Hi Everybody,
Today I'm off to India to visit my daughter Jessica. One of the activities we do there each time we go is to visit an ancient Buddhist settlement that was active around about 1100 AD. It's a series of caves carved into the mountain, with figures of buddhas and boddhisattvas and flowers and animals carved into the rock and a sophisticated system of wells and ponds to provide them with water in such a remote place. And we sit in the caves, just the three of us, and chant nam myoho renge kyo very quietly and its as if the whole mountain vibrates. And other visitors to the place just sit and listen. It's magical.
Any way back to The case for Buddhism, and we're talking about Buddhism's view of happiness.
' Given that it plays such a key role in our universal motivation, let alone our Buddhist practice, my key point is that it's just as well that we all share a common understanding of what we mean when we it, this much over-used word, rather than just assuming that we have a common understanding.
And that would seem to be a genuine issue, both within and beyond Buddhism. Someone as supremely eminent in the field as Martin Seligman for example, is driven to exclaim in his latest book Flourish, that the word happiness,
'...is so overused that it has become almost meaningless. It is an unworkable term for science, or for any practical goals such as edication, therapy, public policy, or just changing your personal life.'
' Almost meaningless ' is a bit strong perhaps, but you can see the point can't you, that the word happiness in the modern idiom, or to the modern ear, is unquestionably a bit...well, a bit lightweight! To many people, and I would include myself, it can all to easily be taken to mean merriment and laughter and good cheer and smiley faces, and I don't think we can simply ignore those connotations as if they were unimportant. we would be doing ourselves and our discussion a grave disservice. Particularly since good cheer and smiley faces is certainly not what is meant by happiness, in both Buddhist teachings, and in the scientific research centred around positive psychology.
Perhaps the closest we come to an appropriate word, or phrase, in both those contexts, certainly one that I personally find much more meaningful, and one that has already been used a great deal in this text is well-being. Why? Because it clearly expresses a much broader and deeper and more solidly based emotion. On one recent occasion for example, when I was talking to an audience of businessmen about Buddhism, the phrase ' happiness in the work place ' got a noticeably cool and even a somewhat cynical reception. But as soon as I switched to talking about ' well-being in the work place,' there was an immediate understanding of what we were really talking about, a much more substantial, an altogether more stable and focused state of life, than laughter and good cheer.
And once again, that distinction, slight but crucial, finds support among the scientists. As Daniel Goleman explains in some detail in his book Working with Emotional Intelligence, when comparisons are made between the effectiveness or the productivity of people at work, the difference is found to lie not so much in the know-how or the purely technical skills of different people, but much more broadly in their overall sense of well-being, and therefore their greater capacity for handling realtionships or dealing in a calm and focused way with difficulties that arise.
But perhaps most important of all, this phrase, well-being, has so much greater depth and breadth and capacity, tha tit can even embrace the idea of mischance and misfortune. Buddhism for example, when it speaks of happiness, has in mind a solid, lasting, resilient sense of well-being, at the core of one's life, that can endure and be experienced, even in the midst of sadness and loss and crucial challenge. That again, finds multiple echoes in the work of modern sociologists. Professor Tal Ben-Shahar for example, who for many years taught in the positive psychology programme at Harvard, talks about the need to ' get real.' Optimism and happiness he argues cannot be about being eternally cheerful. That would be hopelessly unreal. It has to be he says, about getting up close to, getting to grips with and embracing the pains and the problems we encounter, so that we truly understand them, and learn how to work through them to a better place. And he talks of the immense value that we can generate in our lives by learnin gto look for the seeds of the positive in things that go wrong in our lives, rather than continually beingn eaten up by the sense of loss or damage.
And both Buddhism and social science would want to embrace several other dimensions that are difficult to see wrapped up in the simple word happiness, but that we would all freely recognise as central to a durable sens eof well-being. Dimensions such as
- rich and positive relationships with others,
- a sense of accomplishment in our endeavours,
- a sense of meaning or purpose in our activities. And let's not forget,
- a sense of compassion and altruism.
In the same book Martine Seligman recounts for us a brief but telling anecdote that goes as follows;
' My friend Stephen Post, Professor of Medical Humanities at Stony Brook tells a story about his mother. When he was a young boy and his mother saw that he was in a bad mood she would say, ' Stephen, why don't you go and help someone?' Empirically, Ma Posts's maxim has been put to rigorous test, and we scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.'
A powerful life lesson there in just half a dozen lines, and moreover, one that lies right at the heart of Buddhist teachings.
And a great place to stop!
So that's it until I get back from Mumbai. See you then.
Take care.
William Woollard
The Case for Buddhism is available from Amazon
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