Respect

Close your eyes. Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths. And notice where you feel the breathing in the body. By breath, we mean any sense of energy flow that allows the air to come in and go out. Where do you feel that? Focus your attention there. Then try to stay there all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out-. And if long breathing is comfortable, keep it up. If it’s not comfortable, you can change. Make it shorter, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. Try to see what kind of breathing feels good right now. After all, breath is the energy of life. It makes sense that if the breath feels good, it’s going to be good for the body, good for the mind.

Show some respect for your mind. This is why we bow down to the Buddha. He saw the power of the mind, and he teaches us the power of our minds—in particular, the way we can use that power to find our true happiness. That desire for true happiness is something we should honor. In other words, we bow down to him because he teaches us to honor something we should bow down to in ourselves: our desire for happiness that doesn’t change, that doesn’t afflict anybody, doesn’t harm anybody. That’s a desire that should be respected and should have priority in our lives. And it’s not a selfish desire at all.

If you really are concerned about true happiness, you’re going to have to develop qualities of wisdom, compassion, and purity. Wisdom in seeing that true happiness comes from your actions, and long-term happiness is better than short-term. So you do what you can to make sure that your happiness does last. And that requires that you have compassion for other people, because if your happiness depends on their suffering or any harm to them, they’re not going to stand for it. They’re going to do what they can to change it. So you have to take their happiness into consideration as well.

Finally, purity means that you really are serious about doing this well—serious not in the grim sense, but you really do give importance to a happiness that lasts. You don’t just think about it, you actually act in ways that are conducive to true happiness, that cause no harm to yourself, no harm to others. When you really are serious about your happiness in this way, then it involves all kinds of good qualities in the mind. You become a better person to other people, and you become a better person to yourself.

So this is why we bow down to the Buddha, because he teaches us to bow down to something worthy of respect in ourselves—and to do it every day by training the mind. After all, the mind does need to be trained. It has all kinds of desires for happiness that run off in many different directions. You have to decide that some have to be sacrificed for the sake of others that are more important.

This is a basic principle, as the Buddha said: if you see that there’s a long-term happiness that comes from abandoning a lesser happiness, that if you’re wise, you’re going to be willing to abandon the lesser happiness for the long term. It’s very simple. It sounds very simple, but sometimes it’s hard to put into practice, as many of us want to win at chess and keep all our pieces. If you want to win, you have to be willing to sacrifice some things. And this is something you do win, you do have to work for this, but it’s worth doing, this work. It more than rewards all the effort that goes into it.

So take your happiness seriously. Give it importance. You’d think that since everyone wants happiness, they would look carefully at how it’s done. But so many people just run after anything. Anything that strikes their fancy, they run after it. They get disappointed, then they run after something else, get disappointed again. It’s good to take the example of the wise and realize that there are some things we have to give up, but it’s more than worth the exchange.

So be serious about your happiness, and then you’ll be rewarded many times over with some really serious happiness.