Undomesticated Happiness

There was a scene in a novel I read one time. A young man from New York City is visiting his parents who have moved to Arizona because of the father’s emphysema. One moonlit night, he and his father have left the house and are walking in the desert. The young man tries to tell his father about what his life in New York is like, but the father doesn’t really understand. All he says is, “As long as you’re happy, it makes me happy.” Then at one point in the conversation, the young man blurts out, “What I want to know is why I’m so unhappy all the time!” The father has an emphysema attack and almost dies.

His shock came from the attitude that we’re here to make one another happy, and that he had failed. People get married to make each other happy. They have children to make the children happy. It’s a failure when the family is not happy. In some cultures, the parents exist to make their children happy; in others, the children exist to make their parents happy. But either way, that’s not the Buddha’s attitude. He said we’re not here to make one another happy. That’s not our primary goal. We have to take responsibility for our own happiness, in line with the principle of karma: You reap the results of your actions, other people reap the results of theirs. Now, our own long-term happiness does have to take into consideration the well-being of others. It can’t depend on harming them, because harming counts as bad karma. Still, it doesn’t necessarily mean pleasing them.

A parent who’s truly seeking to help a child has to teach the child to find happiness for him- or herself. That’s what the Buddha did in his instructions to Rahula.

The Canon records three times when the Buddha taught Rahula. The first time, Rahula was only seven years old. The Buddha told him, “Look at your actions as you’d look into a mirror.” If you look in a mirror and see something wrong in your face—there’s a blemish, there’s some dirt—you can clean it off. Because we can’t see our own face directly, we have to use a reflection. So you use the reflection to clean your face. In the same way, you look into your actions to see if they’re blemished in any way, if there’s anything you have to clean up in your mind.

The first thing you look at is your intention before you act, to make sure you’re not going to afflict anybody with the action you plan. You take responsibility for it. The question is, “This action that I plan to do, by body, speech, or mind: Is it going to cause affliction to myself, to others, or to both?” If you foresee any affliction, you don’t do it. If you don’t foresee any affliction, you can go ahead and do it. But then, as you’re doing it, you watch what results the action gives rise to. If you see that you are afflicting someone—you’re afflicting yourself, you’re afflicting others—you take responsibility for that. You stop. If you don’t see any affliction, you continue. Then, when the action is done, you’re not yet done. You look to see the long-term results of the action. If you see that you caused any affliction, then you talk it over with someone more advanced on the path, and then you resolve not to make that mistake again. If you don’t see any affliction, take joy in the fact that you’re advancing in your training, and take that as encouragement to continue to train even further.

This is the Buddha’s first gift to Rahula: showing him how he can use his own actions as means to learn to find happiness, how to take responsibility for making himself happy.

There’s a second set of instructions when Rahula is about to learn meditation. The first lesson is, notice the elements in the body—earth, water, wind, fire—and then make your mind like them. Make your mind like earth. People throw disgusting things on the earth, but it doesn’t recoil. Make your mind like wind. Wind blows trash around, but it’s not disgusted by the trash. Water is used to wash disgusting things, but the water isn’t repelled by them. Fire burns trash, but it’s not disgusted by the trash.

When you can do this, you’ve learned to make your mind resilient. When it’s resilient it can learn things. You don’t try to run away from your mistakes. If you run away from things that are unpleasant, you won’t understand them. Yet those are precisely the things we need to learn from After all, we’re here to learn about suffering. We’re here to face it directly, and you can do that only when you’ve learned how to make your mind resilient.

You need resilience also because you’re going to be learning about your own stupidity in causing yourself suffering. As the Buddha said, suffering lies in the things you cling to, the things you crave—in other words, the things you like. Think about that: The things you like cause you to suffer. That shows that you’re ignorant, which means you have to look into your ignorance. So you have to make your mind resilient, strong, solid. That’s what we have to do when we meditate.

We start with the perception of earth as a beginning foundation for endurance and equanimity, but we need to give the mind a more solid foundation than just a perception by getting it deeper into concentration. You need an equanimity based not just on holding on and making yourself determined and resistant. You’ve got to possess some well-being inside that’s independent of things outside and also independent of the parts of the mind you can’t trust. You need a good place to stand. That’s what the levels of jhāna are for.

So again, the Buddha is giving Rahula lessons in how to make himself happy, how to be strong so that he can stand on his own two feet.

And finally, there’s the passage where he takes Rahula into the forest and gets him to sit down and examine his mind, to ask questions about it. In this case, he has him examine the senses: the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind—and questions them. The eye and sights: Are they constant or are they inconstant? They’re inconstant. Is something that’s inconstant easeful or stressful? Stressful. And if something is inconstant and stressful, is it worthwhile claiming that it’s you or yours? No. He questions Rahula about the five senses, and then applies the same questionnaire to the mind. This is where it really hits close to home. We tend to assume that our thoughts and our awareness are ours more than anything else. They’re what we really are. So we need to get deeper in the mind. Take the approach that we use to the senses outside, to let them go, and then apply it to the mind. Ask the same questions and look at it from the same point of view.

So here the Buddha is getting Rahula to ask questions of a different sort. In the first set of instructions, he’s asking questions that make him take responsibility for his actions. The questions in the third set are aimed at getting him to let go of his actions to find something better.

So these are the ways he shows Rahula to learn how to find happiness for himself, how to take responsibility for his happiness. In the first set of questions the Buddha starts out with things to stay away from. The advice to Rahula is to stay away from lying. If you tell a deliberate lie with no sense of shame, you’re empty of the quality of a contemplative. So being contemplative, whether you’re a monk or a layperson, means learning to be truthful. It’s only when you’re truthful and observant that you can really teach yourself what’s true, what’s good, what’s conducive to your own happiness. It’s only then that you can really be responsible. You’re honest, you’re observant, you’re willing to ask the right questions. And then you look for yourself, and because you’ve learned to be honest and observant, you can begin to trust what you see.

That’s what the teachings are all about.

This is the Buddha’s kindness to us: teaching us how to be responsible for ourselves. We take refuge in him, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, but not in the sense that they’re going to do the work for us.

In society, we expect people to be responsible for one another’s happiness. But as the Buddha pointed out, we can’t do that, because your happiness is going to depend on your own skills. Other people’s happiness is going to depend on their own skills. You can’t make somebody else skillful.

Think of Ajaan Lee’s example. You’re going to learn how to weave a basket. There are people who can teach you how to weave, but they can’t teach you to be a good weaver. They can point out things that they’ve learned, but then you have to be observant. You have to commit yourself. You have to be willing to make mistakes and learn how to learn from your mistakes. This is a very different approach to education than what we have in general, where we’re rewarded for following what we’re told to do. Here the Buddha is saying, “Be willing to make mistakes, but learn how to learn from them.” He’s preparing you to master a body of skills, and in particular the skill of learning how to master a skill—how to make you responsible for yourself. That’s a huge challenge.

This approach is different from the one developed in the Mahayana. The Mahayana is more domesticated. They have bodhisattvas who put off entering nirvana to save everyone else. Well, to save everyone else from what? How do you save other people from themselves? How do you save them from their lack of skill? You can’t pick them up and carry them away. They have to learn how to be responsible for learning to be skillful. It’s up to them.

So our responsibility for one another goes only this far. In our search for happiness we want to make sure we don’t cause affliction to others and we don’t try to cause harm to anybody. Remember what the Buddha said about how you cause other people harm: It’s when you get them to break the precepts, get them to give rise to greed, aversion, and delusion in their minds. You avoid that. You help yourself by observing the precepts and getting rid of greed, aversion, and delusion in your mind. That’s how far our responsibilities go. When we try to extend them beyond that, it all gets very vague and blurry. It sounds very ideal, but it’s really hard to implement.

It’s like that common misinterpretation in the English translation of the Karaniya Metta Sutta about the mother looking after her child. Some people translate it to mean that just as she would cherish and love her only child, you should cherish and love all other beings. But that’s impossible. There are a lot of beings out there who are very unlovable. What the sutta is actually saying is that just as a mother would protect her only child, you protect your goodwill. In other words, you don’t bear ill will to anybody. You maintain your goodwill no matter what they do. That’s possible. You can do that. It may not be easy, but it can be done. The Buddha gives the example of bandits who have pinned you down. They’re sawing you up into little pieces with a two handled saw. You can’t do anything to stop them. All you can do is to protect yourself by protecting your goodwill. You extend goodwill for them, goodwill for all beings in the cosmos. In that way, you protect your mind as you leave the body so that you don’t fall into a bad destination.

This doesn’t mean that if someone is harming you, you don’t stop them if you can. Sometimes we have the belief that if you want things to be different from what they are, that’s going to cause you suffering, so you just accept whatever comes up. The Buddha doesn’t have you accept everything that comes up. If someone is harming you, and you can stop them without breaking the precepts, you go ahead and stop them.

This does mean, though, that if you want to figure out the best way to do it, you’ve got to get your anger under control. You breathe through the way you’ve been breathing, calm it down. You talk to yourself in new ways that don’t aggravate the anger. You try to hold skillful images in mind about the way you’re relating to the other person. Instead of seeing the other person as a monster, remind yourself that you need to see the goodness in that other person. And if they have any, it’s a motivation to not overreact, or react in stupid or irresponsible ways. When you see the situation is bad, if you can change it, you do. You don’t just accept things as they are. You accept that there are potentials for change. And you accept the fact that you’re going to see them clearly only when you get your own mind under control. Remember the image of making your mind like earth. Try to make your mind strong—every second, so that you can really see what needs to be done. When you can make a change for the good, go ahead and do it.

Look at the Buddha himself. If he had just accepted where he was, he would have stayed in the palace. But he wanted to make a change, first in himself, and then in the world at large. He wanted this to be a world in which the Dhamma was available, where people could learn how to find happiness for themselves and pass on that knowledge to others. It took a lot of work. But it did change the world. So take him as an example. When we say that our responsibility is for our own happiness, we’re not saying that we can’t change things outside to help others. It’s just that we have to be responsible for our actions, for the sake of our own happiness, just as they have to be responsible for theirs.

Just be careful to see what kind of changes really give rise to true happiness.

So be responsible. Be honest and observant, as in the Buddha’s first lessons to Rahula. Be resilient. Those lessons are important. Everything else the Buddha taught is based on them. So take those lessons to heart.