Do We Need Suffering in Order to Feel Happiness?
Someone asked me, “Don’t we need a certain amount of suffering in order to feel happiness?” That may be true. Happiness may be something we can feel precisely because we are also capable of feeling unhappiness. In an earlier conversation, I asked whether an ant is happy and whether a single-celled organism is happy. They may not feel the same happiness humans speak of, but living beings may still experience some form of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Satisfaction arises through a change in which a lack is filled, as when thirst is followed by drinking water.
In Buddhist terminology, this resembles the relationship between sukha and dukkha. If dukkha is commonly rendered as suffering, sukha can be described as the joy that comes from satisfaction. Dukkha is the distress that comes from not being satisfied. Imagine a balance with satisfaction on one pan and dissatisfaction on the other. It may tilt slightly or sharply in either direction. What we call joy and suffering may be related to such relative changes: relatively more satisfied, relatively more distressed, relatively more joyful. I cannot claim to know this with certainty, but I do agree to some extent that this relativity plays a role in our experience of happiness and unhappiness.
That does not mean we should deliberately suffer in order to gain joy. Life brings physical and mental pain without our having to manufacture any. No one can remain comfortable and well at all times. Buddhist wisdom is not about creating pain so that it can become the raw material of happiness. It is about not adding needless suffering, not being struck by the second arrow, and not tormenting ourselves.
The Second Arrow We Shoot After the First
The first arrow comes even when we wish to avoid it. We may be walking normally and suddenly be injured in an accident. A car may hit us from behind even though we did nothing wrong, leaving us with a damaged back. We may have worked for years and only just begun to earn money when illness suddenly arrives. Countless causes and conditions in the world intersect, and something we never wanted takes place. That is the first arrow.
The same applies to a reality created by our own wrongdoing. If someone drove under the influence, was caught, lost a role in a television production, and had to pay a large penalty, the act and its consequences have become reality. Responsibility must be taken, and the next question is how to live from there. Yet people pile thought upon thought on top of what happened and continue to punish themselves. They decide that hope is gone and that life is no longer possible, repeatedly shooting the same arrow into themselves. If the suffering grows beyond what they can bear, they may even try to end their life.
I am not saying that all real suffering is merely thought. Accidents, illness, and responsibility for wrongdoing are real. My point is that after the first arrow, there is a second arrow with which the mind keeps stabbing itself. A life in which no first arrow ever lands is impossible, but we can observe the second arrow that we shoot at ourselves. This is the point Buddhism ought to teach.
Is an Unstimulated Daily Life Really the Happiest State?
One viewer said that he regarded an ordinary life without stimulation as the happiest state and was trying not to follow needless desire, suffer, or be struck by the second arrow. I did not immediately agree. Is a life without change or stimulation truly happiness? A state without suffering is, first of all, simply a state without suffering. Does that fact alone make it happiness?
Someone may define the absence of suffering as happiness. The problem begins when that definition is handed to everyone as the answer. Can we be satisfied eating food with no proper seasoning? When people eat something delicious, they experience it as delicious. Even monks prepare temple food carefully and neatly because they want it to taste good, do they not? Taste is stimulation and change. Endless absorption in sensory pleasure can become a problem, but it does not follow that eliminating sensation and stimulation is therefore happiness.
Buddhism, Christianity, and many other religious traditions often speak of asceticism and restraint of the senses. A condition in which we are so dependent on something that we cannot endure its absence certainly needs to be examined. But it is also excessive to dismiss all enjoyment of good food, dance, and song as a delusion about happiness and then declare an unstimulated condition to be happiness. An obsession with ever more expensive meat and stronger flavors may be a problem, but that does not make a life of bland food the correct answer to happiness.
The absence of suffering is the absence of suffering. We cannot simply define it as happiness and impose that definition on everyone.
Why Definitions of Happiness Are Dangerous
I am always cautious when defining happiness. When someone says that they are suffering, I can help examine where that suffering is arising. But if someone declares, “Happiness is the absence of stimulation,” I will call that nonsense. I am not claiming that Venerable Pomnyun necessarily spoke with such a simplistic intention. Thoughts are difficult to convey accurately in words and sentences, and I do not know the full context of his statement. Among the many monks I know, I also regard him as one who speaks less nonsense than most. Even so, if eating delicious food, dancing, and singing are all labeled pleasures mistaken for happiness, while the absence of distress is defined as happiness, we still have to ask what exactly the word happiness means.
One may define happiness as a state unmoved by sukha and dukkha. Yet complete immovability and total absence of stimulation are not possible. It is also strange to tell a person who is suffering now, “Become happy immediately.” Making a single definition of happiness and forcing people into it does not transform their lives. Buddhism is supposed to break concepts apart, yet this would erect another solid concept of happiness and ask people to believe in it.
What I want to suggest is that we look differently at the standard by which we feel happiness. This is not really a matter of artificially lowering our standards. It is a matter of seeing again the conditions we already possess. We do not say every day that we are happy because we can see, smell, or hear. Yet when hearing is lost, we discover what an enormous condition it was simply to be able to hear. My mother can barely hear in one ear, and the hearing in the other has also deteriorated, making conversation difficult. Only when she tried a hearing aid did the condition of “being able to hear,” previously treated as nothing special, become visible.
Pursuing What We Lack and Tormenting Ourselves Because We Lack It
People pay little attention to what they already have and stare only at what is missing. Then they say, “I am unhappy because I do not have that,” and torment themselves. Wanting a romantic relationship is not itself wrong. A man seeking a woman or a woman seeking a man arises within the natural conditions of living beings. Just as flowers bloom and bear fruit, wanting something and moving toward it need not be turned into a sin.
The problem is not pursuing what we want. The problem is repeatedly stabbing ourselves because it is absent right now. A person can meet others and learn how to form a relationship. But if he keeps repeating that everyone else has a partner while he does not, that lacking one makes him defective, he punishes his present self over something that has not yet happened. Before saying that desire must be eliminated, we should ask: am I moving toward what I want, or am I merely punishing myself with the thought that I do not have it?
Dividing people by sect and lineage is connected to the same problem. Belonging to a certain lineage or having studied under a particular teacher does not guarantee awakening. Shakyamuni Buddha did not possess a sectarian pedigree in the modern sense. Awakening is not the closed property of one person. It takes place in the network through which humanity learns and receives influence from one another. If we must give it a name, we could say that all of us belong to the human school.
Does Suffering Continue All Day Long?
To observe ourselves, we must ask very concrete questions. A person who says he suffers because he has no girlfriend does not suffer from that thought throughout his sleep. Does the same suffering continue while he is talking with me, reading a book, or working hard enough to sweat? Is he tormented by not having a girlfriend even while relieving his own sexual desire? If not, the sentence “I always suffer because I have no girlfriend” does not describe the whole of his actual experience.
Looking back on my own life, I rarely tormented myself while asleep. I was not suffering while laughing over comic books in a comic-book shop, and when I ran and sweated on the basketball court, I did not even remember my mother’s nagging. Suffering returned when I left the shop and scolded myself—“Why did I read comics when I should have studied?”—or when I walked home after basketball and remembered what I had failed to do. The suffering of that moment arose not only from an event but also from the words and judgments I directed at myself.
We should therefore stop covering ourselves with the huge sentence “I am suffering” and look at precisely when the suffering begins. In what scene and after what thought did emotion and mood change? What thought had just flashed through the mind? How did the body respond? We need to observe whether suffering is a fixed object that exists at the same intensity all day or a process that arises and disappears within particular thoughts and situations.
Observe Your Own Mind, Not My Answer
The important thing is not to let one’s ears flap in whichever direction another person’s words blow. We must ask ourselves: Why am I not satisfied? Am I truly suffering because I have no girlfriend? Or am I tormented by comparison—others have one and I do not—by the judgment that this absence is wrong, and by the thought that it proves I am inadequate? Unless we directly observe the moment emotion changes, we will merely adopt someone else’s definition of happiness as another belief.
Buddhism is not solved by hearing a few sentences. My words are not the answer either. I have never entered another person’s mind or lived his circumstances for him. I have not dated countless people, married many times, raised hundreds of children, or lived hundreds of lives. I have dated one woman, married once, had one child, and lived only about fifty years. How could such a person possess a complete answer to someone else’s life?
What I can do in a lecture is describe the influences that shaped me, how I observed myself, and what patterns I found in that process. The listener should not copy an answer from my story. The core is observation, doubt, and reflection. If someone says, “This is happiness, so this is how you must live,” we should first recognize that it is the speaker’s definition. If Buddhism is a path that breaks concepts and attachments, we must be wary of constructing another rigid concept called happiness and imprisoning ourselves within it.
To the question of whether suffering is needed in order to feel happiness, I answer that I partly agree, but there is no need to manufacture suffering deliberately. Life sends enough first arrows. What we need to do is observe the moment we ignore the conditions we already have, cling only to what is absent, and shoot a second arrow at ourselves. Instead of believing in a correct definition of happiness, we can ask how satisfaction and dissatisfaction are arising and disappearing in the mind right now. That is where Buddhist practice begins.
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