Monday, 01/20/2025
Posting Essays
Chasing the happiness.
Update: 14/04/2015
Sakyamuni Buddha taught that our live comes along with the\r\nsufferings. There are eight sufferings such as suffering from birth, suffering\r\nfrom being grown and old, suffering from sickness, suffering from death,\r\nsuffering from staying apart in love, suffering from hatred, suffering from\r\nunsatisfactory wishes and suffering from five cumulation. Suffering is the\r\nreality of life because the nature of life is suffering. So, throughout life,\r\npeople always seek for happiness. Dalai Lama said, ‘the purpose of life is\r\nchasing the happiness’. He means to follow the words of the Buddha when the\r\nBuddha said ‘leaving suffering,’ he said ‘gaining happiness’. They all told us\r\nabout the reality of a human’s life.
Although seeking happiness is an instinct of a human, we\r\nmust clarify a matter of ‘how is the happiness we desire\r\nand seek?’
Actually, not all people from birth to death seek for\r\nhappiness; the normal happiness which is just the measures or the actions is\r\nused to satisfy the craving and the instinctive desires about eating, drinking,\r\nsleeping and resting. When the desires were satisfied, they feel happy. But the\r\nproblem is that the true happiness is far different from the satisfaction of\r\ndesire.
Chasing the material satisfaction and meeting the personal\r\ndesires are the common tendency of modern human and it maybe makes the material\r\ncivilization develop rapidly. However, along with the pursuit of material\r\nsatisfaction, suddenly, people doubt whether the happiness that they are\r\nfollowing is reliable and stable.
Desiring the material happiness and satisfying the temporary\r\ncraving are the matter of course and not to be blamed much. But if chasing them\r\nwith the endless, unreasonable, unstoppable and insufficient greed, the immense\r\nsuffering will be right after the complacency. From this point, we can see that\r\nalthough we spend our whole life to look for the happiness, without the right\r\nconception about it, sufferings are all we can get because all the happiness\r\nyou seek must pay the painful price. Moreover, the happiness is not real and\r\nstable, it is just a temporary expression, to get it straight, and it is just\r\nan illusion. Furthermore, when people find the thing that they consider\r\nthe happiness, they do not enjoy it but recall the past, the hard and\r\nstruggling way to find it. Human like a log on a circling and rugged river that\r\ndock the happybank and crash the painful bank again and again till forever.\r\nHappiness and suffering come turn after turn like an endless cycle. People just\r\nwant to comfort and delude themselves that they are chasing the happiness, as\r\nthe result, they submerge deeply in the suffering sea.
Mantrayana in Buddhism especially focuses on Bliss\r\nIdeological; the bliss is in the cultivated progress and the joy of the\r\nspiritual aspect. For example, practicing meditation create a happiness named\r\n‘Meditating Happiness’. Cultivating until the two Physical body and spirit\r\nbecome one, we can feel comfortable and felicitous without its chaining, that\r\nfeeling is called ‘Peaceful Body’. The cultivators of the Pure Land Sect focus\r\non the oath to be reborn to the Western Pure Land as the last purpose and\r\nconsider the Pure Land the last state of the cultivation. From this example, we\r\ncan realize that the cultivation create the true happiness as the result.\r\nThough, according to Buddhism, the purpose of cultivation is not only looking\r\nfor a private happiness but also helping other people to be happy and joyful\r\nlike us.
If we chose private happiness as the end, we will fall into\r\nextremeness and we would be lost in the way of people who follow hedonism; or\r\nmaybe we would walk on a wrong path and suffer more and more. The reason for\r\nDalai Lama said, ‘The aim of people desires happiness’ is that he is on\r\npeople’s opinions in order to focus on the desiring happiness – avoiding\r\nsuffering feeling of the modern. We absolutely must not misunderstand the\r\nmeaning of that sentence.
Therefore, chasing and desiring the happiness is just the\r\ncommon beginning and hope not the last purpose of life. If we just focus on the\r\nmaterial happiness, we will meet the painful ending. Moreover, according to the\r\nBuddhism view point, we should not “focus only on ourselves†and looking for\r\nour own happiness, we must consider the others’ happiness as our own happiness\r\nand fell happy when helping people find their happiness. Whenever people get\r\nrid of sorrows, we have the real happiness. That is the vow of the three\r\ngenerations of the Buddha and Bodhisattvas.
Most Ven Thich Thanh Nghiem.
Translated into English by Nguyen Khanh Hoa.