No Happiness Other than Peace

Close your eyes. Take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths. And notice where you feel the breathing in the body. Wherever it’s clearest—where you can tell, now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out—focus your attention right there. And try to stay there. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t feel good, you can change the rhythm; you can change the texture. Make it faster or slower, heavier, lighter, deeper, more shallow. Try to find a way of breathing that feels good for the body right now.

If the mind wanders off outside, just bring it right back in. If it wanders off again, ask it: What are you looking for? If you’re looking for happiness outside, you’re looking in the wrong place. True happiness comes from within. As the Buddha said, “N’atthi santi param sukham”—There is no happiness other than peace. When you look outside, it’s going to be hard to find any peace.

There was a time when Mara came to see the Buddha. He said, “Why bother being Buddha? You could be a king. You could rule righteously over the world.”

The Buddha said, “Even if a king ruled righteously, there’d be people who wouldn’t be satisfied.”

Even if it rained gold coins, it wouldn’t be enough for one person’s sensual desires. If we had two mountains the size of the Himalayas, all of gold, that wouldn’t be enough either. People are insatiable. They have no sense of enough. So no matter how well you ruled over the world, it still wouldn’t be enough for them. There’s always going to be conflict; there’s always going to be strife. If you want to find true peace, you’ve got to look inside. You’ve got to create the peace inside, because you can.

As the Buddha said, you can develop skillful qualities inside. If you couldn’t do that, he wouldn’t have bothered to teach. And if it wasn’t good for you, he wouldn’t have bothered to teach it, either. But because you can develop skillful qualities and get rid of unskillful ones; and because that’ll be good for you: That’s why he taught.

That’s why he left the Dhamma for us. And that’s why we should take advantage of it while it’s available, because it’s not always going to be here. There will be times when the teaching of the Dhamma will disappear. Then everything is really dark. At the very least, we have the light of the Dhamma. And it shows us that we can find light inside. We can find peace inside. That’s where genuine happiness lies.

So. Focus your attention in here. Think of all the good qualities you can develop in the mind: Generosity, virtue, meditation. Those are just the beginning. Those are just the big ones. There are lots of subsidiary ones as well. And they all can be developed in here, because we have these good potentials inside. We have so many good potentials that we don’t take advantage of because we’re looking in the wrong place.

Look in the right place. Look in here. Develop what you’ve got in here. Then you’ll have more than enough happiness. And then, regardless of what the world is like outside, your happiness is secure, and you have enough to share with others. That’s the kind of happiness that really does satisfy because it stays with you. And it doesn’t harm you; it doesn’t harm anybody else. So it’s perfectly safe.