Buddhist Paths to Happiness

Although Buddhism has traditionally been considered a religion, it is unique among religions in that it proposes a clear methodology aimed at psychological transformation which nonetheless is a methodology independent of any metaphysical assertions. A more apt description might be that Buddhism is a philosophy or an aggregate of practices designed to steer an individual towards true happiness unconnected to material pursuits and establish true peace of mind. Exercises such as calmly sitting and observing the sensations involved in breathing as one breath follows another, for example, will in time produce a state of detached peacefulness with which one can contemplate Buddhist doctrines, but the state is independent of those doctrines. One can contemplate Christian or Muslim or even Marxist or agnostic doctrines with equal ease, as well as evoke and explore non-conceptual subjects such as personal memories, physical sensations, and private emotions – such as happiness.

Buddhism has many faces, but one of the most useful faces it presents is that of a most sophisticated meditative path, comprising tools and methods geared to resolve and transcend suffering and to cultivate positive emotions. Using those tools, according to many many individuals Buddhist and non-Buddhist, works. And it does not entail accepting Buddhist beliefs or abandoning other beliefs. But it does entail understanding the way Buddhists approach the question of happiness and how to attain it.

Understanding the Buddhist approach to happiness involves properly understanding two concepts (and one practice) that are rarely correctly understood. The two concepts are suffering and impermanence.

Suffering

The analysis of suffering is at the very heart of Buddhism. Indeed, the very first teaching of the Buddha after achieving enlightenment was the enunciation of what Buddhists call the Four Noble Truths, and the First Noble Truth may seem at first rather grim: Everything Is Suffering. Added to the second concept, that everything is also impermanent, the message would appear to be far from heartening: everything hurts and everything dies. Not a very cheery view of the world. How is it, then, that Buddhists can claim that understanding these root truths are in fact part of a process that can not only lessen unhappiness but lead practitioners to lifelong bliss?

The key lies in understanding them rightly. The term translated as “suffering”, for instance – dukkha – does not mean simple pain. Its meaning is closer to the word, unsatisfactory. Why, according to the Buddha, are all things unsatisfactory? Because when we desire anything, there are only two possible outcomes: either we obtain what we desire or we fail to do so. If we do not obtain what we want, we are unhappy. If we do satisfy our desires, sooner or later we lose these materials gains. Everything changes, including ourselves, and the things that please us today bore us tomorrow, as we either become sated with them or pass on to desire other things. So the lover can only either lose his beloved, or gain her only to lose her eventually to old age and death, or lose his love for her as he himself is tempted to infidelity or slips into senility or the grave. Lasting joy cannot rest on a foundation of inevitable change; craving for what is doomed is itself doomed.

The First Noble Truth is followed by three others, however: There Is a Cause for Suffering, There Is a Solution to Suffering, and the Solution Is the Noble Eightfold Path. Without going into all eight folds of that path in depth, each being a particular step to take to alleviate the problem of suffering, the gist of Buddha’s follow-up to the First Noble Truth is that the real issue is not that things in and of themselves are unsatisfactory, but rather that our attitudes and subjective craving for them are unsatisfactory. Or rather, that our craving rests on impossible and in fact ultimately undesirable assumptions: what we want is not merely the object of our desire, but for that object and our satisfaction in it to stay fixed and never to change. It is not so much the craving for the object of our desire that is at fault, but the craving for frozen static permanence. The lovers who want to be young forever, the happy parents who want their child to remain a toddler forever, the sportsman who wants to remain a champion, the president that desires to run the company without stepping down must inevitably experience frustration. Quite apart from the fact that such desires are untenable, they are not even wise: the wish that things remain permanently fixed eliminates the opportunity for such individual from experiencing growth and development, as well as new and different and larger experiences. And the desire to permanently hold onto things that are fluid and changing leads us to impose a mask of permanence over a state of affairs that is forever fleeting – to posit illusions, in short: illusory pictures of the objects of our desire, of the universe in which they live, and of ourselves.

But this insight is a major step on the road to the end of suffering, says Buddhists, because it clarifies the real problem, and points the way to a genuine practical feasible solution. The real problem is our craving, our desire – in other words, a particular psychological state – and the assumptions of permanence that underlie it. If we can analyze the false assumptions and dispense with them, and if we can get sufficient control over our emotions so as to moderate and direct them better, then the problem may be overcome. And we can. Dispensing with false assumptions and getting a degree of control over our emotions is entirely possible. At least, with a little work.

Impermanence

The second concept crucial to understanding the Buddhist perspective on happiness is impermanence itself. Impermanence – the fact that everything changes – is often understood to mean that everything dies. That is not the case. Death, in fact, is no more than another false and misery-inducing imposition of permanence onto something quite different, and Buddhists not only reject the notion but warn against it as a nihilistic perversion of the much subtler concepts of interdependence and emptiness.

Everything is “empty”, say Buddhists, but the emptiness is not non-existence, merely the fact that everything that exists, exists in dependence on other things. Everything has causes that bring it into being and conditions that maintain it in being. As the causes and conditions depart, the things that are dependent upon it depart; as the causes and conditions arise, the things that are dependent upon it arise. And given a universe that is apparently infinite in time and space (as well as rich in parallel universes and increasingly so in virtual digital ones), it is highly unlikely that similar causes and conditions will never again arise. As far as existence goes, genuinely permanent departure is as unlikely as genuinely permanent residence. So, far from positing a universe in which everything is always dying, the Buddhist image of existence paints a picture of an infinite variety of astonishingly rich potential realities pouring continuously into existence without end. And on a personal level, it posits a universe in which putting the right causes and conditions into place will produce a sought-after state of affairs – happiness, if that is our goal. And it is achievable: it simply requires dropping certain clearly untenable assumptions, and working to change our subjective attitudes.

The question is, how?

Meditation and Happiness

An intellectual grasp of the inevitability of change, and even of the subjective nature of suffering, is not enough by itself to free one from suffering. Just as physical health requires physical training, the mental health happiness requires mental training. The form evolved by Buddhists to achieve those results is meditation.

Precisely how and why meditation works has not become a not inconsiderable subject for neuroscience, and the wealth of different practices and meditational approaches devised by various schools of Buddhism over the course of 2600 years is too vast to address in detail. But it is meditation; Buddhists say that is the quickest and most effective way to create the causes and conditions that lead to happiness. Indeed, meditation itself, even in its early stages can lead to direct experience of serenity and bliss, and practiced meditators report ever-heightened states of transcendental ecstasy. (The British-born Buddhist teacher Ajahn Brahm once said that that celibacy follows naturally from meditation simply because orgasm is not remotely comparable to meditation in terms of pleasure.)

Brahm, in his book Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond, addresses the question of bliss and meditation and draws a clear map of the effective steps.

Initially, the meditator sits for a given period of time and focuses on being in the present moment, noticing how the mind tends to flit away into thoughts of the past, the future, and fantasy. Gently the meditator brings the mind back to the present moment, and allows the thoughts to appear, linger and dissipate. Behavioral scientists theorize that this process is akin to classical conditioning – whereas before, consideration of certain thoughts resulted in emotional and physiological upset, considering them in a state of unperturbed physical calm breaks the connection between the thought and negative or extreme emotional responses. The result is not happiness, exactly, but it is a way to experience formerly misery-inducing thoughts without misery.

Next, in Brahm’s model, the meditator treats discursive interior dialogue the same way. The mind is allowed to babble away, but the meditator simply observes the word stream with detached uninvolved calm until the words gradually die down and die out, and an inner silence Brahm describes as especially peaceful results – not surprisingly, since many of the thoughts that otherwise might be painful or disturbing no longer disturb.

The next two stages, says Brahm, are the critical turning-points. They involve, first, wordless present-moment awareness of the breath, followed by full sustained attention on the breath. In neither case need one modify or change how one breathes. One simply follows the breath attentively. Doing so in the first stage leads into the second, and in the second one encounters what Brahm calls “the beautiful breath” – a state in which one’s breathing is accompanied by feelings of deep, intense beauty and peacefulness. The meditation passes from flat observation into a sense of the transcendent calm loveliness of each breath in which one begins to experience, in Brahm’s words, “the first flowering of bliss in the mind”.

The Farthest Levels of Happiness

In the fifth stage, awareness of the breath itself all but passes away as the experience of transcendental beauty in and of itself permeates one’s subjectivity fully. This beauty – technically called nimitta – in the next, sixth, stage unfolds to such a degree that all other awareness falls away – words, sensations, indeed everything. An absolutely pure beauty stronger and more intense than any normal experience of it shines through akin to a brilliant light, which it resembles, although it is not light, and all sensory experience has fallen away. At this point the meditator is only beginning. Sufficient experience of the nimitta opens the door to a further set of stages called the jhanas. In early Buddhist scriptures, the term jhana and meditation are equivalent. But jhana soon became the term used for an ascending set of stages into levels of superhuman ecstasy that are simply unknown to everyday consciousness. Their existence has been reported and confirmed by meditators since the dawn of Buddhist practice, and each reportedly brings one closer and closer to enlightenment or Buddhahood itself; but as to what it actually is or is comparable to, only direct experience can say. It may be that at such levels the pleasure centers of the brain are stimulated and brought to an extreme peak in ways that common experience cannot trigger; it may be that other more metaphysical explanations may apply. Buddhists simply affirm that meditators who seek the jhana will find them, and that intensities of ecstasy beside which all other pleasures are as nothing will follow.

An Everyday Tool

The experience of the jhanas is something only the committed meditator is likely to experience. Can more mundane levels of meditation bring happiness to those experiencing the everyday struggles and frustration? By all reports, including secular reports, they can. In the books Destructive Emotions and Healing Emotions, the Dalai Lama in dialogue with psychologist Daniel Goleman and other psychologists and neuroscientists discusses the medical and neurological results of meditative practice, and they are overwhelmingly beneficial. The more esoteric reaches of theory and practice are not easily accessible, although they are open to everyone, and embracing Buddhism formally is by no means a requirement for benefiting from it; but the benefits are there and palpable. Properly understanding some of the core ideas of the Buddhist analysis of suffering may by itself diminish the pain of craving and clinging to what cannot be sustained, but taking the path of meditative practice will at the very least reduce stress and physical tension and provide a respite of calm and peace, and at the highest levels may provide happiness of such scope and intensity as to be life-transforming.

As the Buddha said, there is no need to take his word for it. Try it for yourself and observe the results.

Brahm, Ajahn (2006). Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond. Wisdom Publications.

Goleman, Daniel (ed.) (1997). Healing Emotions: Conversations With the Dalai Lama on Mindfulness, Emotions, and Health. Boston: Shambhala Publications.

Kabat-Zinn, Jon (2005). Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness. Hyperion.

Nyanaponika Thera (1954, 1996). The Heart of Buddhist Meditation: A Handbook of Mental Training based on the Buddha’s Way of Mindfulness. York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser.

Reynolds, David K. Playing Ball On Running Water.

Bhikku, Thanissaro (1996). The Wings To Awakening. Dhamma Dana Publications.

Suzuki, D.T. & Carl G. Jung (fwd.) (1948, 1964, 1991). An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. NY: Grove Press.