A Full Life

Years back, a positive psychologist wrote a book on the types of happiness, in which he said there are four ways of finding happiness in life. There’s the pleasant life, where you have nice sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations. There’s the good life, where you master skills. He said that’s the happiness, he said, of gratification, when you can see that you’re mastering something you hadn’t mastered before. The third level was the meaningful life, where you feel that your life is serving a larger purpose. And the fourth was the full life, where you were able to enjoy all three.

He mentions Buddhism in the course of the book, putting it on the first level—just a life of pleasure. The only Buddhism he knew about was the mindfulness of savoring raisins and sipping tea, finding pleasure in simple pleasures of life. He tried to be respectful, but he kept saying that if this is all there is, it’s just a low level of pleasure, a low level of happiness. He was really misinformed, because the Buddha offers instructions on how to find all those levels of happiness, to the nth degree, better than you can find anywhere else.

There’s a type of pleasure he doesn’t talk much about, the pleasures that don’t harm the mind, like the pleasures of wilderness. It’s interesting to note that the Pali Canon contains some of the oldest wilderness poetry in the world. Some of it is attributed to Ven. Maha Kassapa, who was the strictest of the Buddha’s disciples. He talks about the pleasures, how the mind is refreshed when you go out into the wilds—waterfalls, birds, trees, even ladybugs.

It’s important that we do find refreshment in the path. But it has to be a pleasure, as the Buddha said, that doesn’t involve breaking the precepts and doesn’t have a bad impact on the mind. He says that if you indulge in a certain pleasure and you see that it’s giving rise to unskillful mental states, you’ve got to stop. You have to stay away from that kind of pleasure. But if you see that no unskillful states are coming up, that pleasure is perfectly fine. The pleasure of wilderness, the pleasure of social harmony—these are good things to cultivate. They give us energy on the path.

Gladdening the mind is an important part of the practice. And some of that isn’t just finding a good place to meditate where you feel at home, at ease, refreshed by your surroundings. Of course, you can’t make that a requirement because there are times when you can’t be in those refreshing places. That’s when you try to find pleasure in other ways, like the pleasure of mastering a skill.

Here, we get into the area where the Buddha calls the six kinds of delight that nourish us on the path and can actually take us all the way.

There’s delight in the Dhamma itself, having guidance that’s been tested again and again and again over the centuries. The Buddha gives clear advice as to what should and shouldn’t be done. As he said, this was his first duty as a teacher. We’re active beings—we’re making choices all the time. But we come into life without any handbook, so the Buddha provides precisely the handbook we need.

He doesn’t leave death as a mystery. He doesn’t leave the purpose of life as a mystery. He says you can make your purpose in life the end of suffering. The world itself, as a whole, has no purpose, which means that you’re free to choose your purpose. And you want to choose a wise one. We’ve chosen some pretty unwise ones in the past. Here’s some guidance on how to find happiness that’s totally harmless, totally unconditioned. We’re responsible in our search for happiness when we follow the Dhamma. So it’s good to have that Dhamma to back us up, to inform us.

Then there’s the delight in abandoning, delight in developing—this is what we’re doing as we practice. This comes under the good life in that psychologist’s schema, where we’re mastering a skill. We’re mastering the skill of meditation. There are things we’ve got to give up—such as our fascination with our wandering thoughts, because these wandering thoughts have taken us wandering astray for a long, long time. Actions don’t just stay in the mind. They come out and they affect the world outside.

Sometimes you hear some people say, “Karma is simply a matter of the mind affecting the mind,” but that’s not true. The mind affects the world around you. You’ve got to be careful about where your mind wanders. Let go of anything you notice that’s unskillful, and delight in developing concentration, delight in developing mindfulness instead. Develop the right attitude toward the right effort on the path. Take joy in doing these things. When you see that you’ve been able to get past where you might ordinarily not be able to stay with the breath, but that you were able to stick with it, take joy in that. Take joy in developing your skills.

The Buddha says also to delight in seclusion—the opportunity you have to focus direct attention on your mind with a minimum of distractions. That, too, is part of the skill of a good life.

Then there’s the meaningful life: The last two objects of delight, the Buddha said, are delighting in the unafflicted and delighting in non-objectification. These are two names for nibbana. Our lives have direction, they have a purpose, they have a goal. This is what the Dhamma is all about. As the Buddha said, the taste of all the Dhamma is release— just as the taste of all the water in the oceans is salty, the taste of all the Dhamma is release. They all come together at the goal.

We’re starting out from different places, but we’re all heading in the right direction—that direction is unafflicted. In other words, you experience no affliction there and you’re not causing affliction to anybody else. We live in this world of so much affliction, so much cruelty, so much ill will, so much strife. It’s good to know that we’re heading in a direction that’s not following the direction that a lot of other people seem to want to go. So delight in that fact. This gives meaning to your life.

As for non-objectification: “Objectification” is a translation for papañca. It’s a term in Pali that’s hard to translate, but in every case where the Buddha talks about it, it’s always a type of thinking that leads to conflict—conflict inside, conflict outside. So where we’re heading is a place that has no conflict, because there’s nothing that you have to feed on. Nibbana doesn’t require feeding, doesn’t require taking anything away from anyone else, so your mind is free from inner conflict, free from outer conflict. It’s a good goal to have, a meaningful goal to have.

It’s something we should really delight in—that we’re on this path. It’s a good path, in that it’s a good path to be on and it’s taking us to a good place.

So you look at the way the Buddha teaches how we practice, and you see that it covers all the requisites for a full life: We have the pleasures of wilderness, the pleasures of harmony. We have the gratification of mastering the skills of the mind—mindfulness, concentration, discernment. We have the happiness of having meaning in our lives.

You look at the universe—galaxies forming and dissolving, stars coming and then exploding, sending their matter spewing out into space. Then the matter coalesces again, it forms stars again, and it repeats the process over and over and over again. It’s going nowhere—but we are going someplace. And that someplace gives us genuine meaning.

So these are the requisites for a full life. The Buddha gives the best examples, the best recommendations, for how to make this life totally full. So take advantage of those instructions while you can.