Serenity Now

Mindfulness and Stoicism
vs. Transcendental Bliss: Ananda

by Michael Dolan/B.V. Mahayogi

The Buddha offers relief from suffering. Having distilled suffering as the quintessential problem of human existence, his eight-fold path offers a way out. But, noble as his truths may be, there are other nobler truths above and beyond what the Buddha has given.

Happiness is not considered in Buddha’s eight-fold path. Happiness and sadness are two sides of the same coin. Both are part of the mundane experience of this temporary world. As Krishna says in the Bhagavad-Gita:

मात्रा-स्पर्शास् तु कौन्तेय शीतोष्ण-सुख-दुःख-दाः आगमापायिनो ऽनित्यास् तांस् तितिक्षस्व भारत

mātrā-sparśās tu kaunteya śītoṣṇa-sukha-duḥkha-dāḥ

āgamāpāyino 'nityās tāṁs titikṣasva bhārata

O son of Kuntī, the nonpermanent appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course, are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and summer seasons. They arise from sense perception, O scion of Bharata, and one must learn to tolerate them without being disturbed.”

(Bhagavad-Gita 2.14)

Prabhupāda points out in his purport that, “In the proper discharge of duty, one has to learn to tolerate nonpermanent appearances and disappearances of happiness and distress.”

According to Buddha’s system the desire for happiness is a function of ego. Happiness may occur as the absence of suffering when we give up such desires. But Buddha is not interested in “happiness” as such, but in the problem of ending suffering by expunging desire and ego. As Krishna points out above, mundane happiness is cut from the same cloth as mundane suffering. One who is attached to mundane happiness must suffer mundane distress. So as far as “nonpermanent appearance of happiness and distress,” the Buddha’s policy of nonattachment makes good sense. Dissolving the ego and quieting desire eliminates the tendency to try to enjoy mundane happiness and so helps us to become detached from mundane distress.

In early Western civilization, this position resembles something like the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius. While Stoicism as a life philosophy may have been founded by the Greek scholar Zeno, it is perhaps best remembered for the Meditations written by Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 BC. Stoicism can be summarized as follows:

“Keep calm and practice serenity in both happiness and distress.”

In his Introduction to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius translated by Robin Hard, Christopher Gill puts this in perspective:

“THE Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is a work without parallel among writings surviving from Classical antiquity—and an exceptional work in any age and culture. It is the philosophical diary of a Roman emperor, probably written while he was campaigning in Germany near the end of his life. In short, intense, and often powerful reflections, Marcus tries to articulate his core beliefs and values. Drawing mainly on Stoic philosophy, but formulated in his own way, Marcus finds the resources to help him meet challenges that he is acutely conscious of but which are also universal: facing one’s own approaching death, making sense of one’s social role and projects, looking for moral significance in the natural world.”

Here’s an excerpt from the Mediations of Marcus Aurelius

“Again, one who pursues pleasures as being good and tries to avoid pains as being bad is acting irreverently; for it is inevitable that such a person must often find fault with universal nature for assigning something to good people or bad that is contrary to their deserts, because it is so often the case that the bad devote themselves to pleasure and secure the things that give rise to it while the good encounter pain and what gives rise to that.

And furthermore, one who is afraid of pain is sure to be afraid at times of things which come about in the universe, and that is already an impiety; and one who pursues pleasure will not abstain from injustice, and that is a manifest impiety. But towards those things with regard to which universal nature is neutral (for she would not have created both opposites unless she was neutral with regard to both), it is necessary that those who wish to follow nature and be of one mind with her should also adopt a neutral attitude. Accordingly, anyone who is not himself neutral towards pleasure and pain, or life and death, or reputation and disrepute, to which “universal nature adopts a neutral attitude, commits a manifest impiety.

And when I say that universal nature employs these things in a neutral manner, I mean that, through the natural sequence of cause and effect, they happen indifferently to all that comes into being and whose existence is consequent upon a primeval impulse of providence, by which it set out from a first beginning to create the present order of things, having conceived certain principles of all that was to be, and assigned powers to generate the necessary substances and transformations and successions.”

Marcus Aurelius here makes a noble attempt to promote the idea of a neutral attitude towards pleasure and pain, one that would be welcomed by the enlightened Buddha himself.

The neutral attitude of stoicism is, however, difficult to achieve. It is as far from human nature as the alien composure of Spock, the Vulcan logician of Star Trek. Spock is completely devoid of human emotion. He has neither whimsy nor a sense of humor, and responds only to logic. Krishna suggests a degree of stoicism in the second chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita when dealing with Arjuna’s emotional response to the challenge of battle that confronts him. And yet Arjuna defies this stoicism and questions Krishna further. He wants Krishna to go deeper.

Vaishnavas are not stoics. They understand that the human condition does not revolve merely around the question of suffering, as the Buddha would have it. Krishna is the Supreme Personality of Godhead as the origin of al bliss or pleasure--ananda.

His very name, “Krishna,” means “the highest pleasure,” and it is confirmed in the Vedanta Sutra that the Supreme Lord is the reservoir or storehouse of all pleasure.

Buddha’s determination that suffering is the first and most important principle of human existence is as superficial as the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius.

While suffering may be a part of the problem, pleasure is really the central issue of the human condition. We are all hankering after pleasure. The Vedānta-Sutra defines the nature of the Supreme Reality as Ānanda-mayo 'bhyāsāt (Vedānta-sūtra 1.1.12). Beyond the material reality of space and time, beyond the spiritual reality of consciousness, the ultimate reality is full of ecstasy, bliss, divine pleasure. And the ultimate reality is By Himself and For Himself. He exists only for his own pleasure.

The living entities who emanate from the Supreme reality as rays of sunlight emanate from the sun are not only full of consciousness, they are after happiness. But the happiness of this mundane world is unsatisfactory, being temporal. Only spiritual happiness, which is eternal, conscious, and derived from a relationship with the supreme emporium of ecstasy, Shri Krishna, Reality the Beautiful, can give satisfaction to the individual jiva souls. This eternal satisfaction comes through recognition of one’s eternal nature and through surrender to Śrī Krishna, or śaranāgati.

God, or Reality the Beautiful, is perpetually happy. If the eternally conscious jivas surrender to that reality, associate with the Lord, cooperate with Him and take part in His association, then they also realize themselves as eternal conscious beings endowed with ultimate happiness, or sat-chit-ānanda.

This, then is the thesis of the Bhagavat. The central problem of humanity is not the temporary happiness of this world. The materialists would have us believe that this world is all in all and so we must enjoy the senses before we die. Buddha has correctly identified sensual pleasure and desire as the source of suffering in this world. But his analysis is incomplete, for it omits the idea of ananda. Even the followers of Adi Shankar, who promote a covered form of Buddhism under the banner of liberation from this temporary world, fail to penetrate the inner meaning of the Vedānta.

The Bhagavat, gives a more complete commentary on Vedānta, identifying the realization of ananda, eternal bliss, as the true birth-right of the human soul and demonstrating its complete and proper realization. And the acharyas and teachers of the Bhagavat school have shown us the proper path towards that higher and truer form of enlightenment.