A Monk's Guide To Happiness Quotes

A myth we have believed throughout our lives is that we have to ‘get’ happiness, and if we can just get the external details of our lives right, we will be happy. This is not happiness, it is a form of enslavement.

When you run after your thoughts, you’re like a dog running after a stick. But if you throw a stick for a lion, he turns around and looks at who threw it. You only throw a stick at a lion one time. Be like the lion.

One day the Dalai Lama received a visit from a monk arriving from Tibet after spending twenty-five years in Chinese labor camps. His torturers had brought him to the brink of death several times. The Dalai Lama talked at length with the monk, deeply moved to find him so serene after so much suffering. He asked him if he had ever been afraid. The monk answered: “I was often afraid of hating my torturers, for in so doing I would have destroyed myself.” A few months before she died at Auschwitz, Etty Hillesum wrote: “I can see no way around it. Each of us must look inside himself and excise and destroy everything he finds there which he believes should be excised and destroyed in others. We may be quite certain that the least iota of hatred that we bring into the world will make it even more inhospitable to us than it already is.

There have been many times you have been drinking tea and didn't know it, because you were absorbed in worries . . . . If you don't know how to drink your tea in mindfulness and concentration, you are not really drinking tea. You are drinking your sorrow, your fear, your anger—and happiness is not possible.

Monk

people in our lives represent a reflection of some aspect of ourselves. So if a person changes on the inside, their external world must also change. In fact, I was fully aware that I was the cause of my recent

Is there a difference between meditation and mindfulness? In modern times, meditation has in some way been rebranded as mindfulness to make it more accessible from a deeper perspective when, in fact, they are two important aspects of one system of training. Meditation is where we sit down to train our minds using specific techniques. Mindfulness is how we bring our minds back from distraction during the meditation session.

monkey living inside a house. There are five windows, which represent our five senses. The monkey, which represents our consciousness, rushes around inside and keeps looking out of different windows. If you were standing outside the house, it might appear as if there were five monkeys, because the monkey flits about so fast, its face quickly appearing at each window.

I’ve found that many people seek a kind of happiness which is a fleeting sensation: a ‘high’ – an injection-like bolt of energy to the heart. Yet this never seems to last, and when they no longer experience that high, they crave it again.

In my monastery, as in all those belonging to the Zen tradition, there is a very fine portrait of Bodhidharma. It is a Chinese work of art in ink, depicting the Indian monk with sober and vigorous features. The eyebrows, eyes, and chin of Bodhidharma express an invincible spirit. Bodhidharma lived, it is said, in the fifth century A.D. He is considered to be the First Patriarch of Zen Buddhism in China. It might be that most of the things that are reported about his life have no historical validity; but the personality as well as the mind of this monk, as seen and described through tradition, have made him the ideal man for all those who aspire to Zen enlightenment. It is the picture of a man who has come to perfect mastery of himself, to complete freedom in relation to himself and to his surroundings—a man having that tremendous spiritual power which allows him to regard happiness, unhappiness, and all the vicissitudes of life with an absolute calm. The essence of this personality, however, does not come from a position taken about the problem of absolute reality, nor from an indomitable will, but from a profound vision of his own mind and of living reality. The Zen word used here signifies "seeing into his own nature." When one has reached this enlightenment, one feels all systems of erroneous thought crushed inside oneself. The new vision produces in the one enlightened a deep peace, a great tranquility, as well as a spiritual force characterized by the absence of fear. Seeing into one's own nature is the goal of Zen.

I once asked a monk how he found peace. “I say ‘yes,’” he’d said. “To all that happens, I say ‘yes.’” [7]

I think that all that time I’d spent accepting the fact that I was already dead made me sort of a walking zombie among the living back home. Every person I looked at I would see as horribly disfigured, shot, maimed, bleeding, and needing my help. In some ways it was worse than being in Iraq, because the feelings were not appropriate to the situation and because I no longer had my buddies around to support me emotionally. I spent a good deal of time heavily dependent on alcohol and drugs, including drugs such as Clonazepam prescribed by well-meaning psychiatrists at the VA, drugs that were extremely addictive and led to a lot of risky behavior. However, I still had a dream of learning how to meditate and entering the spiritual path, a dream that began in college when I was exposed to teachings of Buddhism and yoga, and I realized these were more stable paths to well-being and elevated mood than the short-term effects of drugs. I decided that I wanted to learn meditation from an authentic Asian master, so I went to Japan to train at a traditional Zen monastery, called Sogen-ji, in the city of Okayama. Many people think that being at a Zen monastery must be a peaceful, blissful experience. Yet though I did have many beautiful experiences, the training was somewhat brutal. We meditated for long hours in freezing-cold rooms open to the snowy air of the Japanese winter and were not allowed to wear hats, scarves, socks, or gloves. A senior monk would constantly patrol the meditation hall with a stick, called the keisaku, or “compassion stick,” which was struck over the shoulders of anyone caught slouching or closing their eyes. Zen training would definitely violate the Geneva Conventions. And these were not guided meditations of the sort one finds in the West; I was simply told to sit and watch my breath, and those were the only meditation instructions I ever received. I remember on the third day at the monastery, I really thought my mind was about to snap due to the pain in my legs and the voice in my head that grew incredibly loud and distracting as I tried to meditate. I went to the senior monk and said, “Please, tell me what to do with my mind so I don’t go insane,” and he simply looked at me, said, “No talking,” and shuffled off. Left to my own devices, I was somehow able to find the will to carry on, and after days, weeks, and months of meditation, I indeed had an experience of such profound happiness and expanded awareness that it gave me the faith that meditation was, as a path to enlightenment, everything I had hoped for, everything I had been promised by the books and scriptures.

Remember Who God Is Calling God “Father” is dismissible today. It rolls off the tongue as unconsciously as the lyrics of “Happy Birthday” as you carry a candlelit cake to the dinner table. It’s become just cheesy enough to edge past in search of some more sophisticated insight from Jesus in the lines that follow. Worse yet, for some its use is grouped in with a centuries-long patriarchal history of male superiority and female oppression. But the disciples likely gasped when Jesus said it. The temple that served as the training ground for their prayers had taught them to pray with supreme reverence. The grounding text for the Jewish people’s understanding of God was the book of Exodus—when the Lord appeared to the people in the form of a cloud by day and fire by night.6 The big question in ancient days wasn’t, “Does God exist?” It would be foolish to ask such a question. “Of course God exists! Open your eyes, man! He’s the cylindrical pillar of fire stretching from the desert floor into the night sky and serves as our trail guide!” Instead, the existential question in ancient days was, “Is God knowable?” Because a pillar of fire doesn’t provoke doubt, but neither does it provide intimacy. These disciples knew a God of cleansing rituals and animal sacrifices, a God of ten plagues and blood on the doorpost, a God who parts seas and floods the earth, a God with a heavy hand of deliverance and a heavy hand of judgment—awesome in power but hard to get to know. Jesus did nothing to diminish the reverence, nothing to minimize the power of God. Jesus made that powerful God knowable.

In zazen, leave your front door and your back door open. Let thoughts come and go. Just don't serve them tea.” Read in: A Monk's Guide to Happiness: Meditation in the 21st Century by Gelong Thubten

An ancient tale tells of a novice who asked an enlightened monk to reveal the secret of happiness. The monk told him, “I eat, and I walk and I sleep.” When the novice replied that he also did these things, the monk replied, “When I eat, I eat. When I walk, I walk. When I sleep, I sleep.