Long-term Happiness

Close your eyes and watch your breath—or better yet, feel your breath as it comes in. Take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body most prominently. Focus your attention right there, and then ask yourself if long breathing feels good. If it does, you can keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change. You can change it to shorter, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. Try to get in touch with how the breathing feels and what feels best for you right now, because you’re trying to create a place for the mind to settle down, where you can stop and reflect on things quietly.

We spend so much time talking, talking, talking, taking in things from outside, churning things out from our own mouths. It’s a good time to take some time to get quiet and to think about our lives.

We’re born into this world. We come without any handbooks, any guidebooks, any instructions. If we’re lucky, we have parents who have right view. If not, we have parents who have wrong view. We pick up our views willy-nilly from our parents and from our surroundings.

But as the Buddha said, if you really want to be wise, you have to look for people who know. He says, find those who are contemplatives, who’ve seriously decided to devote themselves to genuine happiness, and ask them, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term harm and pain? What will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?”

They’ll tell you that, for the sake of long-term welfare and happiness, you want to develop three things: generosity, virtue, and meditation.

You ask them, “With generosity, where should I give a gift?”

The first thing they’ll tell you is give where you feel inspired, where you feel the gift would be well used, because the act of generosity is our first experience of freedom of will. There are so many times, as little children, we just go with our emotions. But when we stop and say, “I could use this, but somebody else could use it too,” and you feel that you’d rather give it to them, then you find that there’s a higher pleasure that comes from being generous. You’re not under the force of your greed all the time. That’s why the Buddha encouraged freedom of choice in where you give a gift.

But then the next question is, “Where, when I give a gift, will lead to the best results?” That, the Buddha said, is a different question. The answer to that one is, try to give to those who are free from passion, aversion, and delusion, or those who are practicing for that sake. That means you have to look carefully at where you’re giving a gift. Put some thought into it. After all, this is one of the ways of finding true happiness, so give it your full attention. Be careful about your motivation. Try to choose a gift that’s appropriate. Then learn how to talk to yourself afterwards to make yourself glad that you did it. In this way, generosity becomes a real source of happiness inside.

The same with virtue: The Buddha says you try to provide protection for yourself and protection for others. If you hold to the precepts—no killing, no stealing, no illicit sex, no lying, no taking intoxicants—that’s a source for your happiness. And you can make other people happy by getting them to observe the precepts as well, because that becomes their good karma. And that’s their source of happiness.

The happiness you gain from virtue means that you give universal safety to others and you’re going to have a portion of that universal safety yourself. In other words, if they don’t have to fear anything from you in terms of breaking the precepts, you have less and less to fear from other people in that area. So this is a happiness that spreads around.

Even more so with the happiness that comes from meditation: You gain a sense of well-being inside. You find you need less and less in terms of things outside. In particular, you need less of your greed, aversion, and delusion. These are like wild animals you tend to go releasing into the neighborhood. When you learn how to keep them under control, it’s like keeping them inside your house so that they don’t bother neighbors. You benefit; they benefit, too.

This way you find happiness that’s long-lasting. And it’s a happiness that harms no one. If your happiness harms other people, they’re not going to stand for it. They’re going to try to find some way to put an end to it. But if your happiness is the happiness that comes from generosity, you gain; other people gain as well.With virtue and the precepts, you gain; other people gain. And with meditation, it’s the same sort of thing. Everybody gains.

That kind of happiness doesn’t create enemies, doesn’t create divisions in society. It creates a sense that we’re all brothers and sisters, members of the same family—this human race who wants to find happiness and has the ability to learn, both through our own actions and learn from the wisdom of others.

So take advantage of the fact that we have the teachings of the Buddha to give us advice on how to find a happiness that’s harmless and lasting. You can take his teachings as a handbook that should have been handed out when you first got born or even before you were born. But it’s never too late to start making sure that your happiness is the type that’s good for everybody.