Authentic Happiness

Recently I've been reading Martin Seligman's book Authentic Happiness. Seligman is a psychologist (as opposed to a psychotherapist) which is to say that he is a scientist who studies the psyche. Psychology typically focuses on dysfunction and negative emotions, but Seligman had a change of heart about 10 years ago and started studying positive emotions, and has developed what he calls "Positive Pscyhology".

Something that has stood out for me is Seligman's summary of what scientific (ie controlled, double blind etc) studies have shown is the importance of nature and the environmental factors, and in particular the way past experience, especially childhood experiene, impacts on the adult psyche. Freud famously associated adult unhappiness (I'm going to use this term very loosely!) with childhood unahppiness - the events of our childhood, so the theory goes, shape the person that we are. This approach assumes that we are all born as a tabula rasa on which events write out the person that we will become.

And so eventually, after decades of just accepting this on face value - because after all it sounds quite reasonable doesn't it? - some psychologist went looking for the effect. They studied children, followed them into adulthood, and most interestingly searched out twins that had been raised apart, and adopted children. And what they found is the events, the traumas even, of childhood are actually very poor predictors of adult success and happiness. Seligman says: "The major traumas of childhood may have some influence on adult personality, but only a barely detectable one. Bad childhood events, in short, do not mandate adult troubles". [Authentic Happiness p.67]. The studies seem to show that rather than events and upbringing (ie nuture), our response to past events is highly correlated to how our parents responded, suggesting a genetic (ie nature) link. This is reinforced by stydying mono-zygotic twins raised apart who are always more alike to each other than to other siblings however they were raised, and by studies of adopted children who are always more like their birth parents than their adopted parents.

This genetic link is important because it is how we respond to our memories, how we think, reflect on, and consider, our memries which is a strong conditioning factor in whether we are happy or not. We are born with a predisposition to dwell on the past in positive or negative ways. However Sleigman's whole book is predicated on the premise that it is possible to change this response. Scientific studies, again, show that it is possible to recognise that dwelling on painful past events is causing us to suffer, and that by changing our focus - Seligman highlights the importance of gratitude for instance - we can change our experience of that past and be happier. So depsite being born with certain tendencies we have the capacity to over-ride these and substitute more positive tendencies.

Now this rave is written by a Buddhist and with Buddhists in mind, and anyone who knows a bit about Buddhism is going to be finding this quite a familiar idea. There's no suggestion that Seligman is a Buddhist, he's working this out from studying people. Interesting, eh?

Seligman goes on to discuss other things that do or don't make for happy people. More money, material possessions, more education, gender, class and geography are poor predictors of happiness. Some of the poorest people in the world report being no less happy than some of the richest, although there is some geographical variation in this: the poor in the third world, and typically happier then the poor in the first world.

One factor which is a good predictor of happiness is religosity. Religious people do tend to be happier, and the more religious they are the happier they report themselves to be. There is some objective evidence for this as well since they tend to be healthier and more long lived, and to have lower levels of "mental illness". So why should religious people be more happy? It turns out to be related to hope. Religious people aremore optimistic about the future - and isn't a lot of religion aimed at this? Buddhism too is soteriological and teleological in it's outlook. We practice in order to experience less suffering, in order to have more meaningful life. And we achieve it, so we are happier. Well more or less and on average anyway.

This aspect of hope is one that interests me and one that I'd like to come back to at some point. Because one school of Buddhist thought suggests that thinking about the future at all is counter productive and that we just need to live in the present moment and be fully accepting of whatever is happening. Pema Chodron, perhaps a little tongue in cheek, goes so far as to suggest that we adopt the aphorism: Abandon hope [in When Things Fall Apart]. Although I rate the Ven Pema highly, I'm not so keen on this approach. I think if there is something we can reasonably do about our pain and suffering then we should go ahead and do that. Simply staying in pain and being equanamous about it seems eminently impractical. If you are on fire it makes more sense to jump in a lake, than to stand there reflecting that from the ultimate point of view there is no fire and no pain (or whatever).

Anyway I'm enjoying Authentic Happiness. The book is backed up by a good website where you can take the myriad psychological tests that appear in the book, and it keeps track of your responses over time to see if things do actually change. His other book Learned Optimism also sounds intriguing.

Studying the Dharma

Today I want to look at some aspects of the study of the Dharma. This is one of my main practices, and one of my favourite acitivities. Study as a practice has both great benefits and great pitfalls. Studying texts tends to be seen as a poor substitute for 'real practice', but I want to try to show that this is poorly informed.

Buddhism is very much a heterodox tradition, full of contradictions and different approaches. Without an historical perspective on the development of Buddhism it is difficult to make sense of these contradictions. So for instance I can't take seriously the statements of successive Buddhist sects which suggest that all other sects teachings are merely provisional and that this new teaching is the "True Teaching of the Buddha". I think of this as not taking the tradition on its own terms. In terms of outlook I am in the Mahayana camp, informed by the Vajrayana, but in terms of how I actually practice I am what has been called, rather rudely, a Hinayanist. If I bought into the various Mahayana or Vajrayana critiques of early Buddhist practices then I would probably feel a bit insecure. But I do not accept those critiques because having looked at the Mahayana critique, for instance, I can see that it is aimed at a caricature, and that later Buddhist writers had no idea about how the early Buddhists actually practiced. Similarly with the Vajrayana's claim that their teachings were delivered by the Buddha himself, but only to disciples of superior ability, it seems clear that this cannot have been the case. Later Buddhism was the product of interaction with other religious traditions both within and without India. In India this was the norm - traditions heavily influenced each other, cults were assimilated (as they were by the Greek and Romans), and especially after about 800 BCE exploration was encouraged.

So here we are in the present with all these stories, practices, and cultural presentations of the Buddha's Dharma. One approach in the West has been to adopt a sectarian appraoch - to take on Zen, or Tibetan, or Theravadin, Buddhism holisbolis. On the other hand some people try to look critically at the traditions and to take what seems useful, and to adapt it to the present time and place. This seems to me to be the best approach. Otherwise we loose sight of the way the presentation of the Dharma has, sometimes radically, changed over the centuries and mistake one particular form of it as being superior to the others when it may simply be different. My inclination is not to accept any practice as being superior to any other practice. So when a Tibetan Lama tells me that the instructions for painting thangkas were given by Shakyamuni Buddha and cannot be deviated from, I have to weigh that against archeological evidence that images of the Buddha were not made for several centuries post-parinibbana, and evidence from the books that I have that Tibetan images of the Buddha vary dramatically across time, place and tradition.

When it comes to texts in translation we are in even more difficult territory. I got interested in this area when comparing Stephen Bachelors's translation of the Bodhicaryavatara from the Tibetan version, with Marion Matics' translation from the Sanskrit. Although the general drift of the two was similar, the details vary considerably. We tend to see a text as a static document - both Judeo-christian culture and the various Buddhist traditions encourage this view of texts. But Buddhist texts were usually living, growing documents. The Pali texts were not written down for several centuries and show signs of having been edited even before that time. Pali was not the language of the Buddha, and so they have gone through at least one translation, and manuscripts with significant differences, not to mention copyists errors exist. The Mahayana texts frequently exist in several different versions and there seems to have been a tendency to incorporate more and more material into them, and to restruct the verses and chapters according to schemes unknown.

This situation led me to learn a little Pali and to start to delve into the Pali texts. I realised for instance that there exists no completely satisfactory of the Karaniya Metta Sutta - there is no one translation which manages to convey all the subtleties which lurk in the Pali words, and even the two dozen or so that I have collectively fail to convey certain aspects. Umberto Eco has referred to translation as "a negotiation". It is a compromise between many competing goals. Lately I have been working with translations of Kukai texts. Kukai wrote in an elaborate form of ancient Chinese, but is frequently translated into English from Japanese translations of the original Chinese. In a small number of cases I have two or more translations which I can compare. One translator has gone out of his way to convey the meaning of the texts, and another seems to have stuck to the literal meaning of the words, but is idiosyncratic in his choice of English equivalents. Another seems to find an easy middle way between these two approaches; and yet I am sure that in at least one case his choice of English words is motivated by trying to prove a particular aspect of the thesis which underlies his book, and this skews the meaning towards one that I feel sure was not intended by Kukai. I recommend Yoshito Hakeda's translations if anyone is interested.

So in studying Buddhism we are faced with some major challenges. Buddhists traditions are sectarian and literalist. We face great uncertainty: for instance the margin of error for dates are frequently given in centuries - the birth of the Buddha being a case in point. Texts were once living documents that changed over time and place, were edited by sectarians, and are often only known to us via multiple translations, all of which leaves the 'meaning' very fuzzy. But this is just like life isn't it? What we assume to be essential and permanent turns out not to be so. Through studying with this kind of critical eye we are confronted with the nature of reality, and by immersing ourselves in study we can begin to see things as they really are.