When we seek happiness through accumulation, either outside of ourselves – from other people, relationships, or material goods – or from our own self-development, we are missing the essential point. In either case we are trying to find completion. But according to Buddhism, such a strategy is doomed.
Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.
Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness
A lovely image of joy in the midst of the changing currents of life
On a branch
floating downriver
a cricket, singing.
Issa, Japanese Buddhist poet, 1763-1827
One of the sad things today is that so many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence. They are dying to tie themselves into a system, a role, or to an image, or to a predetermined identity that other people have actually settled on for them. This identity may be totally at variance with the wild energies that are rising inside in their souls. Many of us get very afraid and we eventually compromise. We settle for something that is safe, rather than engaging the danger and the wildness that is in our own hearts. A man in Connemara said one time to a friend of mine, ‘Beidh muid sínte siar cúig mhilliúin blain déag faoin chré’ – “We’ll be lying down in the earth for about fifteen million years” – and we have a short exposure. I feel that when you recognize that death is on its way, it is a great liberation, because it means that you can in some way feel the call to live everything that is within you. One of the greatest sins is the unlived life, not to allow yourself to become chief executive of the project you call your life, to have a reverence always for the immensity that is inside of you.
John O Donohue, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World
Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.
Izumi Shikibu c., 974 – 1034
The moon in Japanese poetry is always the moon; often it is also the image of awakening. This poem reminds that if a house is walled so tightly that it lets in no wind or rain, if a life is walled so tightly that it lets in no pain, grief, anger, or longing, it will also be closed to the entrance of what is most wanted.
Translation and commentary by Jane Hirshfield
What is here now if there is no problem to solve?
A glimpse Practice to be used for reflection. Maybe try it for the day. We tend to identify with our actions and our problems.
Loch Kelly, Shift into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Open-Hearted Awareness
It is not a matter of looking for happiness
or trying to avoid suffering
but of going to the place beyond happiness or suffering.
Ajahn Chah
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