How can one be happy while others still suffer?

lisawhitehare asked you: 

hi sharanam, would value your thoughts on a quote from osho which was just posted by illuminatedbeing. he talks about a complete cessation of sadness through meditation practice. what do you feel about how personal suffering can end alongside the suffering of other beings? many people are in dreadful pain and distress; animals suffering; ecosystems being destroyed by human activity. until this stops, how is happiness possible? surely the suffering of one means the suffering of all? thanks x

I am honored you would ask for my input on the questions you ask. Thank you. I assume this to be the quote to which you refer:

This life that you are living is sorrow, but this is not the only life. This is the life you have chosen. You can live another kind of life: Buddha lived it, I am living it, you can live it. You can live in a totally different way: you can live desirelessly, you can live meditatively, you can live with choiceless awareness. You can live so centered and rooted in your being that no sorrow can remain. No sadness, no misery, no death remains possible; they all disappear. As you become full of light, your life goes through a transformation. This is not the right kind of life that you are living.

First, I would pose some questions to you: What is sorrow, what is sadness, what is suffering? And perhaps more important, what is happiness, what is the deathless?

I would like to think of myself as one who is awakening. I would like to think of us all that way. My particular path suggests that sadness, as a name we have given to a particular complex of sensations and emotions, is very real and will always be a part of the human experience. However, the thoughts that accompany it, which constitute suffering, can certainly be seen for what they are and no longer be a source of such dismay—this is the basic teaching of The Four Noble Truths.

Living beings become ill, experience pain and die. Not one of us escapes this fate. This, in and of itself, is not cause for sorrow. It is the nature of reality. Happiness does not entail a permanent state of bliss, but rather ever deepening love and compassion (literally, suffering with) of which sadness may indeed be a part. The deathless, a word often used for nibbana, is perhaps that place where we are able to embrace all human emotion and experience as gifts and teachers with equal tenderness. Our attachment to that which we consider “pleasurable” and aversion for that which we call “unpleasurable” dissolve, and this is true love. 

See also:

Ariyapariyesana Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 26)

Attending to the Deathless and Emptiness and Pure Awareness by Ajahn Amaro

Mindfulness: The Path to the Deathless by Ajahn Sumedho (PDF or HTML)

(You may also be interested in posts here referring to the bodhisattva, an ideal which I, unlike some, do not find to be in conflict with that of the arahant.)

11 Notes/ Hide

  1. thefrostisallover reblogged this from sharanam
  2. lisawhitehare said: thank you so much for your very thoughtful and helpful reply, and for the links which i will also follow up - thank you again x
  3. sharanam posted this

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