In one of his Buddhist Geeks interviews from a few years ago, Kenneth Folk talks about how the mainstream Buddhist culture as practiced in the meditation centers was focused on making great human beings, and that he and others in the hardcore/pragmatic movement wanted to change the conversation to talk about technologies of awakening and getting the actual thing done.
Now that admirable progress has been made on this front - to the point where we have an internet forum now where lots of stream-winners (and beyond) are talking about their experiences and giving advice, to the point where stream-entry appeared in the New York Times a few weeks ago - perhaps we could change the conversation again and give more attention to the wide, complex topic of human happiness.
Last year, Thanissaro Bhikkhu gave a talk,
Equanimity Is Overrated, in which he went after the idea, made popular by MBSR and books like Tara Brach's
Radical Acceptance, that the key to ending unhappiness/stress was to place one's bare attention on the present moment and take everything that happens in an equanimous way. According to Thanissaro, there are two problems with the equanimous approach to happiness:
1. Equanimity is not the summum bonum of Buddhist practice. Nibbana is. Equanimity is merely a tool (amongst many) for getting there.
2. The Buddha offers many active ways we can deal with stress, not just passive acceptance or treating everything equally. Thanissaro then goes on to offer some of the Buddha's suggested techniques, such as working with the breath or fabricating a more positive experience using the power of thinking.
(And besides, equanimity is a fabricated state, too. Happiness, according to the Buddha, comes from reaching the unfabricated, which we accomplish by fabricating in a particular, skillful way.)
But the Buddha's message in the suttas is but one of many. It's striking - maybe even a bit overwhelming - how many spiritual messages of happiness there are out there. "Do X if you want to be happy." "Don't do Y if you want to be happy." Then you open another book, and there's a completely different message. And then you think you're following a particular path - like the Buddha's - only to find out that what you're doing is something else, so there's anxiety about not being authentic enough, and so you're told to just do "whatever works", but since you've never actually sat down to think about what it is you really want to accomplish and why, the injunction to "just practice" can actually lead to more unhappiness, not less.
I'm starting to come up with a new approach to cut through all of this: Find someone who has realized the change you want to realize, and learn everything from that person. There are a lot of problems with this approach, but it simplifies things. All you need to know is what you want and to find someone who has done it. Maybe that's not an easy thing to do, but it is simple. You don't have to bother with "what did the Buddha really mean?" or "what's authentic?" Just find someone who seems happy in the way you want to be happy, and copy what they did. If the ideal of the tradition you're working in is a monk, then you had better want to be much more like a monk than you are, because that's where the practice leads. If that's not what you want, then you should do something else.
What do you think?