One Breath at a Time distils 108 of the Dalai Lama’s teachings, an auspicious number in Buddhist tradition that marks the journey from delusion to awakening. Each is followed by a poetic reflection and a brief meditation by a close disciple, inviting the reader to move from understanding to experience, from thought to transformation.

The book unfolds like a quiet pilgrimage: Beginning with mindfulness, deepening into compassion and wisdom, and opening finally into a way of living guided by a moral compass. It may be opened anywhere for daily reflection or followed as a continuous path of practice.

This tender and radiant volume invites readers of every background to inhabit the Dalai Lama’s wisdom in the simplest of ways, to pause, to breathe, and to meet the world with steadiness and care, one breath at a time.

In this luminous collection, offered as a celebration of the Dalai Lama’s ninetieth birthday, his essential teachings are distilled, each a crafted and authentic doorway to transformation—gentle yet profound, clear yet mysterious, accessible yet pointing towards depths that require a lifetime to fathom.

This is not a book about Buddhism but about being human. Not about belief but about investigation. Not about escaping the world but about engaging it with wisdom and compassion, one breath at a time.

One Breath at a Time: 108 Timeless Teachings of Wisdom, His Holiness The Dalai Lama and Rajiv Mehrotra, Hay House India, Paperback, 304 pages, $24.99

The Dalai Lama embodies twenty-five centuries of living, evolving wisdom. He weaves faith with reason, science with contemplation, offering not just frozen doctrine but method, the patient training of the mind towards wisdom and compassion. Through laughter and humility, he reveals that courage can be gentle and that inner peace can seed world peace. His presence illuminates what being fully human means. Our era’s most authentic living moral compass, he celebrates diversity while walking his truth with rare authenticity.

Rajiv Mehrotra, Managing Trustee of the Foundation for Universal Responsibility of the Dalai Lama (established with the Nobel Prize), has been his student for forty-five years. Educated at St. Stephen’s, Delhi, Oxford, and Columbia Universities, he has authored and edited books published in fifty languages and editions, while his documentaries have garnered over 300 global awards. A Templeton Prize judge and popular talk-show host on public television, he was nominated a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum at Davos.