Dalai Lama (14th) — "I like to play golf, but I am not very good at it. I usually lose my balls in th…"
I like to play golf, but I am not very good at it. I usually lose my balls in the bushes.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
A candid, lighthearted admission of enjoying something despite being genuinely bad at it. The speaker finds real pleasure in golf without needing to excel. Losing balls in the rough is a universal beginner's frustration. It's a quiet reminder that joy in an activity doesn't require mastery—participation and honest enjoyment matter far more than performance, score, or looking competent to others.
Relevance to Dalai Lama (14th)
The Dalai Lama is widely celebrated for warm, self-deprecating humor and refusal to project false dignity. He frequently laughs at himself publicly, modeling that humility and joy coexist naturally. This admission of incompetence at golf reflects his core teaching that attachment to outcomes causes suffering—he plays for simple pleasure, embodying Buddhist non-attachment even in leisure, while remaining deeply relatable to ordinary people worldwide.
The era
Golf expanded globally through the late 20th century, becoming a symbol of Western leisure culture. The 14th Dalai Lama, exiled from Tibet since 1959 and based in Dharamsala, India, has engaged broadly with Western society during his decades abroad. His era saw Buddhist philosophy enter mainstream Western life, making his casual humor about ordinary hobbies especially humanizing—bridging ancient spiritual authority with approachable, everyday modernity.
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