily readings for people who will never go near a monastery. The consistent method is to start from a claim about how minds actually work, contentment, anger, attention, and only then reach for doctrine, which is why they sell to readers with no interest in Buddhism at all.
Several are collaborations, shaped by an interviewer or a co-author, so the voice on the page is plainer and more conversational than a treatise would be.
Movies (3)
TV (2)
Books (4)
Where to start with Tenzin Gyatso
The art of happiness is the front door and the reason most people know him as an author: a psychiatrist puts the questions, he answers, and the result reads like a long conversation about ordinary unhappiness rather than a book of teachings.
Ethics for the new millennium is the more serious argument and the one to read next if the first holds you, a case that compassion can be argued for on human grounds with no religious premise attached. The Universe in a Single Atom is the outlier, an attempt to square Buddhist contemplative claims with what physics and neuroscience can show, and it concedes more to the scientists than readers tend to expect.
365 Dalai Lama is a page-a-day collection, pleasant and slight, and the wrong place to start if you want the arguments rather than the calm.