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.
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