Where does happiness come from?

Ask: Where does happiness come from? How to attain happiness?

All living beings on Earth, including humanity, want to find happiness for themselves. However, the important thing is how to find it and whether it is real or unreal or it is temporary. During our practicing progress, where do we find happiness? In old days, when we were children, our happiness is just all about simple plastic toys.

When growing up, our definition of happiness started expanding, wider and higher. When being in schooling, our happiness is passing the exams. After graduated, our happiness is to work for a living. earning enough money, being able to find our half one to live together is our great happiness.

 

 Nevertheless, all these kinds of happiness are still just our illusion. It is because that when we haven’t had what we want, we are sad; when we are achieving the things we want, we are still sad; when those things are gone, we are in suffering. When the couple hasn’t married, it is all about “Swimming for love across all the rivers, climbing for love upto all the hills”, which is all about making promises, we can’t stand not meeting each other every day. Those things are just fake happiness, unstability, impermanence,  and those things change when time goes on, when we get older and the situations change. With  stable job, marriage, we just stay focus on working, making more and more money though we are still poor for years. The poor suffer every day, but there is no better to the rich. However, at last, everyone must die of sickness, pain till their last breath, or burial in cemetery or into the crematoriums.

The short breath were stopped,

The body were burned at the stake,

The remains was picked up in a pinch of ash

Although having been searched possessions for years, we still only find unstable, untrue, short happiness. Where is the real happiness which we have looked for so long? The Buddha showed us that the way leading to truly happiness lies right at where the truth stays. Only in that place, peaceful and truly happiness exists.

For example, when seeing one thing like a cup, golden on which the numbers “9999” was sealed, we though it was real gold. Our hearts beat fast, our legs shake, and the blood inside of us went wild, our feet tremble. But after picking it up, we realize it was made of paper. Then we threw it away and we went away, like nothing happened.

The source of Buddhism is to help us understand the truth. There is no misunderstanding between fake ones and real ones”. For many years, we worked hard just to serve ourselves, but in the end, our bodies are rotten, burnt into ash.

 

 Everything would be destroyed. There is only the pure mind which doesn’t stop reciting the Buddhas’ names is the magical and real truth. Though the lucid hearing and consciousness have no shape, no name, and no color, they rule everything and control everything which is tangible. Without the lucid mind, humanity would become senseless. That lucid and pure mind is the source of the happiness, which had been forgotten by us for so long. We were too busy looking for the fake happiness, without knowing that our body hasn’t been real.

 

Chasing the illusions and mistakes during the whole life was all about wrong places, getting lost and suffering. Everything, which exists on this life, always changes. There is no still motion at only one place and there is no eternity. If we keep clinging on the unknown, it would be just like holding the bubbles. It was like thirsty deer chasing after the sunshine; or the naïve chimpanzee trying to catch the reflection of the moon on the water surface. All of those actions exhaust us, leading us to the best but getting nothing, after all.

 

 There is only Buddha, who can show us the truth in our mind, help us to find to peace and truly happiness right at our pure recitationself. When we all realize that the essence is just a lie, we would recover to living with ourselves, with the source of happiness inside.

 

Thich Minh Thanh.

Translated into English by Nguyen Thi Mai Thao.