By Master Jingzong
Love for yourself shows in several ways: being happy, embracing joy, and being able to laugh. Try doing these regularly – and being happy ranks as the most important.
Being locked up physically isn’t the end of the world. The real prison is when your heart is trapped by unhappiness. Someone who’s happy can find joy even when confined to a room, but an unhappy person remains miserable even if they’re free to roam around. Their furrowed brows say it all.
Want to know if you’re unhappy? Just look at your brows. When you relax them, happiness follows. How can you be happy with furrowed brows? Each morning when you look in the mirror, relax those brows and be happy.
Happiness blooms like a flower. There’s a floral metaphor to describe happiness: “The heart bursts into joyous bloom.” During the spring season when I visited the Shiquan Temple, I saw beautiful azaleas in full bloom. Seeing these flowers blooming vibrantly energized me. Would they release fragrance, bear fruits, or display their beauty without blooming?
When our hearts remain closed, we cannot reveal the beauty of the practice of Amitabha-recitation, cannot spread its fragrance, and cannot bear the fruit of Buddhahood. Being happy is like a flower in bloom – just as flowers open their petals, so do our hearts open with joy. As Bodhisattva Nagarjuna said, “For those with pure faith, as their lotus flowers bloom, they see the Buddha.” When our faith is pure, as our flowers bloom, we see the Buddha.
I once wrote an essay called “Being Happy.” In it, I said that learning the Buddha Dharma is essentially learning to be happy. In Buddhist terms, we call this learning to awaken the Bodhi mind and aspiring to attain Buddhahood. Being happy and aspiring to attain perfect enlightenment are the same thing. They both grow and expand. And how far can this growth reach? In time, it becomes boundless and infinite.
To practice the Buddha Dharma, we must first learn to be happy. No matter how many Buddhist doctrines we have learned, how familiar we are with the theories of precepts, meditation, and wisdom attainment, these efforts will all be futile if we don’t know how to be happy. Those old ladies who recite Amitabha’s name – the Buddha calls them pundarika (the rare white lotus flowers). Why? When the Buddha sees them being happy like blooming flowers, he rewards them with this name. How does this flower bloom? With water, fertilizer, good soil and sunlight, it opens naturally.
How do we make our hearts bloom with joy? Through hearing the Dharma, reflecting on its meaning and putting it into practice. When the Buddha’s compassionate teachings flow into our hearts like life-giving water, and we’re embraced by his light and warmth, our joy gradually blossoms. Our hearts – once frozen and shriveled in the icy cave of the three domains – slowly come back to life, nourished by the Dharma and warmed by the Buddha’s radiance. Through this, we regain our strength and vitality. After all, the purpose of studying the Dharma is to find true happiness in this very life.
Now that you have already secured your future rebirth in the Pure Land – so why aren’t you happy? Nowadays, look at all of us here – we have no worries over basic needs, and we have the precious gift of Amitabha-recitation. Yet if you’re still unhappy, that’s your own choice – you’re just bringing it on yourself. Think about it – you have every reason and every right to be happy, yet here you are, wallowing in unhappiness. Isn’t that just self-imposed suffering? The practice of reciting Amitabha’s name is meant to bring joy. Let’s all be happy.
Recently, I read a book recommended to me by Master Huijing. It talked about love and laughter. Love speaks for itself, but about laughter – people who laugh freely and openly tend to draw positive energy from the universe. This really rings true to me. When you laugh from your heart, your whole being opens up. The universe is full of energy – like sunlight and air – but if you close yourself off, you can’t receive any of it.
The energy of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas pervades infinite space and the entire dharma realms, and this energy is pure love. If you keep your heart closed off, how can this energy reach you? That’s why we need to learn to laugh and open ourselves to joy. Where does our capacity for joy come from? From Amitabha Buddha. So really, we have no reason not to be happy.
If you’re still unhappy, it’s probably because you’re expecting too much from others. Look at those following other Buddhist paths – even though they haven’t yet resolved the issue of freeing themselves from samsara, they still try to share their love and help others. As practitioners of the Pure Land path, we should be even more generous in sharing our love.
From now on, let’s all pay attention to our inner feelings. If after years of practicing this Dharma path, we’re still walking around gloomy and feeling bitter, not being able to find joy and delight, we need to work on this. Just like doing the clapping exercise while reciting Amitabha’s name, we have to take action – even if it means practicing smiling at ourselves in the mirror. Laughing is better than crying and a smile, even a forced one, is better than a frown.
(Translated by the Pure Land School Translation Team; edited by Householder Fojin)
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Learning the Buddha Dharma Begins with Learning to be Happy
