On Happiness: some random thoughts
"Perfect happiness is the absence of happiness." Chuang Tzu
"Destroy a man's illusions and you destroy his happiness."
Hubert van Zeller
"The path to happiness lies through the remembering of death." Abdal Hakim Murad
Gautama Siddhartha Buddha, sometimes called the "antinomian" Hindu sage prince of the Shakya clan, had many argumentative and even pesky disciples who never tired of picking Buddha's brain on everything under the sun. The grand sage and prophet of Buddhism answered many, but about some he always remained silent, or hesitant. For example, on the very important issue of the nature of God, Buddha is said to have remained silent or to have discoursed elliptically or symbolically.
In the modern world, particularly in the modern West, where traditional Christianity lost its pull and foot hold in post-Renaissance Europe (although some like the great Mahatma Gandhi have said that "Christianity was a good religion before it went to Europe") many disoriented and discontented people often feel attracted to some aspect, interpretation or sect of this great world religion, especially to Zen Buddhism. Although there are many reasons for that, one that often stands out is that some Western orientalists--- polemists who are usually metaphysically illiterate and who are often the same ones who question and doubt the authenticity of Sufism/Islamic esoterism and think of it as nothing but a bad copy or crude plagiarism of Hindu spirituality or of some other preceding religion--- these ideologues find Buddhism attractive because they think that it is more an "atheistic" social philosophy than a proper, authentically revealed religion like other world religions such as Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. Now, this is of course nonsense since Buddhism is an authentic religion but one which is different in its discourse and in its use of conceptual and spiritual categories, and especially different from the three monotheistic Abrahamic religions. Some Muslims, most recently Hamza Yusuf (2013), have actually written that the Buddha is one of the 124,000 prophets mentioned in the Holy Quran, the prophet named Dhu al-Kifl (a contraction of "Kapila/Kapilavastu", the birthplace of Buddha). To state this point metaphysically, as Seyyed Hossein Nasr and other scholars and sages have done, "God has spoken many times to different peoples and in different tongues..."
But I have digressed from the topic. Inshallah (God willing), some other day I will post on these crucial issues in a more detailed manner. For now, it suffices to say that Buddhism is not "atheistic" as it is presented to be by some people, but it is non-theistic. And there is a world of difference between those two words---atheistic and non-theistic. Or, it is not "God-centric", God as understood in other major religions. What is God in these religions is sometimes called Supreme Reality, or Supreme Consciousness in Buddhism. The Buddhist worldview with its main idea of "dukkha" emphasizes an approach that is geared towards "knowing the very nature of things" ---things as they really are----and is, therefore, not given to defining everything conceptually and conventionally, because every definition is ultimately "a form". And with forms---important and unavoidable as they are--- as every informed Muslim and Jew in particular should know, there is always the possibility, or danger, of "shirk" or "idol worship", of confusing the symbol (ayat) with Reality, of confusing the finger that points to the moon with the moon itself: danger of polytheism. Because the Buddha was often silent or not clear on this issue of the nature of God (as clarity is ordinarily understood), and because Buddhism is an apophatic theology or worldview (negative theology or the metaphysics of tanzih/utter transcendence), does not mean that Buddhism is just another variety of atheism and the Buddha merely an older, browner version or incarnation of Voltaire, Marx or Jean Paul-Sartre!
So, one of the Buddha's rather pesky disciples often asked Buddha this question: "O Great Sage of the Shakya: What is happiness, and, more importantly, what is the way to happiness?" After trying to answer this disciple in ways that he was known for, The Enlightened One finally said this to that disciple: " There is no way to happiness; happiness IS the way."
Chris Jami in his excellent book Killosophy says, "The most fragile, unhappy people destine themselves to live lives of constantly reminding themselves to be happy." The truly happy people are those who don't run after happiness, who don't obsess about it and who have never consciously tried to define it since defining something always means limiting it, reducing it. Defining means giving some form to something. We can, and we often do that, but sooner or later we realize our folly, or at least the wise among us do. Like that other abstraction we call "love", any attempt at defining happiness will always remain partial, even futile. The moment the fish starts thinking about or starts analyzing the water in which it exists, was born into and will die therein, its miseries begin. In a sense, this obsession to "know it all" is a very modern attitude geared towards control and prediction. It is a mindset which tries to demarcate, to define, to categorize or build cages around things since reductionist modernity is nothing if it is not about control. The kind of control that essentially leads to domination and violence, hence unhappiness or wretchedness. The consequences of this obsession with control and domination can be clearly seen in the form of the ecological crisis that stares us in the face.
A truly contented (happy) person is one whose heart is not dead. Life takes every one of us on a unique journey, but what is shared by all those who are on this journey is the mixed experience of both happiness and misery. Since man, according to all pre-modern and traditional perspectives has a hierarchy of realities within him, these experiences are also felt at different levels within man. There is the reality of the Spirit (ar-Ruh), that of the psyche (nafs) and then that of the body (jism) at the lower end of the hierarchy. We experience happiness and sorrow at all these levels. The body and the psyche are in the realm of flux or transience and only the Spirit is the changeless, the uncreated in man. The happiness of the jism and nafs, while real on their own levels, are ephemeral or transitory, here one day and gone the next. According to Islamic philosophers from Farabi, Ghazzali, Suharwardi and all the way to Ibn al Arabi and Mullah Sadra, all have stressed the hierarchy or the gradation of being (wujud) and because of this the different levels of happiness experienced at each level of these realities, from sensual to intellectual and spiritual. And because of this, Islam shares with Buddhism and Hinduism the saying "die before you die" (or "die to the self so that you live in the Self", the fana and baqa). This 'dying before dying' resulting in the attainment of permanent happiness that is not fleeting and not the cause of pain and suffering requires detachment from the world, requires us to die to the world while we are still alive. Or, "to be IN the world but not OF the world" as the famous Sufi saying informs us. The more detached from the world we are, the more we die to the world, the more intense our self consciousness becomes and the more acutely we become aware of true reality of things and that true knowledge of "things as they are" is what gives us lasting happiness.
As in Buddhism, so in Islam, the attachment to transient happiness is actually blamed or held responsible for man's dukkha or suffering in this world. But whereas in the former this is over-emphasized and which is understandable because, as I already mentioned, Buddhism is an apophatic weltanschauung (worldview), or it has a negative theology, such is not the case in Islam where happiness in this world is also valid, its attainment actually encouraged but clearly differentiated from the happiness that man can experience at other, higher levels of being (works such as the "Tehsil e Sa'ada" by Al Farabi and other words by such sages like Al Ghazzali and many Sufis, including those by Sheikh al Akbar Ibn al Arabi all say so ). Worldly happiness must be attained, but real happiness is one which has permanence and does not come to an end with the demise of man's body and psyche at death. For example, it is reflected in the smile of the dying man who attained it while he was still alive. Since the heart is the seat of the Spirit, that smile confirms that the dying person's heart remains alive while they depart from this world. Al- Ghazali has identified this highest form of happiness, this permanent happiness with "knowledge of God".
The Sufis, especially Ibn al Arabi, say, "the truly happy person is one with whom God is pleased". This is the highest form of happiness---spiritual happiness--- where a person, a wayfarer is contented, or who is experiencing "ridhwan" because his Lord is "raadhi" with him. The Muslim belief is that no matter what we have achieved, what positions we have attained and what we have gathered and possessed in worldly terms, we cannot really be happy if Allah is not pleased with us. True happiness will always elude us, will always be out of reach for those of us who forget this. And that is why, one of the best prayers we can gift the pious amongst us with is to say that "may God be pleased with him or her". A famous hadith says, "God loveth those who are content" and, conversely, only those who have the love, fear and knowledge of God are truly content. The Sufi master Ibn Ata Allah al-Iskandari has said: "Often in giving you something He is (in reality) denying you (something), just as He may, in denying you something, be really bestowing a gift upon you." God's loved ones are always aware of this apparently paradoxical hikma and are, therefore, content either way. We are again reminded that this is also because of the knowledge of God by yet another Sufi master, Sheikh Ahmed al Alawi: "He who knows God is disinterested in the gifts of God and he who is negligent of God is insatiable for the gifts of God."
The philosopher sage Seyyed Hossein Nasr tells us that, "a person who is content and with whom God is content, has no fear, fears nothing in this world". People who have been blessed with this (essentially spiritual) contentment transcend fear because "they are God's friends". Nasr further says that faith or iman is a gift of joy from God to us, and that faith and happiness are inseparable. Faith requires "sacrifice and self discipline but results in joy and happiness for the person of faith, who knows that in performing these rites one is doing God’s Will...and thereby experiencing the grace or barakah that issues from the performance of the sacred rites" and that "On the human plane love is often combined with pain and sorrow, but the love of God is inseparable from joy and happiness, even when there is longing and separation." God is the source of all goodness and beauty that is around us and within us, "how can a soul that attains through the love of God, through the attachment to the source of all beauty not be in a state of joy and happiness?" he asks. This happiness that comes through faith is the antidote to all the fears, the doubts and the trepidations we experience in this world, if only man has sincere faith, has tawwakul, he tells us. He continues: "The Islamic saying tawakkaltu ‘alā’Llāh (“I place my confidence in God”), repeated so often in daily life, encourages one to take refuge in the bosom of the Divine in a state of contentment, a state that overcomes and transcends all that causes sorrow and unhappiness in human life in this world." (2014, p. 81)
Man is born with a spiritual yearning that remains with him while he still breathes. It is so because his very substance, his very essence, has kneaded into it the perfume of the Truth, Goodness and Beauty of his Creator. He is, after all, imago Dei (image/form of his Creator). A yearning for return to that origin which is also our end. While we experience the transient happiness of our psyche and body, attaining this permanent happiness that is not followed by sorrow and suffering remains a challenge: "The difficulty lies in attaining permanent happiness in a world that some have characterized as a vale of tears. In Islam, as in other authentic religions, that permanent state of happiness is attained by gaining not the freedom of the passionate self to receive whatever it desires, but freedom from desire and from the passionate self." (Nasr 2014)
Let me end this post which is for the most part an explication of, or commentary on, Seyyed Hossein Nasr's 2014 lecture on the "Islamic Perspective on Happiness" given at Emory University, USA, with his beautiful concluding insights. Says he,
"To attain permanent happiness, we must therefore remember who we really are, where we came from, why we are here, and where we are going. We must detach ourselves from fleeting pleasures and joys and seek permanent joy by attaching ourselves to the spiritual world, which is our original home and the only place where we shall attain permanent happiness. We must die before we die; die to the world here and now in order to gain eternal felicity in the life of the spirit and the intellect understood in its traditional sense....Only through leading a spiritual life do we gain that peace that “passeth all understanding” and attain that abiding happiness for which we were brought into this world and which is our birthright by virtue of our primordial nature ( fitṛah), yet which we have forgotten and have to recall. To be truly happy, we must rediscover who we really are. In this process of rediscovery, even sadness can be a major step towards the attainment of happiness, if this sadness is nostalgia for our original abode in its proximity to the Divine." (Nasr 2014, p. 90)
"The path to happiness lies through the remembering of death." Abdal Hakim Murad
Gautama Siddhartha Buddha, sometimes called the "antinomian" Hindu sage prince of the Shakya clan, had many argumentative and even pesky disciples who never tired of picking Buddha's brain on everything under the sun. The grand sage and prophet of Buddhism answered many, but about some he always remained silent, or hesitant. For example, on the very important issue of the nature of God, Buddha is said to have remained silent or to have discoursed elliptically or symbolically.
In the modern world, particularly in the modern West, where traditional Christianity lost its pull and foot hold in post-Renaissance Europe (although some like the great Mahatma Gandhi have said that "Christianity was a good religion before it went to Europe") many disoriented and discontented people often feel attracted to some aspect, interpretation or sect of this great world religion, especially to Zen Buddhism. Although there are many reasons for that, one that often stands out is that some Western orientalists--- polemists who are usually metaphysically illiterate and who are often the same ones who question and doubt the authenticity of Sufism/Islamic esoterism and think of it as nothing but a bad copy or crude plagiarism of Hindu spirituality or of some other preceding religion--- these ideologues find Buddhism attractive because they think that it is more an "atheistic" social philosophy than a proper, authentically revealed religion like other world religions such as Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. Now, this is of course nonsense since Buddhism is an authentic religion but one which is different in its discourse and in its use of conceptual and spiritual categories, and especially different from the three monotheistic Abrahamic religions. Some Muslims, most recently Hamza Yusuf (2013), have actually written that the Buddha is one of the 124,000 prophets mentioned in the Holy Quran, the prophet named Dhu al-Kifl (a contraction of "Kapila/Kapilavastu", the birthplace of Buddha). To state this point metaphysically, as Seyyed Hossein Nasr and other scholars and sages have done, "God has spoken many times to different peoples and in different tongues..."
But I have digressed from the topic. Inshallah (God willing), some other day I will post on these crucial issues in a more detailed manner. For now, it suffices to say that Buddhism is not "atheistic" as it is presented to be by some people, but it is non-theistic. And there is a world of difference between those two words---atheistic and non-theistic. Or, it is not "God-centric", God as understood in other major religions. What is God in these religions is sometimes called Supreme Reality, or Supreme Consciousness in Buddhism. The Buddhist worldview with its main idea of "dukkha" emphasizes an approach that is geared towards "knowing the very nature of things" ---things as they really are----and is, therefore, not given to defining everything conceptually and conventionally, because every definition is ultimately "a form". And with forms---important and unavoidable as they are--- as every informed Muslim and Jew in particular should know, there is always the possibility, or danger, of "shirk" or "idol worship", of confusing the symbol (ayat) with Reality, of confusing the finger that points to the moon with the moon itself: danger of polytheism. Because the Buddha was often silent or not clear on this issue of the nature of God (as clarity is ordinarily understood), and because Buddhism is an apophatic theology or worldview (negative theology or the metaphysics of tanzih/utter transcendence), does not mean that Buddhism is just another variety of atheism and the Buddha merely an older, browner version or incarnation of Voltaire, Marx or Jean Paul-Sartre!
So, one of the Buddha's rather pesky disciples often asked Buddha this question: "O Great Sage of the Shakya: What is happiness, and, more importantly, what is the way to happiness?" After trying to answer this disciple in ways that he was known for, The Enlightened One finally said this to that disciple: " There is no way to happiness; happiness IS the way."
Chris Jami in his excellent book Killosophy says, "The most fragile, unhappy people destine themselves to live lives of constantly reminding themselves to be happy." The truly happy people are those who don't run after happiness, who don't obsess about it and who have never consciously tried to define it since defining something always means limiting it, reducing it. Defining means giving some form to something. We can, and we often do that, but sooner or later we realize our folly, or at least the wise among us do. Like that other abstraction we call "love", any attempt at defining happiness will always remain partial, even futile. The moment the fish starts thinking about or starts analyzing the water in which it exists, was born into and will die therein, its miseries begin. In a sense, this obsession to "know it all" is a very modern attitude geared towards control and prediction. It is a mindset which tries to demarcate, to define, to categorize or build cages around things since reductionist modernity is nothing if it is not about control. The kind of control that essentially leads to domination and violence, hence unhappiness or wretchedness. The consequences of this obsession with control and domination can be clearly seen in the form of the ecological crisis that stares us in the face.
A truly contented (happy) person is one whose heart is not dead. Life takes every one of us on a unique journey, but what is shared by all those who are on this journey is the mixed experience of both happiness and misery. Since man, according to all pre-modern and traditional perspectives has a hierarchy of realities within him, these experiences are also felt at different levels within man. There is the reality of the Spirit (ar-Ruh), that of the psyche (nafs) and then that of the body (jism) at the lower end of the hierarchy. We experience happiness and sorrow at all these levels. The body and the psyche are in the realm of flux or transience and only the Spirit is the changeless, the uncreated in man. The happiness of the jism and nafs, while real on their own levels, are ephemeral or transitory, here one day and gone the next. According to Islamic philosophers from Farabi, Ghazzali, Suharwardi and all the way to Ibn al Arabi and Mullah Sadra, all have stressed the hierarchy or the gradation of being (wujud) and because of this the different levels of happiness experienced at each level of these realities, from sensual to intellectual and spiritual. And because of this, Islam shares with Buddhism and Hinduism the saying "die before you die" (or "die to the self so that you live in the Self", the fana and baqa). This 'dying before dying' resulting in the attainment of permanent happiness that is not fleeting and not the cause of pain and suffering requires detachment from the world, requires us to die to the world while we are still alive. Or, "to be IN the world but not OF the world" as the famous Sufi saying informs us. The more detached from the world we are, the more we die to the world, the more intense our self consciousness becomes and the more acutely we become aware of true reality of things and that true knowledge of "things as they are" is what gives us lasting happiness.
As in Buddhism, so in Islam, the attachment to transient happiness is actually blamed or held responsible for man's dukkha or suffering in this world. But whereas in the former this is over-emphasized and which is understandable because, as I already mentioned, Buddhism is an apophatic weltanschauung (worldview), or it has a negative theology, such is not the case in Islam where happiness in this world is also valid, its attainment actually encouraged but clearly differentiated from the happiness that man can experience at other, higher levels of being (works such as the "Tehsil e Sa'ada" by Al Farabi and other words by such sages like Al Ghazzali and many Sufis, including those by Sheikh al Akbar Ibn al Arabi all say so ). Worldly happiness must be attained, but real happiness is one which has permanence and does not come to an end with the demise of man's body and psyche at death. For example, it is reflected in the smile of the dying man who attained it while he was still alive. Since the heart is the seat of the Spirit, that smile confirms that the dying person's heart remains alive while they depart from this world. Al- Ghazali has identified this highest form of happiness, this permanent happiness with "knowledge of God".
The Sufis, especially Ibn al Arabi, say, "the truly happy person is one with whom God is pleased". This is the highest form of happiness---spiritual happiness--- where a person, a wayfarer is contented, or who is experiencing "ridhwan" because his Lord is "raadhi" with him. The Muslim belief is that no matter what we have achieved, what positions we have attained and what we have gathered and possessed in worldly terms, we cannot really be happy if Allah is not pleased with us. True happiness will always elude us, will always be out of reach for those of us who forget this. And that is why, one of the best prayers we can gift the pious amongst us with is to say that "may God be pleased with him or her". A famous hadith says, "God loveth those who are content" and, conversely, only those who have the love, fear and knowledge of God are truly content. The Sufi master Ibn Ata Allah al-Iskandari has said: "Often in giving you something He is (in reality) denying you (something), just as He may, in denying you something, be really bestowing a gift upon you." God's loved ones are always aware of this apparently paradoxical hikma and are, therefore, content either way. We are again reminded that this is also because of the knowledge of God by yet another Sufi master, Sheikh Ahmed al Alawi: "He who knows God is disinterested in the gifts of God and he who is negligent of God is insatiable for the gifts of God."
The philosopher sage Seyyed Hossein Nasr tells us that, "a person who is content and with whom God is content, has no fear, fears nothing in this world". People who have been blessed with this (essentially spiritual) contentment transcend fear because "they are God's friends". Nasr further says that faith or iman is a gift of joy from God to us, and that faith and happiness are inseparable. Faith requires "sacrifice and self discipline but results in joy and happiness for the person of faith, who knows that in performing these rites one is doing God’s Will...and thereby experiencing the grace or barakah that issues from the performance of the sacred rites" and that "On the human plane love is often combined with pain and sorrow, but the love of God is inseparable from joy and happiness, even when there is longing and separation." God is the source of all goodness and beauty that is around us and within us, "how can a soul that attains through the love of God, through the attachment to the source of all beauty not be in a state of joy and happiness?" he asks. This happiness that comes through faith is the antidote to all the fears, the doubts and the trepidations we experience in this world, if only man has sincere faith, has tawwakul, he tells us. He continues: "The Islamic saying tawakkaltu ‘alā’Llāh (“I place my confidence in God”), repeated so often in daily life, encourages one to take refuge in the bosom of the Divine in a state of contentment, a state that overcomes and transcends all that causes sorrow and unhappiness in human life in this world." (2014, p. 81)
Man is born with a spiritual yearning that remains with him while he still breathes. It is so because his very substance, his very essence, has kneaded into it the perfume of the Truth, Goodness and Beauty of his Creator. He is, after all, imago Dei (image/form of his Creator). A yearning for return to that origin which is also our end. While we experience the transient happiness of our psyche and body, attaining this permanent happiness that is not followed by sorrow and suffering remains a challenge: "The difficulty lies in attaining permanent happiness in a world that some have characterized as a vale of tears. In Islam, as in other authentic religions, that permanent state of happiness is attained by gaining not the freedom of the passionate self to receive whatever it desires, but freedom from desire and from the passionate self." (Nasr 2014)
Let me end this post which is for the most part an explication of, or commentary on, Seyyed Hossein Nasr's 2014 lecture on the "Islamic Perspective on Happiness" given at Emory University, USA, with his beautiful concluding insights. Says he,
"To attain permanent happiness, we must therefore remember who we really are, where we came from, why we are here, and where we are going. We must detach ourselves from fleeting pleasures and joys and seek permanent joy by attaching ourselves to the spiritual world, which is our original home and the only place where we shall attain permanent happiness. We must die before we die; die to the world here and now in order to gain eternal felicity in the life of the spirit and the intellect understood in its traditional sense....Only through leading a spiritual life do we gain that peace that “passeth all understanding” and attain that abiding happiness for which we were brought into this world and which is our birthright by virtue of our primordial nature ( fitṛah), yet which we have forgotten and have to recall. To be truly happy, we must rediscover who we really are. In this process of rediscovery, even sadness can be a major step towards the attainment of happiness, if this sadness is nostalgia for our original abode in its proximity to the Divine." (Nasr 2014, p. 90)
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