Is happiness just theoretical?

Happiness is very nice in theory, but how does it translate into practice? As the American psychiatrist Howard Cutler puts it in The Art of Happiness: “I became convinced that the Dalai Lama had learned to live with a sense of fulfillment and a degree of serenity that I had never seen in other people.”- Such an example might seem a little out of our league, but the truth is that as inaccessible as it may seem, the Dalai Lama is definitely not an isolated case. I myself have spent thirty-five years living among not only sages and spiritual masters, but also a number of “ordinary” people whose inner serenity and joy help them to withstand most of the ups and downs of life. These people have nothing further to gain for themselves and are therefore entirely available to others. My friend Alan Wallace relates the case of a Tibetan hermit whom he knew well and who told him, with no pretension whatsoever (he was living peacefully in his hermitage, making no demands on anyone), that he had lived for twenty years in a “state of continuous bliss.”

This is not about marveling over exceptional cases or proclaiming the so-called superiority of one approach — Buddhist, in this case — over other schools of thought. The main lesson I draw from it is this: If the wise man can be happy, then happiness must be possible. This is a crucial point, since so many people believe, in effect, that true happiness is impossible.

The wise man and the wisdom he embodies do not represent an inaccessible ideal, but a living example. It so happens that it is precisely such points of reference that we need in our daily lives so as to better understand what we can become. The point here is not that we need to reject wholesale the lives we are leading, but that we can benefit immensely from the wisdom of those who have elucidated the dynamics of happiness and suffering.

Fortunately, the idea of the happy wise man is alien neither to the Western world nor to the modern world, although it has become a rare commodity. According to the philosopher Andre Comte-Sponville: “The wise man has nothing left to expect or to hope for. Because he is entirely happy, he needs nothing. Because he needs nothing, he is entirely happy” – Such qualities do not fall from the sky, and if the image of the wise man is a little old-fashioned nowadays — at least in the West — whose fault is that? We are responsible for a scarcity that afflicts us all. One is not born wise; one becomes it.

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