Responsible Happiness

Close your eyes and take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body. Wherever it’s clearest, focus your attention there. And then watch it for a while to see if long breathing feels good. As long as it does, keep it up. When it doesn’t feel good anymore, you can change. Try shorter breathing, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, or slower. See what kind of breathing feels good for you right now—every right now.

You want to be observant of what you’re doing right now, because as the Buddha said, everything in our life comes from our actions. And where are the actions happening? They’re happening right now. Then you have the results of past actions. Those are already done. You can’t go back and change them, but you can make sure that what you’re doing right now is skillful. In other words, it doesn’t harm anybody. You’re not harming yourself. You’re not harming others. You’re not getting them to do harm. That’s an important part of having compassion for other people—because if they do harm, then it becomes their karma.

So you think about how you’re looking for happiness and try to find it in a responsible way, one that doesn’t create any harm for yourself, doesn’t harm anybody else at all. The best way to do that is to look inside, to develop good qualities in the mind. If we act in ignorance, we end up doing things that we don’t really understand, causing harm we don’t see. But still, the harm comes back at us. So you want to make sure that what you’re doing is very clear to you right now.

That means you have to develop three qualities: mindfulness, to keep in mind the fact that your actions are important; and then alertness, to watch what you’re actually doing; and then a quality called ardency: You want to do this well. After all, this is your life that you’re shaping. So shape it in a good direction. Shape it in a responsible direction so that your happiness, coming from within, doesn’t have to take anything away from anyone else, doesn’t have to oppress anybody else.

You look at the way most people find happiness in the world, and you see thatthey go for wealth, they go for status, they go for praise, they go for sensual pleasures. But these sorts of things, when you gain, somebody else has to lose. Or they gain, you lose. This is why we have divisions in the world. People can’t cooperate because they’re looking for happiness in a way that causes other people to suffer.

The best way to look for happiness is to develop good qualities in mind that everyone can see are good: like being generous, being virtuous, developing thoughts of goodwill—goodwill for everybody. In terms of being generous, you share not only your material things as you can, but also your time, your energy, your knowledge.

You share your forgiveness. Forgiveness doesn’t mean that you’re going to love the other person. Sometimes you realize they’ve behaved in such a way that you don’t want to have anything to do with them ever again, which is perfectly fine. But when you forgive them, you basically say, “I’m not going to harm you in return.”

Because so much of the harm in the world comes from people who say, “I’ve been harmed, so I deserve the right to harm somebody else in return.” When you can renounce that “right,” it’s a gift. It should be the easiest gift of all to give. It doesn’t cost any money. But for a lot of people, it’s the hardest thing to give. Still, it’s the most worthwhile. When you make the vow not to harm anybody, that asserts your responsibility. It maintains your uprightness as a person.

That connects with your virtue. You don’t harm anybody by killing, stealing, having illicit sex, lying, or taking intoxicants. This is one of the reasons why we take these precepts every week, to remind us that they’re so important.

When Ajaan Suwat was invited to teach meditation to a group of Westerners in Massachusetts years back, at the end of the retreat they asked him, “How do we carry the practice into daily life?”  And he said, “Observe the precepts.”  Now, some of them got upset, thinking that he was looking down on them as lay people who couldn’t manage meditation in daily life. But as he later explained to me, “Observing the precepts is a kind of meditation. You have to look very carefully at what you’re doing and saying and thinking, what your intentions are as you engage with other people.” When you try to do this right, you’re developing those qualities of mindfulness, alertness, and ardency, becoming more sensitive to how your actions have an impact on yourself and an impact on others. It’s all to the good.

And finally, thoughts of goodwill. Goodwill is something we usually feel for some people, but not for others, which is goodwill on the human level. We want to raise it to a level of a divine being who can have goodwill for everybody, regardless of what they’ve done. What this means is that you wish for their happiness. How are they going to be happy?—by acting skillfully. So you’re not saying, “Just keep on doing what you’re doing and be happy.” If people are acting in harmful ways, you’re basically saying, “May you see the harm that you’re doing and voluntarily stop.” That’s a thought you can have for anybody.

It also reminds you that you don’t have to go around as an avenging angel to clear things up, straighten things out. You’ve got your own mind that you have to straighten out first. If you can help other people straighten out their minds, you’re perfectly happy to do so, but you’re not going to impose your ideas of justice on them.

When we think in these ways, then it’s easy to live with one another. And we can find happiness in ways that are not causing any suffering or any harm to anybody else. That means we’re being responsible.

Sometimes people who meditate are accused of being irresponsible and just looking after themselves. But actually, they’re the most responsible people around, because they take the question of happiness seriously—not in a grim way, but realizing that if you’re going to find happiness, you have to think carefully about how you’re doing it. It’s in these ways that we create happiness for ourselves and also have a good influence on the world around us—by being very careful about our actions. So remember, your actions are important.

Someone once asked me, “How would you boil the Buddha’s teachings down to one sentence?” It comes down to: Be very careful what you do, because what you do has a big impact. Think about that as you make your choices—and try your best to make your choices well.