The Buddhist Hour Radio Broadcast Archives
Buddhist Hour Radio Broadcast on Hillside 88.0 FM
Script 365 for Sunday 23 January 2005CE
2547 Buddhist Era
This script is titled: How Do
You Get Happiness?
The following Buddha Dhamma talk was given by John D.
Hughes at the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd. during a five
day meditation course held at the Centre in June 1988. We began this
talk 'How do you get happiness' in our program broadcast two weeks
ago on 7 January 2005, and now we continue with this the fifth tape
in the series.
The authors apologise for any errors or
misunderstandings that may have occurred in the process of
transcribing the talks from the original audio tape recording.
John
D Hughes continued:
Another meditation is like this.....you
meditate - your heart beats, your lungs pump air, but the heart
doesn't know that the lungs are breathing.
The right hand
doesn't know what the left hand's doing.
You eat food, your
stomach digests the food, the heart doesn't know the stomach's
digesting the food, the lungs don't know the stomach's digesting the
food.
You move this arm, leg doesn't know you move this arm.
You move this leg, arm doesn't know you move this leg..... No
communication.
Therefore it is a compound - wiggle this
finger, these fingers don't know, wiggle that finger, this finger
doesn't know. And if you study biochemistry, as I've done, you'll
find there's whole sets of systems in the body, each of them
independent of the other.
So if it was "my" body
you would know everything about it. But you don't know. So the body
is not self, the body is not an I, a my or a me.
Now if it
was, you get a tooth, the tooth ache comes....the tooth doesn't say
to the body "Can I have permission to have a toothache?' It just
happens, like rebel.
You cut your finger the blood comes
out....finger doesn't say "Is it alright if I get cut?"
You have no control over your body because it is not a
self.
If it was a self, if your body was your self you would
make it perfectly healthy, unsmelly, perfectly beautiful and the
women would look like Marilyn Monroe. Do you want to look like
Marilyn Monroe? Who's your idol? Bridgit Bardot? What? A Clydesdale
horse? Who?
Mary's my idol...responded one student. (real
name replaced for privacy)
Mary's your idol. Well if you had
control over your body you would look like Mary, and there'd be two
of you, and I'd look like Jack Nicholson. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
I'm starting to look like him, look. I'm getting thin ... is this
right?
He's got a pot and going bald. Am I going bald?
So
if your body was your self, you wouldn't want to have a body that
aches, gets toothache, coughs, splutters, and you wouldn't have a
body that snot comes out of your nose, and urine comes out of you.
You'd make a beautiful body. So the body is anatta, not a permanent
self. Also it changes, changes, and because it can ache or pain if
you grab it with your mind, if you don't grab it with your mind you
won't feel pain, but its subject to birth, subject to death.
So
by meditation on your body you come to one discovery....the body,
which in Pali is rupa, body or form, rupa anicca, that means
impermanent, it changes, it won't stay forever, it will die, dukkha
meaning unsatisfactory or troublesome or a torment or annoyance or,
dukkha is a Pali word and anatta, is not a permanent self.
Well
by meditating like this, this is a, this is already on the way to the
cemetery.
When it aches I don't feel pain much because I
don't grab my body. You'd say, “Well what do you expect from a
dead corpse?” Tooth ache come, hair fall out, teeth fall out,
grow old, grow ugly, “What do you expect from a dead
corpse?”
You expect it to be beautiful. And therefore
the mind, the ego mind stops worrying.
Now if you had all the
time you've spent this life combing your hair, brushing your teeth,
lipstick, da, da, da, clothes, making the body beautiful. If you had
all that time available it would be like a bonus... you'd have
another 30 years on your life. You were a model, weren't you? How
many man hours or woman hours did you put into that body? And here's
your walking corpse on the way to the cemetery. It's still hanging
together all right. Right?
So you see when you understand
something perfectly, it takes that trouble off your mind and then the
mind has more time to consider what's important. Now what is
important is to train the mind. Not the body. Body doesn't need to be
trained. What's the use of training a corpse? Just a waste of
time.
So because human beings born and die, animals are born
and die, heavenly beings are born and die, hell beings are born and
die. There is no permanent birth that you can hold on to. So the
Buddha found that out, and he wanted to find how to do and he found
the method. He got nirvana.
But the main thing is to meditate
on your body and remove the ego attachment to your body. That is the
first step. When you've done that thoroughly then you can start to
learn how to train the mind. But while your body is always getting in
the way you've got to meditate a lot on your body to understand
that.
So because everyone loves their body, you undertake a
precept no killing. Not anything. A mosquito loves its body, you kill
it - pain. If you cause pain to another being you get illness. You
stop killing, you stop harming. Its alright to eat meat. You can buy
dead meat from a butcher. The Buddha ate meat, but he didn't kill. No
killing. It's the butcher who gets the kamma, not you. You can't get
the kamma from someone else. You can only get the kamma of your
actions.
So the first thing is one precept you can deduce from
your own mind. No being likes to be killed. Therefore one precept. No
killing. No being likes to be lied to. You wouldn't like to be lied
to. No lying. No being likes to be robbed from or stolen or conned.
No stealing. Married men, married women, don't like their wives,
husbands to have sex on the side. No adultery, no sexual misconduct
if you know. And also since the ultimate goal is to train the mind to
be bright and clear, no intoxicants that cloud the mind. Which means
no alcohol, no grass, no marijuana, no heroin. You could give me a
list as long as your arm, whatever. Right.
So five precepts.
The kind Venerable just, we did in Pali. Recollect five precepts
regularly and then that moderates your ego behavior. See the ego will
steal, lie, say stuff you Jack, I'm alright and trample over
everything. And it doesn't know that that kamma will shorten a life,
make for sickness, make for poverty, make for less. So you've got to
keep clarifying the mind because it doesn't know.
See there's
probably only about, maybe one person in 50,000 in Australia who keep
five precepts. So what happens is we get old and sick, and die ....
What happens is you find just by observing the reality that
everything is deteriorating. So you clean your house, everything's
clean, within a week it's dirty.
The dust blows in.
Now,
when... If you get food, it's fresh, you'll leave it, it goes bad,
you can't eat it.
When you observe just the simple things
around you, if you've done any physics you know it's the third law of
thermodynamics, which is a physics law which says:
"Chaos
increases as a function of time."
That's one way of
expressing the law of entropy. In other words disorder is the natural
consequence, or all systems run to disorder.
So for example,
sugar is crystallized, you put it in tea, it goes to liquid. You
don't observe the sugars come out and recrystallize. You have to put
a lot of energy to recrystallize sugar.
So what happens is,
and it's even in physics, what it says if you don't tend to things
they deteriorate. Now until you know that, if you don't tend to your
mind it deteriorates.
So, by neglect you can't say “She'll
be right mate.” Because she won't be right. Because everything
is impermanent...changing, changing, changing.
So as a
function of time, things deteriorate. You have to put a lot of energy
to make things get better.
So, in other words, each day your
body basically, for most people, gets worse and then gets better.
Each day your mind gets better. Now even western psychologists know
that in the first one year of life there's more learning done than in
most of your life.
Because in the first year or so you learn
major skills like learning how to walk, learning how to talk. Major
learning skills.
Young children can pick up a language by the
time they're four, and if you try to learn a new language when you're
adult you struggle with it. So basically, you're deteriorating from
the day you're born, that's what it really amounts to.
However,
there's no law that says you can't do something about it. Now, what
do you do about it, what do you (do) about making your IQ increase?
If you've seen the averages the IQ curves deteriorate very rapidly
with age.
So by forty or fifty mostly people's IQs have
dropped thirty or forty points. However, if you cultivate your mind,
you'll go against the stream of the averages and you'll get brighter.
Because of past kamma, I had a very high IQ as a kid, very
high. And if I bothered to do an IQ test I'd be well above the
average now.
Now what is it that you do? Remember, you've got
one asset...your ability to understand things. For example if you
couldn't understand mathematics there could be an error on your bank
account, you wouldn't pick it up. It cost you money.
So,
you've got to, until you get to the position where you know what's
what sum, and know what to cultivate and what not to cultivate. If
you had some bad land, say they there was salt in the soil, you had
some good land, you wouldn't waste your energy and effort cultivating
the bad things, you'd spend your effort cultivating the good things.
So until you untangle where you're at, until you actually
start somewhere, and you make a vow and you say I'm sick of being
stupid, I want to be intelligent. I'm sick of being unhappy, I want
to find the path that makes me happy. I'm sick of being robbed or
bashed or raped or killed or whatever you want to say. I want to get
to a better happiness. And I want to know why it happens.
Now
once you say I want to know why things are like they are, then you're
interested in one thing only, you're interested in the truth of
what's what. Then you say, well who knows the truth of what's what?
So you can go and test people out. You can say, you could run
around and do a survey. You could say to people, “Could you
tell me why people are born, and birth is suffering?” Remember
it's a big trauma being born. “Could you tell me why birth is
suffering, living's some suffering, old age, sickness and death is
suffering, can you tell me why that happens?”
Now, if
you go and ask most people, like an answer like "that's the way
it is", is not an answer. So you've got to understand, do things
happen from causes, or do things just happen for no reasons at all?
Until you know that everything happens driven by causes you're
getting nowhere.
So you've got to understand good causes make
happiness, bad causes make unhappiness. But if you mistake a bad
cause thinking it will bring happiness, and you're wrong, it'll soon
show up, the error will soon show up and you'll be unhappy.
So
druggies think drugs are happiness. In a short time they find out
they are in pain. They made an error, they mistook something
unwholesome, a cause of misery, and took it for a cause of happiness.
Then their IQ deteriorates, their health deteriorates, everything
deteriorates. Sometimes the deterioration is so rapid, so fast,
they're dead. And that's that.
So there's no time, because a
human life isn't all that long. There's no time to muck around. Now,
this is hearsay for most of you, but you've had an infinite number of
lives in the past and every one of them has been a dud. You've learnt
nothing in an infinite time, because you still don't know whats what.
So you, if you think there's nothing to be learnt you'll
never learn. So you've got to do like a stocktake and say "What
do I really know?" Well, if you observe it you know your
unhappiness, you know that you haven't been perfectly happy. And then
you go and talk to other people and find out they're not happy.
Now
that for most people is where the investigation stops, they don't
want to know about it...they don't continue on. So is there a path or
isn't there a path that leads you to happiness? That's what you want
to know.
So I've met people who are perfectly happy, and I
know what caused it because I've talked to them about it. And
although it's not apparent to you, I can tell you this without a lie,
I have more happiness in one day of my life than this whole room full
of people have had in their whole lifetime.
So I'm very happy,
and I know why that's so. And I'm not going to tell you! Oh, that's
not right, I'm your teacher. Yeah.
So I'm not going to tell
you. You think water will bring you happiness.
Well, suck it
and see.
Well, where did your misery go? Does it work?
Does
it work?
Have, more, never had enough!
Does it work?
Does it work?
Alright, well what you do, if you think that
water causes happiness, get it in bottles and gallons, stand on the
street corner and say happiness! happiness! you want happiness! and
they say yeah. I have here some water, sir or madam, and I'll sell
you this bottle of water for a hundred and fifty dollars and see how
many sales you make.
But remember, there's the fair trading
act. If it doesn't work, they come and sue you. If drinking water
made happiness, fish would be happier than human beings. So if you
thought like that, you'd generate the causes for taking birth as a
fish. Then you'd be eaten by another fish.
Well, is your
happiness complete now? That's it then?
"No, I need some
more" said one of the students.
Never had enough. And
then with that you'll never need any more water for the rest of your
life. You'll have had enough then. No more water?
You got
happiness now?
So your happiness is complete now. You got
complete happiness now?
"No" replied the
student.
Well, how are you going to get complete happiness?
Drink more water?
How are you goin to do it? What do you do
now, you've tried that. What are you going to do now? Eat
chocolate?
"No just stop being greedy" said the
student.
Starting when?
"Next year" came the
response.
And when will the result show? If you stop being
greedy next year how long will the result take, before you see a
result?
It would take about a hundred world cycles for the
results to show. So be patient. It works, but it takes a while for
the results to show.
Anyone else got any theories about this
happiness business?
Of course you've got millions of them
because that's what you've been doing all of your life. You've been,
you see the mind is seeking to be happy, it's never seeking misery,
unless you're a play actor.
So every single action you did
this life was seeking happiness. But the trouble is, it didn't work.
Bad luck. Didn't work.
So what are you goin to do now?
"Practice the Dhamma" said the student
How
do you know that'll bring you happiness? What evidence is
there?
You've met enlightened people. You're one of the few
girls in Australia who have met an enlightened being, that arahant.
He's happy? Sometimes he looks like this. Good! Good! But his mind is
perfectly happy, you know that don't you?
How long has he been
practicing?
Well, I'll tell you the last time I met him was
one world cycle ago. That's a long time ago. A world cycle's about
ten with thirty seven naught million years. That's when I met him
last, and we were both monks under one of the earlier Buddhas. So I
know, since he was a monk, a world cycle ago, he's been practising a
world cycle.
How long have you been practicing Buddha Dhamma ?
"As far as I know about six years" said the
student.
Well. Oh !! ...Well do you want to hear the good news
or the bad news first? Which do you want? What do you want to hear ?
Keep practising for another world cycle, then you might end up as a
Buddhist monk and keep practising for another world cycle, you might
become enlightened. If you practice very strongly, it mightn't take
that long.
If you don't practice, you might be wandering
around for the next two hundred and twenty world cycles suffering,
suffering, which isn't much.
Whatever you like.
So,
any other theories of happiness ?
When you go to school and
you see other people talking with other people and they're not
talking to you, you get jealous, that is jealousy. That's a type of
practice.
I'm not putting you down , but because you're a
woman, women are very good at jealousy. They don't have to cultivate
it much, they're, it's a natural skill they've got.
And
what's the result of jealousy? That you have no authority, in other
words you always work under a boss, you never can get to a high, high
job position. Never get to like a managing director.
That's
why women, there's not many, there's a few women managing directors
in Australia. But that's why, in essence, most of the top jobs where
people practise authority, there's some exceptions, like the Prime
Minister of England's a woman. The Prime Minister of India before the
present one, she got shot, she was a woman.
When Sri Lanka
had independence under the British the first Prime Minister of Sri
Lanka was a woman. But broadly, in most countries, the men are
running the, they are in the positions of authority. If you want a
position of authority you should never be jealous. Now the causes,
the casual chain of that outcome you can find in your meditation, if
you meditate. So jealousy is an unpleasant feeling when you have it,
but it has enormous effect on your future job chances.
Now
one way you could do it, I don't recommend this, is to intensify your
jealousy and see what happens. But I don't recommend that because the
pain will be too much.
So, the antidote to jealousy is a
cetasika, which is wholesome mind, which is called sympathetic joy.
When someone achieves something good, you feel happy for them and
that's abnormal by most people's standards because they,... envy is
another problem. Hate, you know. There are negative minds.
You
can't learn anything high in the Dhamma till you've tidied up some of
these things. It's just like you couldn't do university mathematics
if you couldn't pass HSC mathematics at about a ninety percent level.
You'll fail, because you haven't got the background. So you've got
to, you've got to stop being sheepish, you've got to hurry up and
find out the path to happiness.
And since everyone in the
world's falling around, having a hard time, to a lesser or greater
degree, it's obviously, if you find a miserable person you don't say
to them, “Excuse me miserable person, could you tell me how to
get great happiness?” Because if they knew they would be happy.
So you've got to look very carefully. Sometimes you see
people with the outward form of happiness. You walk up to someone and
say, “Ah, you look happy”.
"Ah, yeah man I'm
happy".
"What's the secret?"
"Oh, I
drank four bottles of whisky today".
So you come back
and watch them the next morning and they wake up with a hangover and
you say, what happened to your happiness now?
So you've got to
pursue in your mind not just a short term fix. We're talking about
happiness that never comes to an end, stability of mind happiness.
How do you do it?
Well that's the problem. Meditate and find
out, now!
Thank you very much.
The MP3 file and
transcript of the original recorded teachings read on today's program
will be available online at www.edharma.org during February 2005.
Today's radio script is available at website
www.bdcublessings.net.au.
May you make the causes for true
happiness.
May you come to see the reality of your happiness.
May you be well and happy.
May all beings be well and
happy.
The script was transcribed, prepared and edited by
Julian Bamford, Frank Carter, Leanne Eames, Evelin Halls, Anita
Hughes, Leila Igracki, Alec Sloman, Lainie Smallwood and Amber
Svensson.
References:
John D. Hughes Collection Recorded
Dhamma Teachings. Transcription Of Dhamma Teachings
Recording
Title: How Do You Get Happiness?
Tape 5, Side 2
Teacher: John
D. Hughes
Date of recording: 26/6/88
Transcribed by: Alec
Sloman
Checked by : Frank Carter 6/1/05
CD Reference
26_06_88T5S2A
File Name: 26_06_88T5S2A_JDHtranscribe.rtf
5
Day Meditation Course
26 June 1988, 7.18pm
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