Happiness Page 18

  chapter 38

  Buddhism: The Path to Freedom

  The Buddha did not spend his life simply talking about suffering. He set out to make a very different point: suffering, he says, comes from within us. It is of our own making. It rides on everything we do, on every decision we make. What fetters us to pain and struggle, he says, is forged by our own hands, by our unwarranted and unsatisfied and unbounded desires.

  It only makes sense, then, that it can only be undone by us, as well.

  Happiness, in fact, is not a word the Buddha uses. He talks instead about enlightenment, about nirvana, about coming to see life as it is and learning to act accordingly. Suffering, he teaches, comes from things being out of plumb, out of joint, out of balance, out of focus in our lives.

  It is a short distance from that insight to the worrisome question of how a society that is based on the creation of false needs, in a whole generation of peoples, can ever really be a happy one. Worse, what must individuals do in such a culture to be both part of it — as we all are, of course — and, at the same time, not part of the grasping, groaning reality it creates for us all?

  Happiness to the Buddha does not lie in things or power or money. It is not accumulated; it is shaped out of the clay of the self. It is the means for shaping that clay that is at the center of his teaching: to eliminate suffering, he says, we must eliminate, control, and master our desires. He does not say that we must eliminate these things; he says we must eliminate our complete devotion to them.

  The Eightfold Path to the elimination of suffering is a simple path but not an easy one. It is a profound path but not a facile one. To walk this path to the end is the project of a lifetime.

  The path is a clear one, however. It is straightforward and direct, not mired in the density of philosophical language or obscured by allusions to the theology of the ages. Its very simplicity disarms us. It guides us ethically and strengthens us mentally in order to protect us from the pitfalls and allurements to delusions of which life abounds.

  But it is the delusions of life to which we cling.

  The Eightfold Path deals with the eight dimensions of life that stop us on the way to Enlightenment with all the glitter of false stones and faux riches to mark our way. These delusions offer the unwary who seek them out goods they do not have to offer and a life they cannot give.

  The Noble Eightfold Path calls us to:

  1. Right view

  2. Right intention

  3. Right speech

  4. Right action

  5. Right livelihood

  6. Right effort

  7. Right mindfulness

  8. Right concentration

  1. Right view requires us to see things as they are. As the wise of our own era put it, “If it’s too good to be true, it’s too good to be true.” We must come to realize that everything we see, everything we’re offered, are at best a kind of false god, promising a satisfaction we presume will be eternal only to discover that all of them are short-lived, at best. “This, too, is passing” is the mantra of the wise, of those who see things as they are and refuse to become captive to any of them.

  2. Right intention is the ethical response to having developed a right view. Once we see a thing for what it is, we treat it accordingly. Right intention includes the decision to resist desires, to meet all people, to go into all the situations in life with good will. Good will demands that we resist doing harm to any living thing.

  3. Right speech is the commitment never to use speech to do harm — to lie, to slander, to hurt, or to be superficial in the way we treat the serious topics of life.

  4. Right action requires that we put into practice what we say our principles are. It tells us to put our body into what we say our mind knows and our heart feels. It means that we commit ourselves to actions that make the world safe for others, as well as for ourselves. The Buddha says that we must harm no sentient being, that we take no life, that we harm nothing intentionally, that we take nothing that has not been given, that we harm no one by sexual misconduct.

  Right action is a call for compassion. It is a commitment to sexual justice. It is the resolve to walk an honest path through life, to injure no one, to lust after nothing, to deal justly with all.

  5. Right livelihood calls us to earn our livelihood in a righteous and peaceful way, to gain our wealth justly. The Buddha, in fact, mentions four specific activities that harm others and must be avoided: dealing in weapons, prostitution, animal slaughter, or intoxicants and poisons.

  6. Right effort requires the seeker to put mental and physical energy into maintaining the path through life. It is not a matter of hoping that we are able to do what the Buddha prescribes. It is a matter of putting our whole heart and soul into the doing of right — as too often we have given ourselves to doing wrong. It calls for lifelong commitment and personal discipline.

  7. Right mindfulness urges us to concentrate on the things that count in life, on relinquishing judgmentalism, on keeping our hearts straight and our minds clear so that we are not overwhelmed by confusion or negativity or meaningless distractions. We are to be single-minded, intent on the things that really matter in life.

  8. Right concentration requires the serious seeker to bring a wholesomeness of mind and openness of heart to the continuing attempt to walk the path with total consciousness of life as it is and life as it must be.

  * * *

  The Eightfold Path is a blueprint for right living, for soulfulness, for putting the world “right.” More than that, it is a path hewn out of a spiritual wisdom that teaches that no amount of things or power or status can save us from the suffering we bring to ourselves, as well as to others, when we leave the path. When we live steeped in empty allurements and give in to useless desires, we doom ourselves to pain. When we fail to do what is right and to say what is honest, when we refuse to do what is just, and instead earn our way through life by unjust and violent means, we bring evil into our own lives and pain into the lives of others as well. We bring pain where pain does not need to be. When we yield in our efforts and live in bitter judgment on others, when we give our hearts and minds to the useless, the superficial, and the glitter of life, we fail to become everything we are meant to be.

  Then, no real happiness is possible because we have failed to shape it for ourselves. Worse, we have polluted it for others, as well.

  To the Buddha, happiness has nothing to do with living in a Disneyland of adult delights. Happiness, he teaches, is a far more important dimension of life than that, both for the seeker and for the world.

  chapter 39

  Judaism: Chosen to Be Happy

  However much we recall of Jewish history, contemporary or biblical, with its long experience of persecution, slavery, rejection, and prejudice, it’s impossible to recall having heard that the entire community of Jews anywhere, at any time, had collapsed under the burden of their suffering. It is impossible to remember being told that Jews are just naturally bitter as a result of their tragic history. It is impossible to leave a group of Jews with a sense of having been with a people dour and deprived. On the contrary, Jewish history sings of happiness everywhere.

  In the midst of the Jewish scriptures’ description of the exodus from Egypt, hunted by an army, haunted by the thought of finding themselves in slavery again, tired and hungry, bored and discouraged, when the Hebrews finally crossed the Red Sea and left the Egyptian army mired in the mud behind them, the Israelite women, led by Moses’ sister Miriam, broke into song and led the whole community of Israel, terrified and exhausted, lost and homeless, in a dance of joy and praise.

  It is a lesson for the rest of us, this Jewish propensity to regard the small things of life as omens of goodness now and signs of more to come. This is not, in other words, a religion devoted to the dour. It is more likely an exercise in believing in the inherent goodness of life, of putting our faith in the
God we cannot see because of the giftedness we find in what we can see. Viktor Frankl, concentration camp inmate, wrote of it from this same perspective in his signature book Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy:

  We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from us but one thing: the last of human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances — to choose one’s own way.

  Choosing to see the delivery from evil as its greatest good, the Jewish scriptures see joy where others may only see doom.

  In another part of the Hebrew scriptures, the psalms speak often of drinking good wine, eating good food, “giving thanks to the Lord for he is good.” In another place in the Psalms, the Jew is reminded to say always, “This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

  The Jewish community celebrates heartily and often. They make a festival out of every harvest and every season of the year. They mark the return of the light to the temple after the Maccabean revolt rather than dwelling on the death of the community that had died trying to save it. They mark the beginning of every new year — whatever it portends — with prayer and song. They observe their liberation from Egypt with banquets and gifts. They remember the giving of the Torah with bursts of happiness. And they make every Sabbath of the year a moment of spiritual ecstasy.

  There is, in fact, an entire month, Adar, dedicated to happiness in the Jewish calendar, to celebrating the events in Jewish history that show an outpouring of the love of God for them in the midst of the mundane and the malevolent.

  Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav teaches, “It’s a great mitzvah to be always happy.”

  The Psalms remind us that happy people are those “who are satisfied with their portion.” And the rabbis teach that to be offered a new piece of fruit and not to taste it is a sin. To fail, in other words, to appreciate the good things of life — whether we recognize them at first blush or not — to forget to enjoy life to the full, is not a Jewish virtue.

  This is a people who, as a people, know how to rejoice.

  But where does this attitude come from and how is it sustained in a history steeped in discrimination and suspicion, in pogroms and persecutions, in uncertainty and fear? What is the well from which such a beleaguered people drink?

  The fact is that the Jewish worldview rests on four pillars: hope, goodness, human responsibility, and the centrality of justice.

  Jewish history is the story of a people with whom God has taken up permanent abode. The link between God and the people of God is a personal one. When Israel calls, God answers. When God calls, Israel answers — knowing that, however dark the path, God is on it with them again, just as God was on the journey from Egypt to the Promised Land.

  The Jewish journey is not a journey to happiness; it is a journey to God. Frankl writes in another place, “It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.”

  The Jewish sense of the presence of God is palpable. Israel lives from week to week waiting for the coming of the Messiah and their liberation from a world thick with sin. They never doubt either the truth of the coming or the certainty of that liberation, because Israel, as the scripture says, has been “up to its neck in seaweed” before and always survived and were never abandoned.

  Hope sustains Judaism — and with good cause. Abraham hoped and was saved; Noah hoped and was saved; Moses hoped and was saved. Emmanuel, “God with us,” Israel knows — “the cloud by day and the fire by night” — is with them still.

  Creation itself speaks to the Jew of the abundant goodness of God. God’s will is obviously the salvation of the people, poured out in the earth itself and enabled by our own human gifts of heart and soul, of mind and body. In those things and the history of Israel itself, Jews see with clarity that God’s mercy never ceases. God’s generosity never fails us. From one day to the next, from sunrise to sunset, they accept everything as from the hand of God.

  Jews feel the responsibility that comes to those who see humanity as created to carry out the will of God here and now. Co-creators of the world, they know that it is their glory and their right to complete what God has begun.

  They know, too, with clear-eyed certainty that justice will, in the end, prevail, and until that time it is their place as agents of the one in whose image they have been made to bring it. Tikkun o’lam — to heal and repair the earth — is the role of humanity on earth; this is what gives the Jewish community the sense of purpose and place in the mind of God.

  With those things in mind, they say, the Jew has reason to be happy.

  chapter 40

  Judaism: The People of the Law

  Happiness, unlike the case in any other religious tradition, is a law for Israel. It is not one of the Ten Commandments passed down to Moses at Sinai, but it is an attitude so ingrained in Israel that it makes the Ten Commandments possible. It is also not, in the strict sense of the word, a mitzvot. It is not one of the 613 laws of the Torah enumerated by the great twelfth-century philosopher and rabbi, Maimonides. And yet, from one perspective, happiness carries a greater obligation for the individual Jew and has a greater effect on Judaism than any one of the moral or ethical principles decreed in the Torah.

  Happiness, for the Jewish community, is more basic to Judaism than any single statute or any particular rule. For the Jewish community, happiness is an attitude of the spirit, a law of the heart, the vessel into which the Jewish worldview is poured. But the “happiness” meant here is not necessarily some kind of social cheerfulness. It is not the blithe, smiling, superficial approach to the world that comes packaged in television comedies. It’s not Madison Avenue “perkiness.”

  This happiness has depth and vision. It looks back over life and, despite its dark side, sees the presence of God everywhere. It sees the God who created life with all the good things that implies. It sees the God who is a palpable presence in the very face of evil. It finds a God who companions a person through evil to the promise of oncoming liberation that comes with every rising dawn.

  In fact, the Jewish scriptures enjoin the Israelite over and over again “to serve the Lord with gladness.”

  Every day the Jew thanks God for the giving of the law which, if kept faithfully, leads the Jew to the happiness that lies in serving God. Happiness, according to the kabbalist, is an experience of the soul, not any particular kind of personal achievement. Happiness, that is, comes simply as a result of doing what should be done to become the best of what we can be.

  Happiness, from this point of view, comes with doing what is necessary to grow well, to develop fully, to become the fullness of the Jewish obligation to find and follow God. Happiness, Judaism teaches, has nothing to do with whether the road of life is easy or difficult. It has to do with trusting that the God who brought us to the road will sustain us on the way to its end, to the point where the end is ultimate and complete.

  “If we know what life is about,” the rabbis teach, “there is no sadness in the world.” Life, for the Jew, is about serving God with gladness. To know the will of God as it is revealed in the Torah, to know that life is about doing the will of God, means that everything in life, in the end, redounds to our good. The Jewish tradition emphasizes tikvah, hope, not despair. To the Jewish heart, nothing life offers is irredeemably terrible as long as we ourselves live out the will of God in the course of it, even though its goodness may be understood only long after its event.

  Life, for the Jew, is always in itself good. Life itself is a blessing. To trust God is to be sure of coming to the perfect end, whether we realize the joy of it as it is happening or not. On the contrary, happiness has nothing to do with glee or success. Happiness lies solely in serving God. “Blessed is the nation whose God is YHWH,” the psalms sing.
“Whoso trusts in YHWH, happy is he.”

  Three elements of Jewish life are constant reminders of what it means to strive for the fullness of happiness: the Torah, the Mishnah (the written commentaries on the oral Torah in rabbinical Judaism), and the celebration of the Sabbath as a foretaste of heaven.

  In the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, the laws of God are stated. These 613 mitzvoth form the frame in which the Jewish life is lived. Some of them are positive, requiring certain actions in life. Some of them are negative, proscribing some actions as unacceptable. Some of them, after the fall of the temple in 70 ce, are no longer applicable to any present dimension of Jewish life. The point is that the fullness of happiness resides in following the teaching as given in the Torah.

  The Mishnah, or living Torah, is a collection of the rabbinical interpretations of those laws across all times and cultures in ways that apply the laws of the Torah to present day circumstances from year to year, from century to century, from culture to culture.

  Shabbas, the keeping of the Sabbath, like the study of Torah, is the celebration of time out of time, a foretaste of life as it will be when the messiah has come and when being rather than doing will be the order of day. It is the sweet reminder of what it means to live in the presence of God at all times. Shabbas is a continual awareness of what it is to “know what life is about,” which then makes it imperative “to serve the Lord with gladness.”

  Contrary to most other religious traditions, asceticism is not a dimension of Jewish life. On the contrary. Instead, the rabbis teach, “Rejoice in all that you put your hand unto” (Deut. 12:7). “Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy,” the Book of Ecclesiastes teaches (Eccles. 9:7).1 But it is a saying of the rabbis that confirms the reason for all of Israel’s happiness: “He who still has some bread in his basket and asks, What shall I eat on the morrow? has little faith.” Faith in the living God is the core and the cement of what the Jew knows as the path to happiness.