Chuang and earlier Zen living

The way to be happy, sane, and mentally well is not to become unhappy, insane, or mentally unwell in the first place. But given that no one manages to do this, the next best thing is to look for things that work to bring you to greater happiness, sanity, and mental wellbeing, then do those things. The practices of Zen, including mindfulness, achieve these goals, but you have to actually do them, and do them often enough and rigorously enough for the cumulative effect of your efforts to result in what you want to feel - namely, happy, sane, and well. It is simply a matter of committing to the task.

So now we move from theory to practice. In order to achieve peace of mind we have to manage and control our automatic mind. That's the medium through which our wants and desires emerge. This fourth truth was originally made up of eight areas of our life that we have to develop and improve. It states that, if we develop these eight areas we will become the master of our wants and desires, start to see ourselves as part of the wider forms of life around us, and through these two developments, become happy and content instead of dissatisfied. The eight areas are arranged around three wider themes: Life philosophy, Management of the Mind, Work, and Self-Discipline. Philosophy The first area we have to develop is how we see life. The right way to see life is what was explained in the first three truths, namely that we are programmed to be dissatisfied, that the dissatisfaction emerges from our constant wants not being met and our narrow view of our self, but that we can overcome these i...

So we now know that we are dissatisfied in our lives, and that this is caused by our constant wants, wishes, and desires, both positive and negative. These in turn are caused by our narrow sense of what we are. We see ourselves as separate from everything else, whereas, viewed more deeply, we are in fact connected to and dependent on, everything around us. The third transforming truth is simply put: we can overcome our natural tendency to see ourselves as independent and rid ourselves of most of our self-centred wishes. In their place we can become a much happier, less grasping and fraught person, and feel more connected to everything. In orther words we find deep inner peace and happiness at being alive.

 So the first truth in the sequence of four that leads us to a radically different life was the recognition that we are innately dissatisfied, rarely if ever at peaceful within ourselves. The second truth concerns what causes this unhappy state of restlessness. There are two parts to this. The first is that we constantly want things. By things I don't mean just physical things we can buy at a shop or take out of the cupboard. In addition to these things I also mean more mental things, like love, recognition, appreciation, praise, success (however we define this). Also we want things to be different from how they are when we are not happy with certain things. Examples include a cold, wet, windy day; being stuck in the traffic at rush hour; someone turning up very late for a meeting with you; you turning up very late for a meeting with someone. Most of our negative moods and feelings are the result of the absence of things that we want, or the presence of things that we don't wan...

In the West the term is "The First Noble Truth" but apparently that's a typically bad translation from the 19th century. The literal meaning is the first of the truths that ennoble you. But I don't like the word ennoble, as it too sounds archaic. Buddhism is, if anything, about transforming our lives from unsatisfactory to happy, so I think my choice of the word "transforms" fits the teaching of the Buddha. This first truth concerns human dissatisfaction. Put another way it is about humans' inability to feel mentally settled, at peace, stable. We are easily upset, annoyed, irritated, frustrated, and very often over trivial things. The phrase "the straw that breaks the camel's back" is such a good one. A series of tiny little things that annoy us seems to build up inside us until we emotionally explode or implode. Yet each thing on its own probably wasn't worth even of a negative response at all. Of course there are much worse things tha...