Use Your Happiness Well

When you do something good, you want to share it with others. When you receive something good, usually you want to share it with others. Sharing merit is doing something good and then sharing that with others. That lets you know there will be good results coming from the good things you’ve done and you decide you don’t want to just keep them for yourself. You want to share them with other people. But they have to approve.

In other words, if someone has passed away and they’re in a position where they can know what you’re doing and they approve, that’s when they get merit. They get merit from their own actions. You’re simply asking them to approve of what you’re doing, and they see that as a good thing. Of course, the people around you can pick up some merit by approving as well.

Anumodana: the merit that comes from approving of the good things that other people have done. There’s so little of this in the world: one, people doing good things, and then, two, people showing their approval. So it’s a good thing to encourage. It’s a form of empathetic joy, which, of all the brahmavihāras, seems to be the hardest one.

We want people to be happy. We say, “May all beings be happy. May all those who are suffering be free from their suffering.” Then we see people who are happy, and we’re not inspired. They’re not using their happiness well. But even in cases like that, you say, “Whatever happiness you do have, may you not be deprived of it.” If you want to have other people deprived of their happiness, then the same principle gets applied to you. Other people may not approve of what you’re doing with your happiness, but do you want them to be jealous of you? Do you want them to resent you? Well, no. But you do want to make sure that you, yourself, use your happiness well.

As Ajaan Fuang used to say, you do something good in terms of being generous and you do something good in terms of being virtuous. You take the goodness of that, and you invest it again. You don’t just sit there and rake in the happiness. You say, “I’ve got to devote it to the fact that I’ve got some opportunities to practice now.” Opportunities to practice do depend on the goodness you’ve done in the past. So now you’ve got those opportunities. Make the most of them so that your happiness will be inspiring to others.

As the Buddha said, when you see someone who’s really suffering, remind yourself, you’ve been there in the past. That way, when you help them, your help is not condescending because you realize you’ve been in their position. And you’d appreciate someone showing some respect, if they gave you help—as you would show respect to the people you’re helping.

As for people who are in a better position than you, remind yourself that you’ve been there too. There’s no reason to be resentful. There’s no reason to be jealous. And if you see them abusing their power, abusing their beauty, abusing their wealth, remind yourself that you’ve probably done that too. What would you like in a case like that? You hope that this person comes to his senses or her senses. You hope that they realize that they’ve got the opportunity to do good, and here they are wasting it. So maybe they should do some more good in the world.

Then you look at your opportunities. You’ve got a lot more opportunities than a lot of people in the world. So try to make the most of what you’ve got. In other words, we do the causes for happiness not for the sake of going to heaven or just having a comfortable life, but for having the opportunity to practice, to train the mind further. When you think in those ways, then happiness is a good thing. Otherwise, if you make it an excuse for being careless, for being callous in your attitude towards other people because you’ve got something they don’t have, that’s going to be for your downfall.

This is one of the ironies of happiness and samsara. People get all these rewards from doing good, and then they turn those rewards into a reason for falling down again. You get proud. You get disdainful of others who are not as fortunate as you are. Remember, fortune comes from your good actions. But you can’t measure people by what you see about their good fortune right now.

There’s that saying that if you want to see people’s past actions, you look at their present condition; if you want to see their future condition, you look at their present actions. That’s not really true. What you see now is the result of some past actions, but not all of them. It’s not the case that karma is a single bank account, and what you’re seeing is the running balance. What you’re seeing are the seeds happen to be sprouting right now, giving rise to plants right now. As for the seeds that are not giving rise to plants at the moment, you don’t know what they are.

So you can’t measure people by where they are right now in their lives. Then there’s the question of “measuring people”: Do you want to measure them to see if they’re doing something better than you are? If they are, try to imitate them. If you see that they’re doing something bad that you’re also doing, tell yourself: “This is what it looks like from the outside. Maybe I’d better change my ways.”

That way, your attitude toward happiness—your happiness and the happiness of others—gets a lot more mature and becomes the basis for saying: “I want to get out of all this. I want to find a happiness that’s totally harmless, that doesn’t cause intoxication—a kind of happiness that’s really worth the effort that goes into creating it.”