A Greater Happiness

Close your eyes. Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body. Allow your attention to settle there. Then watch the breath for a while. Feel the breath for a while. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change. You can make it shorter, more shallow. Faster, slower. Heavier, lighter. Ask yourself, “What kind of breathing does the body need right now?”

We live with the breath every day, every day, but we don’t know it that well. Most of us haven’t explored what the breath can do for the body besides just keeping it alive. But if you adjust the breath so it feels just right coming in, just right going out, it can give rise to a strong sense of well-being. It’s a well-being that’s really solid and lasting. This is why we meditate.

One of the reasons why we meditate is we’re looking for a happiness that’s more lasting than the ordinary happinesses of the world. Everybody can find pleasure. It’s very easy. But the problem is that a lot of the pleasures people look for are very short-term. And when they turn from pleasure, they turn into pain. We want something that doesn’t turn back into pain—or at the very least provides enough long-term well-being that it’s going to be worth the effort that goes into it.

There’s a saying in the Dhammapada that if there’s an abundant happiness that comes when you let go of a lesser happiness, the wise person will forsake the lesser happiness for the sake of the more abundant happiness. It’s a basic principle of wisdom. We’d like to have every possible pleasure in the world, but we realize that we can’t. So we have to ask ourselves which ones are worth the effort—which ones will last and support us for a long period of time and not have bad consequences down the line.

A British translator of that passage in the Dhammapada added a footnote, saying that this could not possibly be the meaning of this passage because it’s just too simple. We don’t need a Buddha to tell us that you look for long-term happiness as opposed to short-term.

Well, everybody knows that as a principle, but the question is: Do you live it? You can find it all too easy when you’re tired, thirsty, frustrated with things to go for a quick fix. Learning how not to go for the quick fix that will turn into a long-term suffering: That’s the essence of wisdom—wisdom as a practical quality. Buddhist wisdom is not abstract. It’s more practical, strategic. How do we find happiness that lasts? And how do we resist the temptation to go for a quick fix that will turn into pain so that we can find something that lasts with us—is true to us—a happiness that’s not a traitor to us? That’s the sign of your wisdom.

We meditate because we realize that we want long-term happiness. Even though we’re sitting here with our eyes closed—we can’t look at pretty things—sitting in a meditation posture that after a while begins to get painful—still, we’re doing it because we’re training the mind. We’re training the mind because we realize the mind, when it’s trained, brings happiness, a happiness that lasts.

But it’s not the case that the meditation saves all its pleasure for the end. If you sit here breathing in a way that feels good, there’s pleasure right there. And it’s an innocent pleasure. It doesn’t create any harm for anybody at all.

So show some wisdom in your search for happiness. Look for something that’s long-term and then learn to train your mind so that it stays true to that intention—that you want something that’s long-term and you’re willing to give up the things that will get in the way.