Happiness

Review: Precious Human Life We have been going through the lam-rim graded stages of the path from the point of view of how they help us to develop a healthy sense of self. We have seen how thinking about the precious human rebirth and realizing how fortunate we actually are...

Finding Inspiration We have looked at the framework from which these teachings about integrating our life derive, and there are just a few more points I want to add before I open it up for questions. This is concerning the term “inspiration.” We have the Sanskrit word...

Review We were discussing the various methods used in Buddhism to strengthen the evolving Buddha-nature factor that we identified within the network of good qualities, namely our innate joy, our ability to experience things with happiness. As you recall, in order to strengthen...

Feelings as Having the Four Aspects of True Suffering As we have seen, the four aspects of true suffering also apply to feelings. All feelings – happiness, unhappiness and neutral – are nonstatic, miserable, devoid of a coarse “me” experiencing them and lack a subtle “me”...

Verses 11 through 14 Verse 11: Living Happily without Unease or Attachments How to Act When We Meet People Even When We Are Living in Seclusion Let me rid myself of hostility and uneasy mental states, and go happily everywhere. Here, Atisha is continuing the discussion...

The Pursuit of Happiness We have two types of happiness, physical happiness and mental happiness, and most of the effort we put into our lives is involved in the pursuit of physical comfort and happiness. In the pursuit of physical happiness and comfort a lot of people engage...

Conversion to Buddhism We’ve been speaking about some of the various difficulties that many people have in working with Buddhism. We’ve seen that it’s very important to have a realistic attitude. In terms of this, one of the pieces of advice that His Holiness the Dalai Lama...

We have done the meditation on the close placement of mindfulness on the body and it might also be helpful to try the meditation of the close placement of mindfulness on the feelings in terms of the noble truth of the true origins of suffering. General View of Feelings as...

Differentiating the Various Aspects of Feelings Adjusting the ten mental factors is an effective means for increasing attentiveness to problems and for enhancing the intention to respond. Several factors, however, may still hamper this response. One of the more troublesome is...

A short introduction to the Buddhist idea of happiness.