Buddhism Taught Me The Nature of Happiness

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”   -John Lennon

           In our modern society we get caught it the future, planning as much as possible, career paths, events, daily life, we even like to plan our vacations, our time we allocate to relaxing and yet we follow a rigorous plan.  I agree with Mr. Lennon in our sense, but he only opened the idea to me.  I began to ask what is happiness, it is not as measurable and concrete as physical objects, yet it can make you feel like you have scaled a mountain and its opposite suffering, is also non concrete, but it can hit you like a brick wall.  This is where Buddhism comes into my life and helps to teach me the nature of happiness and the path to it.

            In our journey into Buddhism philosophy we are first exposed to the Four Noble Truths.  All of which begin with the recognizing of suffering.  Now some might question at this point what Buddhism has to offer happiness if its four foundational ideas all relate to suffering and that in itself is a trick question.  The first Noble Truth is suffering.  You must first acknowledge you are suffering.  This suffering isn’t always obvious it’s not always a physical pain, although it can be, you can suffer from a variety of things including not being mindful of what you consume. The first step is you must acknowledge that you are indeed suffering.  The second truth is discovering the origin of suffering, now that we know it exists within us we must search for the cause of this suffering, which may not always be the first culprit that comes to mind.  The third path is then to then refrain from that which is causing the suffering.  Once this is achieved we can then work to avoid things to avoid suffering in the fourth truth through the Eightfold path.  But how does this all relate? We are not truly happy while we suffer and many do not even realize they suffer while they suffer.  Even more people seek to ignore suffering as a means to achieving happiness, if I ignore it I can still be happy, but this only leads to more suffering.  For example this would be like having your house catch on fire and you deciding to go get ice cream because it makes you happy and seeing your house of fire does not.  As almost any person would you would make some attempt to fix it whether it be with fire extinguisher or a call to the fire department.  There is no differences between this and the suffering within, we cannot ignore it me must acknowledge it to fix the true problem and then we are free to be truly happy.

            Now even if you live your life by the Eightfold Path you will still suffer time to time.  As the Buddha’s teachings reveal to us this is inevitable.  There will be suffering, even if we are living the right way.  His teaching reveals even more into the nature of happiness with his introduction of the two truths.  The first truth is the relative truth and the second is the absolute truth.  Both of these truths are that they are true.  Relative truth tends to be things more along the surface these are observable things such as the presence of happiness.  The absolute truth is the understanding of interconnectedness of everything, the union of opposites.  As the text explains “Many people think that in order to avoid suffering, they have to give up joy, and the call this ‘transcending joy and suffering.’ This is not correct. If you recognize and accept your pain without running away from it, you will discover that although pain exists, joy also exists.” (Pg. 121)  We learn from the two truths that not only is there no joy without suffering; there is joy within the suffering.

            The last section pertaining to happiness (that I will be discussing) is the first Dharma Seal.  The first seal is impermanence.  Understanding this concept is crucial to understanding how to achieve happiness.  One major cause of unhappiness in our world is that we seek permanence; we like to find some equilibrium we like and keep that constant, with no changing.  The only problem as the Buddha points out is that we live in a non permanent world, our world is constantly moving and changing along with everything in it, so seeking permanence in this causes suffering. 

            Buddhism truly has a lot to offer everyone, not just those seeking a new religion but even those who already have one.  Buddhists as Professor Salazar stated tend to be happy people, with laughter and smiling occurring throughout ceremonies and rituals.  It is this thought that inspired me apply the teaching of Buddha to happiness and why this was my chosen topic.  It teaches one not to fear suffering, as suffering happens as it must for there to be joy.  It is only once we learn to remedy our suffering can we truly enjoy true happiness.