Buddhist Hour
Script No. 434
Broadcast live on Mountain District Radio 3MDR 97.1 FM
9.00 pm till 10.00 pm.
On Friday 30 June 2006 CE 2550 Buddhist Era

This script is entitled:
"Lifetimes of Learning - A Do It Yourself Approach to Happiness"

Class 2 Part 1

We now continue with Class No.2 in our series "Lifetimes of Learning - A Do It Yourself Approach to Happiness". This class was first presented on the 7th of February 2006 at the Dandenong Ranges Community Cultural Centre in Upwey Victoria.

As on last weeks Buddhist Hour we will spend some time tonight with our introduction to the components of ‘A Do It Yourself Approach to Happiness’. Our aim is to present for you clear and do-able instructions on how to transform your everyday life into a way of developing happiness based on Buddhist teachings.

On the Buddhist Hour last week we asked the question: How is the Buddhist ‘Do It Yourself Approach to Happiness’ different from our own version?

Many of you may know about the history of Buddhism. The Buddhist Path comes from the life the Buddha led and his quest to find the way out of suffering. Through correct Buddhist practice you definitely develop happiness, and you can become even happier than what we conventionally mean when we use the word ‘happiness’, but happiness is only a by product of Buddhist practice, something you get on the way to the real goal of Buddhism. But as you may know the goal or end result of practicing Buddhism is not expressed using the word ‘happiness’ as in Buddhism, happiness is not the final goal. You go past happiness to something else, from a Buddhist point of view, to something better.

Most people want to experience a happy life, and there is certainly nothing wrong with that. Our aim through the ‘Lifetimes of Learning’ series of classes is to provide practical guidance on how to become truly happier.

But more than this as we talk about the Lord Buddha's teachings and how to practice Buddhism each for ourselves, we hope that you may begin to see with a fresh understanding what it was that the Buddha knew, what the Buddha found out, and then what he taught to others for 45 years till the end of his life and passing into paranibbana. It was the real goal of Buddhist practice - nibbana, in the Pali language or Nirvana in Sanskrit, and sometimes translated as perfect peace, and often in the English language it is translated as Enlightenment.

Through the practise of Buddhism or Buddha Dhamma we come to see that it is up to each of us to look after our own well-being and happiness. We are completely responsible for ourselves as we inherit and experience, sooner or later, the result of all our choices and the causes we make. Just as no one else can breath for you, it is up to each of us to do the work that will ultimately bring true happiness.

So the Buddhist Eightfold Path is a ‘Do-It-Yourself’ path and that is the wonderful thing. There is nothing outside us to stop us, there are no mysteries that prevent us from achieving our wish to be happy. We are not dependent on another person's favour or agreement for us to improve our generosity, loving kindness and wisdom and to apply the Buddha's teachings in our life. We already have everything we need to get started.

The idea is, we get to the understanding of Buddhism by doing it in our everyday lives.

You may wonder how your everyday life can be transformed into a path to happiness?

That is really what Buddhism is all about for laypersons - you and I. To turn what you do in your job, your family life, friendships and in your leisure time into a process that creates wholesome good causes for you to become well and happy.

A very simple example of this is the practice of awareness of the present.

The practice of awareness of the present, being mindful of what we are doing moment by moment, is a foundation for the development of happiness.

In our everyday life we are usually not really paying much attention to how we live, we just get up and start getting on with what needs to be done, or what we want to do. Our attention is on doing, we are busy doing things, organising things, thinking about things. Often we are doing one thing whilst thinking about something else. Our mind is not really there, not fully attentive to the thing that we are doing.

For example, when we are driving to some place our mind may be thinking of what we are going to do when we get there, or after we have left. We may relive in our mind something that happened last night or last week, something someone said or we think they are going to say. We are living these phantom experiences in our mind rather than the real experiences of what we are actually doing.

Tarchin Hearn wrote in Walking in Wisdom that:

"We spend most of our lives in states of never really being anywhere. We move through the world like phantoms; dream figures interacting with other dream figures who themselves are planning their journeys. How rare is it to be real! How rare is it to be here." (Hearn 2003)

You can see the scope for us to really enjoy or appreciate the experience of living is quite limited when our mind is like this. Our mind simply cannot experience much satisfaction, enjoyment, joy or peace when it is bound up in this dream like state of living. Yet satisfaction, enjoyment and joy are some of the fundamental building blocks of happiness. Therefore in order for us to become happier and for our happiness to last for longer periods of our day, our way of being, as we live each moment, needs to change.

This is to do with not living just to get things done. It is to do with the quality of our mind as we live. We need to start paying attention to what is actually happening in the present and what our mind is doing. We start to give up living by our old habits of how to live, habits that limit our present happiness and have caused much of our past unhappiness. We start to re-learn how to live.

Venerable Chogyam Trungpa wrote in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism.

"If you pour a cup of tea, you are aware of extending your arm and touching your hand to the teapot, lifting it and pouring the water. Finally the water touches your teacup and fills it, and you stop pouring it and put the teapot down precisely, as in the Japanese Tea Ceremony. You become aware that each precise movement has dignity. We have long forgotten that activities can be simple and precise. Every act of our lives can contain simplicity and precision and can thus have tremendous beauty and dignity." (Trungpa 1973)

In a similar vein Tarchin Hearn noted:

"…that to be present, to be awake and alert and beautifully responsive to what is going on inside us and around us, is the key to resting easefully in the unending movements of being alive. Pausing or stopping is not really an option. If we wish to find peace, it will have to be in the midst of all this whirling movement." (Hearn 2003)

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines happiness as: "the state of pleasurable content of mind, which results from success or the attainment of what is considered good." In other words, it is event driven by good things happening to us.

In Buddhism it is the state of being happy or content that can be developed. It can be experienced more and more frequently depending on the quality of our practice and the causes we make. As we make the right causes and conditions our life gradually becomes happier. As we understand better and better what the real causes for happiness are we can incorporate those causes into our everyday life and the increase to our experience of wellbeing will surely come as the result. Our normal state becomes happier, whether we have success or whether good things happen or not.

Awareness of the present or as it is called in Buddhism ‘mindfulness’ is one Buddhist practice for our everyday life that can have a fundamental impact on our experience of living. There are many other foundations that we will talk about during this course. The practice of morality is one such foundation of happiness, the giving up of negative minds and attitudes is another and the cultivation of good minds and good actions are other good foundations.

The basis of all such Buddhist practices sits within the Ten Perfections, or paramis in the Pali language. They are like ‘training packages’. The training of each Perfection targets a specific aspect of our physical, verbal and mental behaviour and polishes it up, and over time eventually turns us into an ultimately compassionate and wise being, a Buddha.

The Pali word the Buddha used to describe the methods he taught was parami, which has been translated as ‘perfection or ‘transcendental virtue’. When literally translated it means ‘crossed over’ or ‘gone over to the other shore’. It is as though the parami's, the Perfections, are rafts that take us across the ocean of life to the shore of enlightenment.

Our plan over these coming weeks is to explain each of the Ten Perfections with the main focus being to show you how to practice these ‘perfecters’; what we can do in our everyday lives, whether we are at work, with our families, friends, or by ourselves, to practice these Ten Perfections.

The third training package, or Perfection, is the Perfection of Renunciation. Renunciation deals with our deep attachment to people, things, experiences, thoughts, feelings and so forth. Normally, we think that happiness is caused by having the things we want, and that unhappiness is caused by not having the things we want. Basically, this is not the case.

It sounds very straightforward to say that following greed and choosing to accumulate every material thing that we think we want, and focusing our life on accumulating wealth and status, is not a certain way of being happy. Sure, as a layperson, to have is much better than to not have, but it's not something that is sure to make us happy, otherwise all the wealthy people would be happy and this isn't the case, even in Australia, which has one of the world's wealthiest societies. Our youth suicide rate is one of the highest in the world, so that measure of unhappiness indicates causes other than material wealth create real happiness.

Renunciation is about letting go. It is about not trying to grab hold of everything we want in order to absorb happiness from those things. You can't grab your way to happiness, it will never be truly satisfying. The pleasure of hearing a great new song fades off, the new clothes become old fashioned, your new car becomes outdated, your cutting-edge computer is soon too slow and maybe even a past friend becomes a new enemy. The person you loved now seems to irritate you. These scenarios we all know too well. Getting what you want doesn't give you lasting happiness. It looks like it will make you happy, but it is an illusion.

Our real problem comes from our craving for these things, wanting, not wanting; this is the source of our suffering. The mind wanting or craving is running after things, the mind not wanting is rejecting and hating things. It just never stops. The method we are using to get happy is causing us to be unhappy.

The Perfection of Renunciation brings us to this view that our unhappiness is caused by our craving for this and that, and that to become happy we must learn to let go of this craving. The mind can only come to true peace through letting go.

With Perfect Renunciation you can really enjoy life. The difference is that although you can enjoy many aspects of the world, you understand the real nature of the world as being unsatisfactory and unreliable. With this knowledge, you strive for something greater than a new car or prettier girlfriend; you strive for the true peace of enlightenment.

In the course we will find out how to give away things we like, not just things we don't like, give up some of our old habitual views of the world which cause us to be unhappy, give up things which cause us to suffer, and give up our old bad habits.

The fourth training package, or Perfection, is the Perfection or Wisdom, or panna-parami in Pali. There are many types of wisdom in the world. One, having studied natural laws, is wise in science. Others, who have perhaps lived in difficult circumstances are ‘streetwise.’ In the world, there are many, many things to learn about, and many things to have knowledge of.

The Perfection of Wisdom is very unique. It goes beyond explaining how things happen and instead looks at why things happen.

The Perfection of Wisdom trains us to use our minds and see why things happens in the first place and the way things really work, i.e. all things are a result of karma, our actions in the past.

The reason why we cultivate the Perfection of Wisdom is, through wisdom we can cut the root of suffering, ignorance, and greed and attain the total bliss of matchless enlightenment.

The fifth training package, or Perfection, is the Perfection of Energy, or viriya-parami in Pali. Even in daily life effort needs to be made to achieve our goals. For example, we have to get up for work, and sometimes this can be a big effort!

Buddhist writer Anthony Flannagan writes:

"...in what ways should this {energy} be directed? The answer is simple - in all ways that are conducive to spiritual progress: in what we do, in what we say, and in what we think! To do what is right, to avoid evil, to purify the mind, this is the teaching of the Buddha, and to apply this perfectly requires unceasing energy. (Flannagan)

The Perfection of Energy is not only to do with what we use our energy for, but to have wisdom with regard to our use of energy. We will learn during this series of radio classes what good actions we can do every day that will create more energy or life force for us to use. We will look to see how we currently waste large amounts of our mental energy and what we can do to reduce that.

To train ourselves in the Perfection of Energy we will learn about:

The Way of the Kitchen - We find out how to practice all the Perfections as you prepare, cook and offer food. We will see how to use the kitchen as a wonderfully practical method of making powerful causes for our health, strength, energy, long life and attainment of wisdom.

Whole Life Planning - We are also going to take a look at how writing a whole life plan helps us improve our quality of life as well as harmonising the major components of our life and moving us towards achieving our main wish for our well-being and happiness in this life.

Long-Life Practice, how to really enjoy your good karma. We are also going to explore how to rejuvenate ourselves through harmless fun and high grade pleasure and through specific long life practices such as the Chan practice of the Way of the Garden.

Buddhist practice also eliminates the opposites to the Perfection of Energy, such as laziness and procrastination, by applying the correct antidotes and appreciating our great good fortune and the rare opportunities that we already have.

The sixth training package, or Perfection, is the Perfection of Patience, or khanti-parami in Pali.

We have all heard the saying ‘Patience is a virtue’, but how many of us are mindful of this on a daily basis? We are able to maintain composure under minor or even moderate abuse or hardship, but when people start yelling at us, it's only natural that we yell back. It's really easy for us to lose our cool if things go wrong enough.

The Perfection of Patience is the art of staying cool and not getting impatient or angry, even in thought, under any circumstance whatsoever. It's called the Perfection of Patience because, once we've developed it to it's highest level, there's no chance that we can ever get angry again.

The Buddha taught that patience is extremely important because anger has the extraordinary capacity to destroy the good things we've done in the past. In a moment of anger even the greatest of friendships can be forsaken, and we can lose all that we have worked so hard to gain. Anger is particularly dangerous in this way. Patience cuts off the door to so much suffering for ourselves and others.

In our life there is certainly an abundance of opportunities for training ourselves in the Perfection of Patience. Once we understand the importance of patience we first identify in which areas we are vulnerable and then, with strong intention to cut off our negative responses, we make a determined effort in restraint.

During the course we will help you in this practice by contemplating the faults of anger and the benefits of patience, by disregarding harm done to you and by being certain about the teachings on cause and effect. We will consider the example of the Buddha's practice of patience even in the face of loosing his own life from the stories of the former lives of the Buddha.

In ‘Lifetimes of Learning - A Do It Yourself Approach to Happiness’ we will learn to use mindfulness to monitor our speech and writing to maintain truthfulness, which is the next Perfection that we shall talk about on Buddhist Hour next week.

That brings us to the end of tonight's class paper. Tune in to the Buddhist Hour again next Friday evening at 9.00pm to learn about the remaining Perfections of Truthfulness, Determination, Loving-kindness and Equanimity.

May you create the causes to attain all the Perfections.

May your life go extremely well.

May you be well and happy.

May all beings be well and happy.

This script was prepared and edited by Julian Bamford, Anita Carter, Frank Carter, David Ley and Alec Sloman.

1. Carter A, Carter F, Sloman A. 2006. Lifetimes of Learning - A do it Yourself Approach to Happiness Class No.2. Presented at the Dandenong Ranges Community Cultural Centre, Upwey Vic 3158.

1. Hearn, Tarchin. 2003. Walking in Wisdom. Published by Wangapeka Books, c/o Wangapeka Educational Trust RD 2 Wakefield, Nelson, New Zealand.

2. Trungpa, Chogyam. 1973. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. Clear Light Series. Published by Shambhala Publications, Inc. 1123 Spruce Street, Boulder, Colorado 80302.

3. Little, W., Fowler, H.W., Coulson, J. 1973. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Published by the Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, Oxford, New York, Toronto.

4. Flanagan, Anthony. Vigor. http://buddhism.about.com/library/weekly/aa102502a.htm

5. Venerable Narada Thera. 1998. The Buddha and His Teachings. Published by the Buddhist Missionary Society, 123, Jalan Behala, 50470 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

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