Ultimate Happiness

So you've all been thinking about happiness this morning, and I want to say a little bit more about happiness from perhaps a more spiritual point of view, a more particularly Pure Land Buddhist point of view. That's just me stalling for time because I haven't quite decided where to begin the talk yet. Yeah, well, often when I do a talk, I sort of have several things floating around that rather than having them exactly in the order, and then it's just sort of, okay, so which, which thing to pluck from first. So I missed the, the last bit of the group because I was making lunch, but earlier when we were talking about the things that made us happy, we were talking, we were mostly talking about worldly things. The cats, the company, the food that we eat, the places that we go. All of those things are subject to change and decay, and from their own side, they're unreliable. You know, unfortunately, the 3 cats that we have at some point will die, and we won't— they won't be here anymore. And the same is true for all of us. For the temple, and even the Malvern Hills at some point will disappear. And maybe even in our own lifetime, things like the hills will change. You don't— we don't know that for sure. So when we rely on these things for our satisfaction, for our happiness, we're leaning into something that isn't quite reliable. And there's a scale— some things are more reliable than others, you know. It's more likely that the hills will be here for a long time than it is, um, perhaps that your fancy sports car will stay with you for the whole of your life. Although even a sports car can be— have more longevity than a cat. So there's disappointment built in if we're leaning into those sorts of things. So I guess that's sort of beginning to think about the external conditions that we talked about. In terms, terms of the internal conditions that we were thinking about, um Happiness is something that comes and goes. We talked about that this morning. I think the Dalai Lama— I can't remember exactly how he puts it, but the sort of happiness that I'm talking about, he says, is different to the sort of happiness that you talk about in ordinary life. It's, um, there's this— perhaps contentment is a better word, a sort of spaciousness or a steadiness or equanimity, a quiet joy that sustains you regardless of what the internal conditions are, regardless of whether we're experiencing, whether we're sort of feeling sad or happy in a conventional sense. There can be something bigger around that, something, a sort of quiet joy at the edges, you know. And even that is outside our control, whether it comes or not, but it's, it's more reliable than ordinary happiness. So I want to think a little bit how in both of these, in the external and the internal conditions, we can start to change how we think or behave so that we are less involved in the rising and falling of our own emotions, and less involved, or less caught up in, less reliant on worldly things around us, the external conditions for our happiness. And the solution to both of these problems— the unreliability of worldly things and the unreliability of our own emotions— is love. Giving and receiving love. In the Pure Land Buddhist school of Buddhism, there's a very clear sense that there is a great love that's accessible to us. That is beginningless and endless. That's outside of the ups and downs of ordinary life, and that's outside of our own ups and downs as well. From its own side, it's reliable, unlike the hills or the other things that we talked about. It's unchanging. It's like a spring that doesn't dry up. This is a sort of existential truth for Pure Land Buddhists, that we can lean into this unlimited love, that we can drink from this spring that doesn't run dry. Now, it doesn't really matter whether you think of the spring as something inside yourself that is just blocked off, or whether you think of it as outside yourself that we go to. Pure Land Buddhists tend— certainly in ancient times— would think of it as being outside themselves, and there's a certain wisdom in that because It undermines the ego's tendencies to make something of us. And in the Larger Pure Land Sutra, this stream— the metaphor of light is used for this spring that wells up. Light is the love. The Buddha Amida Buddha, who we talk about, is It's just a figure that embodies this. It's a figure that we relate to. It's a shape that we put on this existential truth that makes it easier for our ordinary human minds to understand. Human beings like stories, and there's a story about a monk called Dharmakara who became a Buddha called Amida, which is the Buddha on the peacock chest and the one, the red Buddha on the wall there. The Buddha of infinite light and life. And part of the promises that he made was that this supply of love would be available to everybody who turned towards it. And we do it through the chanting practice, but there are other ways of turning towards it. So I just want to read you something from the Larger Pure Land Sutra, which describes something about the effect of this light or this love. This light touching beings makes the three poisons— greed, hate, and delusion— disappear as they feel tenderness, joy, and enthusiasm. Naturally, good thoughts arise even in any of the three lower realms, or in the midst of affliction and travail. Touched by this light, they find repose and assuagement that fails not. At the end of their days, they will all be led to liberation. So one of the qualities of this light is that it brings joy, it brings happiness, regardless of the condition that you're in when you turn towards it, whether you're in the three lower realms, which is the, the hungry ghost, which represents a state of greed, the hells, which represent sort of hateful, hurtful states and states of real suffering, or the animal realm, which represents lustful greed. Those are big emotions that we get caught up in, but actually, even in the midst of all that, there is something that we can lean into that will bring a sense of peace. Satya Robyn said, when she was talking about gardening, that we don't necessarily get to choose when the plants come up, and actually, most people's experience is that despite knowing this, knowing there's this thing that we can lean into. Sometimes we don't really open our eyes to it. We produce blocks from our own side, either conscious or unconsciously, perhaps because it's frightening to be loved, perhaps because it means actually if we're loved then we don't need to be so angry, and at the moment it's really important for part of me to feel angry or greedy or lustful. So we don't always reach out, we don't always make contact. With this, this light. We don't always drink from this stream, but it is from its own side. It's always there. It's a sort of— it's a universal law. In ancient Indian understanding of the world, they talk about the five— I think they talk about the five laws, but it's the five sort of areas that life unfolds in. And I don't know if I can remember them all because I wasn't particularly going to talk about them this afternoon, but one of them is the physical realm. So this is geology, if you like. It's mountains rising and falling. Another is the biological realm. Another might be the weather, another is our own karmic realms. And all of these things are subject to decay, to change, to transience. Cause and effect plays out in each of them, and sometimes between them as well. But regardless of this unfolding dance, the light sort of shines through, straight through them, all, and is accessible regardless of what state the world is in. And sometimes in your meditation practice, or out on the hills, or when you're doing yoga, you might have an experience of this kind of peace, this kind of settled mind, and without really knowing where it's come from. Maybe you don't quite know what I'm— you know, maybe you haven't had that experience yet. This is a practice of entrusting, and sometimes we entrust to things that we've experienced ourselves, sometimes we entrust to things that we're told by other people who experience them. In the story about Amida Buddha, the reason that he went on to become enlightened was because he met somebody else who was embodying this sense of peace. He had an experience of seeing the light reflected through somebody else, and that inspired him to turn his own mind to the light and to become a reflector and ultimately a transmitter of this light. So all of this is by way of encouragement to begin the transition from leaning into worldly things from— for your source of joy, to leaning into something else. And you don't need to call it Amida Buddha. There are many names for God. You don't need to call it God. You can just think of it as something, some quality that the universe has that unfolds as it's unfolding. But for us, we have to call it something, so we call it Amida. I'll read you this list as well. Some people have heard this before, but it's one of my favorite lists. It's a list of other names for Amida Buddha, and it just, it describes some of the qualities of this light. So he's therefore called the Buddha of Measureless Light, Amitābha. So this is the sense that the light can't— we can't measure the light, and also that the love —if we're thinking that the light is love. It doesn't measure us. It doesn't need us to be anything in particular. Ordinary human love, you know, we require you, I need you to be in a particular way. If you go too far outside these limits, then it's going to be more difficult for me to love you. Sorry, Satya Robyn. You know, and we try and be generous with those limits, but probably we've all got them in us somewhere, whereas the Buddha embodies a love that is without those limits. Some of you know the story of Ajāsattu, who killed one of the Buddha's friends, and the Buddha still welcomed him into his fold, still taught him as if he was any other person. His love could encompass everybody regardless. And the same is true of this light. We don't need to change in order to be able to be touched by the light. It's a boundless light, the Buddha of boundless light. There isn't anything that gets in the way. It's an unimpeded light. It's an incomparable light. Our human love is limited. The love of Amida Buddha, this existential love that's outside of us, like the happiness that flows through the tube that Satya was talking about, it's bigger than anything else that we can imagine. And so the list goes on and on and on, all these wonderful, marvelous qualities qualities of the love that we can start to turn towards through various practices, but particularly just through entrusting and knowing that it's there. And in that act of knowing that it's there, it starts to affect us. When we associate with people who are more loving, we become more loving. When we trust that there is this great love in the universe and start to lean into it, either through our practices or just through changing our attitude, it starts to affect us. And slowly, slowly, slowly, we begin able to love others more generously, um, as we are accepted and loved by this light. Not only are we able to love others more generous— generously, we're also able to be generous to the rising and falling of whatever's in our own mind. So this brings us to the internal conditions that we were talking about right at the beginning, in the sense that happiness, ordinary happiness, is something that's transient. We know it comes and goes, sometimes unaccountably. Sadness comes and goes, grief comes and goes, anger. They all have their own patterns, they all move through us. Sometimes we hold on to them and make them bigger, sometimes we push them down, they pop up again. Later on, but there's no steady sense of contentment in the foolish mind. But actually, the more that we feel loved, the more we're able to lean into this light. As these things arise in us, we're able to be generous to those. Like in Rumi's poem 'The Guest House,' where he encourages you to welcome whatever guest comes in as if it's an old friend. You know, like on the shrine we put out these offerings for the Buddha because he's a particularly special guest. In the same way, whatever is arising within us, we should treat in the same way, whether we think it's a good thing or a bad thing. Oh, I don't want to treat anger like it's a special guest. Actually, if you're kind towards your anger, if you're loving towards your anger, in the same way that we change When we're loved, the anger starts to change. When it's loved, little by little, slowly by slowly, it starts to melt away. And maybe we don't completely get rid of it in this lifetime. Some of us are very full of the three poisons, but we can begin to change our relationship to them. We can begin to be kind to these rising and falling within us. And the kinder we can be to what's rising and falling within ourselves, the easier it is to feel close to this great light that I'm talking about. The more likely it is that we'll feel this sense of joy and ease and contentment. There's an image from the sutra that I really like, a different metaphor from the ones that we've been using, which is of a Bodhi tree. The Bodhi tree is the tree that the Buddha sat under when he became enlightened. And when he became enlightened, he touched the earth. There's a real sense of, for him at least, recognizing— I think when he touches the earth, he's not only being grateful for the earth, to the earth for its sustenance, but he's also recognizing something universal about the nature of enlightenment. He's touching something outside of himself, he's leaning into something much bigger than himself, and we can see the tree as a stand-in for this. At a talk in Buddhafield this year, a Tree Ratner Order member called Stephen talked about the Bodhi tree being like the Norse World Tree. It sort of stands in for the whole, of life. And I suppose because it's a Bodhi tree, it's not just standing in for the whole of life, it's standing in for enlightenment in the midst of life. And in the Larger Pure Land Sutra, it says, wherever you go, whether you come into the land where the Buddha is, whether you go into other lands, you'll always be able to see the Bodhi tree. You'll always be able to turn and spot it on the horizon. This is another way of thinking about the light. Uh, it's something that you can always just catch out of the corner of your eyes. Reliable. A lot of the things, a lot of the work that we're doing this morning about this sort of finding out when am I happy, when am I less happy, what are the blocks— this is really getting to know what it is to be the particular being that is me, or you, or you, or you, or you. And that work is really good for you, good to do, because as Satya said, those blocks, that's what gets in the way of us seeing the light, of experiencing the light. And it isn't particularly— I don't think that we need to get rid of them in order to see the light, in order to feel the love. It's that we need to stop shielding them and allow them to be loved. So present this to the Buddha and say, well, here it is, I can't manage to love this part of myself, but I know that there is something in the universe, there's this quality of love in the universe that can love it. Or perhaps if you want to think in terms of your own Buddha nature, I know there's a part of me that can love it even if my conscious mind can't. Do it. Here it is, let it be loved. This is what's getting in the way. I can't move it, I can't change it. Perhaps some of the things, maybe we can shuffle out of the way sometimes. Right, today I'm going to be really good, today I'm going to break this habit, and today I'm going to whatever it is. And sometimes you manage to follow through on those promises, but a lot of the time We don't. We find ourselves slipping back into old ways, and the blockages are still there. And all we can do then is allow them to be loved. Maybe they'll change, maybe they won't. But actually, we don't need to get rid of them, because if they're being loved, then we're feeling the love. We're starting to experience the contentment. We don't necessarily need to change anything about our own configuration in order to feel loved, in order to entrust ourselves to this benign process, as Dada Vichy called it in the summer. We just need to turn towards the light. We just need to say, okay, you can love this bit. Okay, you can love this bit. Okay, you can love this bit. Honen, who popularized this tradition in medieval Japan, had lots of disciples. One of them was called Shinran, and one of them was called Ippen. Both of them sometimes taught using the metaphor of the sun being this light and the clouds being all the blockages that we've talked about. You know, you've still got a faint glow through the clouds, but essentially we can't see the sun today because the clouds are in the way. Now, for Ippon, he wasn't really interested in the nature of the clouds. He just wanted to get through them and be with the sun. And sometimes through his ecstatic practices of dancing, he was able to do that. He was able to clear away the clouds. Whereas Shinran realized that actually when you put clouds in front of the sun— you see this particularly at sunset, you talked about going up onto the western hills at sunset— they have that golden edge to them. The clouds are loved, the clouds are part of the picture at the moment. Today there's clouds in the sky, maybe tomorrow there'll be less clouds. Sometimes we can blow a few of them away, sometimes we can't, but always we can trust that the sun is shining on them, that the sun is lighting them up. And a sunset is particularly beautiful when there's clouds in the sky. This is, um, this is where the real deep sense of contentment comes from, not in trying to clean yourself, particularly not in trying to, um, change your life so that you're happy all of the time, although those things— those— that's good work to do as far as it goes. But bringing the whole of yourself into this light and just allowing it to be loved, because whether it changes or not, the love soaking in and that sense of— what was— what did it say? Tenderness, joy, and enthusiasm. Naturally good thoughts arise even in any of the three lower realms. In the midst of affliction and travail, touched by this light, they find repose and assuagement regardless of what state you're in. You don't need to get out of the hell realms in order to be touched by this light, in order to feel the contentment. You just need to trust that there is something that's producing this light that you can show yourself to. As Honin said, the moon is shining On all of the huts in the village, on all of the villages, all you have to do is look up. Namaste.