The Dalai Lama was stumped. He thought he knew about the mind, he said, but he'd never heard of the mental experience about which he'd been asked. Yet here was a roomful of people to whom it was familiar as hunger or thirst. What, he wanted to know, is this self-hatred of which you speak?

It's an often-told story among American Buddhists (one version, by Sharon Salzberg, who actually asked the question at a conference in Dharmsala in 1990, is here)