Buddhist understandings of happiness: pleasant feelings or fearless efforts
Ringu Tulku Rinpoche
Tibetan Buddhist Master of the Kagyu order*.
Keynote speech on the 27th of November, 2007, at Chulalongkorn University,
Bangkok Thailand.
I am very honored to be able to take part in this conference. I was wondering that
when a dignitary usually visits a school they ask the students ‘what would you like to
become?’. The students would say ‘I want to become a doctor’, ‘I want to become an
engineer' and so on and so forth. But it is not asked why you want to become that.
Even if you ask there the conclusion is usually ‘yes that is very good’. There is not
culture that makes you think too much beyond that of why I want to do this or why I
want to become like that. Even among general adults if you ask ‘what you want to
do?’ the question does not go much beyond that. I think this is something which has
been thought about and discussed a lot in the Buddhist texts and traditions. We always
talk about wishing lasting peace and happiness for all sentient beings. But this is not
something not only from the Buddhist philosophical view.
It is about the question of what it is that you really want. Basically if you look deeply
into our hearths maybe there is nobody among us who does not want to be free from
pain, problems and difficulties and sufferings for ourselves and our loved ones. I think
most or all of the people, whatever they are striving for and are so busy with, whether
we express this or not, the motive behind is to be free from any kind of problems and
sufferings for ourselves and our loved ones. Not just that, we want to have certain
kind of joy, satisfaction, wellbeing or you may call it happiness to combine them all
together. We want something that is very good for me or my people. I think it is
extremely important to extend this, to say that for myself and my loved ones because I
want to be free from suffering, and I want to be happy.
Happiness from the Buddhist point of view and maybe from every point of view is not
just sensual gratification. It is little bit more than that. Even if you have full sensual
gratification and have all the luxuries it is not necessarily so that you would be fully
satisfied and fully happy. So therefore happiness is a state of mind. It is not unrelated
to the world around us to what we have or what we don’t have. Of course everything
is very much interdependent and correlated. Of course development and economics
and everything else like education are part and parcel of this. But basically happiness
is the state of mind. Even if you have all the things but your mind is in the certain
unsettled kind of way it is not possible to be happy.
So therefore from the Buddhist point of view, happiness is sometimes called peace.
But when you talk about peace it is not the peace where everything stops and there is
nothing happening and it is kind of boring peace. The peace here is the absence of
disturbances. It is the absence of disturbing experiences and emotions. Therefore
when we talk about happiness it is of course also absence of sufferings, pain and
problems.
There is also one thing that is very important to discuss from the Buddhist point of
view. To have the absence of all problems is very difficult. It is like clearing away all
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the pebbles on the street, which is impossible, but if you put on shoes it will serve the
same purpose. From the Buddhist point of view the way we experience ourselves and
how we look at the world around us depends on how we react to things around us.
This reaction becomes very important.
So therefore different types of caring for the environment, for the society, for the
economy and for everything else is also very much related to this. The reason why
things do not happen as they should happen is because of the idea that if I get
everything that is supposed to be good for me than everything else does not matter
anymore. If I start to think like that and everybody else starts to think like this then it
is not only bad for others, for the society and the world it is also not good for me
either. This is because I am dependent on the society and my happiness and my
wellbeing is dependent on my society. So therefore if I think that I should be the only
thing that should be taken care of, if I think that my luxuries and what I have is the
most important thing then it does not actually serve my purpose as well.
So therefore from the Buddhist point of view compassion becomes very important in
this case. Compassion in this case means that what I want is not just for me. Not just
for people who are very near to me. All the people who are similar to me, they also
wish the same thing that I wish. In a way this is also reflected in our usual way of
behaving and seeing. For instance I think you all know that when a person says: ‘My
job is not very satisfying’ or ‘I don’t have job satisfaction’ then most of that time we
can see that what they really mean by saying that the job is not satisfactory, you will
find most of the time’ that what they mean is that what I am doing is not really
benefiting anybody. What I am doing is not really serving any purpose that would
benefit other beings. So there is this basic thing in us that if I don’t do something that
is not only good for me but also good for somebody else, for more people, then I can
feel that the job is not really good enough. We don’t feel that we are living a
meaningful life. This is a kind of basic compassion, or kindness which is also there.
We have all sorts of other things like anger but compassion is also kind of natural. It
is not just influenced by culture or philosophy but it is very much innate in human
beings.
Therefore, the wider understanding is that if we care for the wellbeing of others this is
also caring for myself. This kind of understanding becomes compassion. If we can see
like this, our happiness is not just self gratification but a very strong will. It a very
clear way of seeing that whatever actions that I do will bring benefit and wellbeing to
many people is something that I would very much like to do. If that happens I will be
satisfied, content even if it is not something gratifying or pleasurable to the senses, I
would feel very good. Therefore the understanding of the peace of mind is coming
from the understanding that whatever I am doing or wherever I am or whatever
situation I am in, if I react with certain kind of you can call it peace or attitude then ti
is about learning how to work with my own emotions. Sometimes how I feel depends
on my attitude or my way of seeing things around me. It is not always because the
way things are happening. It is because of the way I react to that.
So therefore from the Buddhist point of view one can be very happy even if the
person is not in the best of kind of material or environmental situation. One can be
very unhappy even if that person is in a very privileged social or otherwise situation.
Therefore it is very much how I work on how to experience myself. This is very
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important thing from the Buddhist point of view: how I experience myself?. This is
very important way of looking not only at the individual level but also at the level of
the society, the country and on the government level. If I feel that somebody is having
something less than me I feel that I should also help them and share with them and see
what I can do. It is about being interrelated. It is very important from the point of
view of interreligious understanding or different kind of ethnic varieties to see that we
are all similar in the sense that we all want happiness and be free from suffering. How
we want to get there and what kind of lives we live and what kind of believes we have
are all very different. These differences are not the problem if we understand that
everybody does not have to think my way. If we allow people to be as they are and
what they want to be, then we don’t have to fight and can live with people because we
love each other and care for each other and we wish good things for each other. This
can be possible if my way of seeing or my happiness is not just to grab or control or
take over others’ things.
My happiness is basically a way of understanding and experiencing. It is not about
looking at happiness from outside but also from within. It is state of mind or an
attitude. It is a way of understanding myself. From Buddhist point of view happiness
is about understanding myself together with understanding of other people.
Understanding of other people comes from understanding of myself. If I see myself
the way I am, then I can understand others very well. With that comes the compassion
that we need to share. Also I think the more we can see the interdependence, the
interrelatedness, the more we can understand what was a slogan long time a go: ‘for
the sake of the world I sacrifice my country, for the sake of my country I sacrifice my
village, for the sake of my village I sacrifice my family, for the sake of my family I
sacrifice myself, because without my family I am not there, without my village my
family is not there, without my country my village is not there, without the world my
country is not there. Therefore the more we can understand this interdependence the
more we become universal. From the Buddhist point of view we say a little prayer
which says: may all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.
Happiness is something that everybody wants, but what becomes very important to
know is what are the causes of happiness. It is important to see what are my actions
and reactions, what things that I do and don’t do are bringing results that are good or
not good for me and also good or not good for others. The more we understand this
the more we have what we usually call compassion. Compassion is something which
is not just about holding on to individual comforts. It is more open or more universal
and in a way more fearless. It is a wish to live meaningfully, which means life which
gives benefit to a more universal, wider circle of beings and people.
Thank you very much. I am extremely grateful that I can be promoting the concept of
National Gross Happiness and that you have this conference and the conferences that
happened before. I hope there will be many more conferences like that all over the
world. I hope that this little seed can come out as a harvest all over the world and that
the world will become a happy place to be.
* Ringu Tulku Rinpoche trained in all schools of Tibetan Buddhism under several
great masters he received his formal education at Nangmyal institute of Tibetology at
the Sanskrit University in Varaanasi, India. He served as a professor of Tibetology in
Sikkim for 17 years and founded the Bodhicharya, an international organization that
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coordinates worldwide activities to preserve and transmit Buddhist teachings to
promote intercultural dialogue and educational and social projects. He is the author of
several books and is currently visiting professor at Naropa Institute in the United
States.
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