During the Buddha’s time, a group of monks happened upon one of their fellow monastics in the forest, the Venerable Bhaddiya (Ud 2.10). “Ah, what bliss, ah, what bliss…,” they heard him muttering to himself. The monks were worried that Bhaddiya felt disheartened with the spiritual life and was spending all of his time daydreaming about the opulent life he had before being ordained, so they told the Buddha their concerns. When the Buddha met with Bhaddiya, Bhaddiya responded with words to the effect of, “My brother monks completely misunderstood my exclamations. I wasn’t dreaming of the petty happiness of the royal life but, rather, savoring the supreme happiness that arises from the spiritual path!”
I appreciate how this story reveals not only our tendency to make assumptions about other people’s experiences, but, more importantly, shows us that not all forms of happiness are equal in depth. Happiness has always been a popular aspiration both inside and outside of Buddhist circles and I often wonder about the type of happiness we may be craving today. Is it the same happiness that the Buddha was encouraging in early Buddh
ism?
One big discovery that arose in my own spiritual practice was that I had been searching for the kind of happiness my society, family and culture had conditioned me to seek. It was the happiness of mere well-being. In other words, it was the classic attempt to maximize pleasant experiences and minimize unpleasant experiences. As much as I intellectually knew the folly of this, it took practice to recognize my conditioning and to see that such attempts, in fact, led to a meaningless and hollow life filled with a sense of separateness.
As I continued to practice, I began to discover that this spiritual path opens the door to a deeper sense of happiness and contentment, a happiness that I probably wouldn’t have defined as “happiness” at the beginning of this spiritual journey. This kind of happiness requires me to open my heart to not only my own suffering but to the suffering of others. I think this is why the Buddha broadened his description of happiness to include a heart also filled with the noble quality of compassion and willing to touch into the suffering of the world.
Yes, my mind still prefers pleasant experiences over unpleasant experiences but, like Bhaddiya, this path and practice have widened my heart to include a kind of bliss not confined to the narrow world of my preferences. It is now open to and part of this vast universe of the Dharma which includes everyone and everything, thus allowing me to savor the supreme happiness that arises from the spiritual path.
December 21, 2019 – Winter Solstice: Japanese Tea Ceremony
“The fool who knows he is a fool
The Buddha taught that every human birth is precious & worthy of gratitude. In one of his well-known analogies, he said that receiving a human birth is more rare than the chance that a blind turtle floating in the ocean would stick its head through a small hoop. He would often instruct a monk to take his ground cloth into the forest, sit at the base of a tree, and begin “gladdening the heart” by reflecting on the series of fortunate circumstances that had given the monk the motivation & ability to seek freedom through understanding the dharma.
Depending on your quality of mind,
stronger & stronger.
At the age of 16, I discovered the Buddha Dharma because of a paper I was required to write in high school on a religion other than Judeo-Christian. As I reflected on what I was reading about Buddhism, I felt like I had found ‘home‘. My heartfelt thought was, “This makes such great sense.”
been & is on the Hermitage staff, and for myself as guiding teacher.
no matter where I am, what I’m engaged in or who I’m with… in any situation, any place in the world.
The beauty of the dharma is worth reflecting on from time to time. It helps to remind us of the power of the practice and where it can take us in any moment. Another way to express this could be “gladdening the mind.”
in the world, because we’re constantly concerned with ourselves. We’re always interested in how much we can get, how well we can perform, how comfortable we can be. The Buddha mentioned in a discourse that “oneself is dearest to oneself.” So with all that, why is it so difficult to actually love oneself?
then one can easily accept these six roots in everybody. No difficulty at all, when one has seen them in oneself. They are the underlying roots of everyone’s behavior. Then we can look at ourselves a little more realistically, namely not blaming ourselves for the unwholesome roots, not patting ourselves on the back for the wholesome ones, but rather accepting their existence within us. We can also accept others more clear-sightedly & have a much easier time relating to them…
For one just starting the practice of meditation, there is often hope for a cure.
strengthen us in all dimensions of our being.
Every now & again we get irritated – just a little bit. It is nothing major, and it does not throw us out of balance. But there is this little contraction when a meditator comes into the meditation hall & is noisier than we think she or he should be. “Can’t you sit down more quietly? Don’t you see that I am deeply meditating?” Then we take a deep breath, realising how silly it is to get upset about this triviality & settle back into our practice. Concentration is getting better & deeper – and then somebody coughs. “How inconsiderate!” the mind comments. Then back to the experience of the breath. Now mindfulness is really picking up, the mind is sharp & clear – and somebody blows the nose. And this blows the mind, “Don’t you know that I was just about to have a really deep experience?!”
ing & insights to happen. With this, we become very selective & exclude many experiences because they do not fit into our idea.
phenomena over which we have no absolute control. The art of vipassana meditation is to deal with all experiences in the same way. One object is not better than another. Mindfulness is not discriminating. A so-called ‘disturbance‘ is mind-made: sound is just sound, pain is just pain, heat is just heat, cold is just cold, smell is just smell, silence is just silence …..