Creative Goodness

We’ll begin the meditation with thoughts of goodwill: May all beings be happy; may they create the causes for true happiness.

You realize that, in the light of karma, people become happy not because of your wishing them to be happy. They become happy because of the things they do, the things they say, the things they think. So you’re wishing: “May all beings be skillful.” Then when you have goodwill for yourself: “May I be skillful”—which is why a wish for happiness is not a selfish thought. It requires that you act in skillful ways.

You look at the world, and they’re so clever in doing unskillful things. You want to be clever in doing what’s skillful. It’s good to begin the day thinking about: “What ways can I be generous today? What ways can I be virtuous? What ways can I meditate?” In other words, look to yourself for the causes of happiness. We wish for a good day, but there’s that verse that we chant on what makes an auspicious day. An auspicious day is one where you do your duty.

What are your duties? The duties, of course, are the duties of the four noble truths, and those are built on generosity. As the Buddha said, it’s through generosity that the mind gets inclined to the position where it can be receptive to the four noble truths and the duties they entail.

So you think about generosity: What ways can you think of that would be imaginative ways of being generous in the course of the day? The day becomes good because of your contribution, not because of what other people do or things that just simply happen. They become good because you’ve added something good. It’s in this way that you create happiness for yourself, and of course the happiness spreads out to others.

This is the good thing about what the Buddha calls three forms of merit: generosity, virtue, goodwill: The happiness they create has no boundaries. It’s something you can extend to everybody because you make yourself happy, and the happiness spreads out. You make others happy, and the happiness comes back into you. If you make yourself happy in these ways, then the happiness becomes all-around.

So many of the ways in which the world looks for happiness—through gain, material gain, status, praise, sensual pleasures—create a lot of divisions. With material gain, you gain; somebody else has to lose. With status, you gain a particular status; other people have to lose that status—which is what the Buddha saw: that everything in the world has already been laid claim to. If you want to find your happiness in the things in the world, you have to fight people off. But in terms of your generosity, your virtue, the ways you develop goodwill in the mind: These all come from within. No one has laid claim to them. They’re totally yours, and you can do something really good with them.

So think about what’s going to be your contribution to the world what’s going to be your contribution to your own true happiness. You want the two to be the same thing.