Good day, everyone!
Yesterday morning at the end of meditation I read these lines, from the Dhammapada (one of the oldest of the Buddhist sutras):
“If one who enjoys a lesser happiness beholds a greater happiness,
Let him leave aside the lesser to gain the greater.”
There are a lot of pithy ways that we might sum up the Buddha’s teachings, and that’s one of them.
What is the lesser happiness? The lesser happiness, as I see it, is the happiness that comes from getting what we want, or what we believe that we want, in the circumstances of our lives. It’s the happiness that comes from having things go our way, from the enjoyment of pleasures of all kinds, and so on. And there is a real sort of happiness that comes from these things, isn’t there? We feel happy when it appears that the the stuff of our lives and the desires we have are in sync.
What is the greater happiness? This is the happiness that is not dependent upon anything. This is the happiness that occurs on a process level when we are present, awake, aware, and living in a state of love and self-love, regardless of our circumstances. Because this sort of happiness is not dependent upon anything, it is reliable and sure. Because it arises on a process level rather than on a content level, it is deeper than the lesser sort of happiness, and it has the capacity to offer true peace and fulfillment. The lesser happiness, unfortunately, does not.
Anyone who can see the difference between these two sorts of happiness, the Buddha is saying, and who is in their right mind, it’s going to choose the greater happiness over the lesser happiness. That just makes sense, doesn’t it? But how often are we in our right mind? How often do we have the freedom to choose between the two sorts of happiness? Not all that often, unfortunately, as we spend most of our time, most of us, trapped within a worldview that says our true happiness will be occasioned by outside things and occurrences.
Are the two sorts of happiness mutually exclusive? This is something the quote doesn’t address, but this seems an important point to me. The answer, I would say, is no. I don’t see any problem with feeling happy when it so happens that things go our way. I also don’t see a problem with enjoying the many pleasures that our lives afford. The trouble, as always, of course, occurs when we become attached. Is it a problem that we become attached to things going our way, to pleasures of all kinds, and so on, out of the belief that they will make us happy? Yes! Absolutely!!!!! That is a very big problem, indeed. But if we live our lives from the place of the greater happiness, in which fulfillment arises moment by moment out of the moment and out of our innate presence and consciousness, then we can enjoy our lives on a content level as well–and why wouldn’t we? We are given the capacity for pleasure and enjoyment. There’s little so natural as that. Let’s enjoy our lives! It’s just that when we substitute the lesser happiness for the greater happiness, and ignore the work we need to do in order to access that greater happiness, then we suffer, and then we doom ourselves to a great unhappiness, and that’s absolutely and profoundly no good.
Let us practice the greater happiness today. Want to? And enjoy whatever else our circumstances put before us.
In peace,
David