My Tuesday yoga class has two different teachers who alternate weeks. One of them, Sarika, always concludes the relaxation phase at the end of class with the following words: “Think to yourself, ‘I am soul. This physical body isn’t mine. I am soul. A soul has no attachments, no hatreds, no conflicts, no desires. This body isn’t mine. I am soul.’ My other Tuesday teacher, Nancy, includes in every class the following ritual: She has us wrap our right arm over our left, grasp our shoulders with the opposite hands, and repeat after her: “I love my body.”

Unwittingly my Tuesday teachers exemplify something of the dilemma I want to talk about today. There is no end of advice to be had these days about how to attain satisfaction in living—from ancient wisdom to popular psychology and self help groups to new age gurus to internet daily inspiration sites. But in many ways, much of this advice seems to boil down to two polar choices which, for purposes of argument, I am characterizing today as “Buddha versus Thoreau.” Which approach is more likely to generate human happiness - detachment from the things of this world or passionate engagement with it? Wherein does satisfaction lie—living the internal life of the spirit or living the external life of an embodied self?

Most of you have heard the story of the Buddha. According to legend Buddha was born Siddhartha Gautama, the son of a king in northern India. At his birth, it was prophesied that he would one day renounce his kingdom and become a holy man. Afraid that might come true, his father tried to keep the young prince bound to the palace with sensual delights and to hide anything from him that might disturb his mind. But eventually the prince became curious about life outside the palace walls and so ventured out on a series of chariot rides. During those rides, the young prince was exposed—for the first time, presumably—to old age, sickness and death and was upset at the thought that these afflictions would someday beset him also. On the last trip outside the palace, Siddhartha met a holy man who had a peaceful, radiant expression on his face. Siddhartha learned that the man had given up the usual ways of living to wander from place to place searching for the meaning of existence. The prince then left his family, his harem and his royal future to go into the forest seeking enlightenment. After his enlightenment, the Buddha, which means awakened one, preached that life is suffering and that the only way to escape suffering is by breaking the attachments that bind us to pleasure, achievement and physical existence; that we must give up all striving and understand the world is but an illusion, that our life is a creation of our own minds. This is the way to enlightenment and bliss.

Many western thinkers have looked at the same afflictions as Buddha—sickness, aging, and mortality—and come to a very different conclusion from him—that life must be lived to the fullest through passionate engagement with the world. Life without passion is not really living. Yes, attachments to people and things and striving after goals bring pain but they also bring our greatest joys. And yes, we all will die, but that is all the more reason to embrace life fully while we are alive. This philosophy is perhaps best exemplified by the Romantic writers but it is also characterizes Transcendentalism, that movement within Unitarianism which was, in part, influenced by the Romantics. To the Transcendentalists, such as Thoreau and Emerson, the most important thing was direct experience through the senses, particularly of the natural world. Such experience was not only the source of greatest joy but also of communion with the divine.

Well, who had it right—Buddha or Thoreau?

Well, of course, Buddha was not wrong. He was a very astute observer of the human psyche and he recognized that the way our minds typically work, what the Buddhists call the monkey mind, can make us miserable. The Buddha observed, for example, that human beings tend to dwell on the negative at the expense of the positive and that we are constantly reacting to the world, assessing everything through a filter of our personal likes and dislikes. He recognized, too, that human beings are ever vigilant to being cheated or short changed and that we are continuously comparing ourselves to and judging ourselves and others and that we carry unconscious assumptions about how the world should work and how we should be treated. He likened the human mind to a crazed, wild elephant that careens from one thing to another. There is no hope of controlling it by a sheer act of will, rather it must be tamed and trained. In many ways the Buddha presaged the findings of modern psychology and evolutionary science. Our brains are subject to a continuous stream of automatic reactions and unconscious thoughts, most of which are a product of our evolutionary heritage. These automatic processes enabled us to survive, but at this point in our evolution are no longer so adaptive and they contribute greatly to our discontent and disease.

As the Buddha taught, so much of the unhappiness we experience in life we create for ourselves by the machinations of the monkey mind or by the interpretations we bring to events. And, from the Buddha’s perspective, our attachments to the things of this world only worsen the effect. It is the attachment we feel for those close to us that makes us feel grief when they die. It is the attachment, the powerful import, we assign to our own life and our wealth, status, reputation and achievement that causes us discomfort and pain when they go—as all things of this world must go. Moreover, as the Buddha knew and as modern studies show, most of those things we spend so much effort pursuing, turn out, once they are achieved, to provide only fleeting satisfaction. We strive to earn more money thinking it will make us happier, only to discover that the more we make, the more we tend to want; and, the more we have, the less effective it is at bringing us joy. We work long and hard to achieve success, to attain certain goals, sacrificing other things in life, but even if we reach our goal, the feeling of satisfaction is short-lived, more often one of relief than jubilation, and it is often accompanied by the thought “okay, what do I have to do now?” Further, from the Buddha’s perspective, it is the attachment we assign to our own ego—the import we give to our own thoughts and feelings—that causes our suffering in the first place. Simplistically put, if you didn’t care how you felt, what would it matter what you felt? In the Buddhist perspective, good things happen and bad things happen, eternally turns the wheel of being; and, there is nothing we can do to control that, so why allow ourselves to be jerked around

by our reaction to events? Why not liberate ourselves from such reactivity through the discipline of meditation, which allows us to relinquish attachments and realize the illusory nature of the world? Although we give up the pleasure of fleeting satisfactions, we save ourselves the larger pain of suffering and loss.

The Buddha was right about the power of meditation. Modern research has proven that regular meditation does change the automatic thought processes of the human brain, quieting the monkey mind. It has been shown to make people calmer, less reactive to the ups and downs and petty provocations of life. It also reduces sadness, alleviates physical pain and increases contentment. Disciplining the mind, focusing on the internal life, does lead to greater satisfaction in living.

So—Buddha had it right. Or did he? Is the pain of inevitable suffering in life so great that most people would choose to forego the pleasures and joys of life if they could be assured of a life free of pain? Jonathan Haidt, in his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, poses the question, what would have happened if Siddhartha had descended from his chariot and talked to the people he assumed were so miserable? What if he had interviewed the poor, the elderly, the crippled? Well, a psychologist has done that. Robert Biswas-Diener has traveled the world asking people about their lives and how satisfied they are with them. Wherever he goes, he finds that most people, with the exception of the homeless, are more satisfied than dissatisfied with their lives. He found that even sex workers in the slums of Calcutta, forced by poverty to sell their bodies and sacrifice their futures to disease, rated their satisfaction on twelve dimensions of life as more satisfied than not. Yes, they suffered privations that would seem to us unbearable, but they also had close friends with whom they spent much of their time and most of them stayed in touch with their families. Biswas-Diener concludes that while they do not lead enviable lives, they do lead meaningful lives; they capitalize on the non-material resources available to them and find satisfaction in many areas of life.

Studies have also shown that most quadriplegics, people who, from the perspective of the fully mobile, might seem to have a low quality of life, find, for the most part, enduring satisfactions in living. So, too for the elderly, whose lives from the perspective of youth, might seem far from enviable. While the young do have more to look forward to than the elderly, ratings of life satisfaction actually rise with age. The lives of people whom the young Buddha might have deemed miserable are, when viewed from the inside, much better than he might have imagined.

Studies such as these point to the adaptability and resiliency of the human spirit. But do they argue for the view that happiness comes from passionate engagement with the things of this world? Was Thoreau right? Well, if modern psychological research has proven the truths of Buddha’s insights, it has also shown that there are things worth striving for in the world which can provide lasting happiness.

Take for example the pursuit of goals, the striving for achievement. While studies have shown that the satisfaction of accomplishment is short-lived and that when we work hard for something and finally attain it, we often experience a feeling of disappointment that we don’t feel any more lasting pleasure than we do, studies also show that human beings can derive immense gratification from the doing itself and in making progress toward a goal. We don’t choose to go on a mountain hike simply to get back to the bottom of the mountain or to feel the relief of taking the backpack off when it is over. We choose to hike because we enjoy the climb toward the summit and because we enjoy the experience of the view. And, isn’t it true, as studies have also shown, that we take deep pleasure in work and avocations that challenge us to use our strengths and that give us a sense of mastery? Often when we are engaged in such activities, we experience a feeling of total immersion, of being “in the zone” if you will, that gives immense satisfaction and makes hard work seem almost effortless. Those states are not ephemeral, but can last for long periods of time. Human beings, it turns out, have a need to make things happen and when we have an effect on the world we experience great satisfaction from that. And it turns out we also have a human need to be of assistance to others. Studies show that people derive long lasting improvements in mood when they consciously choose to do something nice for someone else on a regular basis.

And that points to the areas of life which are the most important in terms of giving people a sense of satisfaction and meaning in life—relationships with other people and a feeling of contributing to the larger good. We human beings are relational creatures. If our evolutionary history endowed us with a worrisome vigilance and a negativity bias, it also endowed us with emotions finely tuned for loving, befriending, helping and for participating in groups. We all need other people to lean on and we all need to know that we can be leaned upon. And we need to feel also that our lives count, that the fact of our having lived, made a difference for the better, however small.

And isn’t the experience of love one of the greatest joys of human living—from the red-hot heat of passionate love, to the comfortable warmth of long time companionship, to the affirmation and shared experiences of friendship, to the sweet aches of parenthood? One of my older colleagues told me the other day that one of the hard lessons of her stage in life is that her grandchildren’s lives will not be perfect, that she cannot keep them from difficulty or sorrow. None of us can keep our children or grandchildren so safe. But, even knowing that, would we give up the delight in watching them grow, the joy in seeing them become who they are meant to be, or even the unadulterated physical pleasure of holding their tiny form in our arms? A man told me once that when his son was a baby, all it took was one smell of the top of his son’s head in the morning - that was enough to sustain him through an entire day of work.

And what of the pleasures of the body? Must we denigrate those? True, sensual pleasures are fleeting, they give no lasting benefit. But does that negate the delight, the pure bodily satisfaction? To never taste and savor a succulent lobster, a luscious strawberry, a fine Bordeaux; to never experience the feel of affectionate or erotic touch; to never lose oneself in sex, or dance or music or art—would we forego all that for the promise of never feeling pain?

The Buddha would say these needs and desires are just more sources of suffering; that the people we love will die and we will die; that the beauty we are attracted to will fade; the body will age. But the testimony of those who know what it is to face death—those living with terminal illness—is, more often than not, to cherish every moment, to recognize the preciousness of every human soul you meet, to celebrate the pleasures of the flesh as long as they will last, and love, love, love to your dying breath.

So which is it, Buddha or Thoreau? Perhaps it is not either, or; but both, and. Certainly, there is immense wisdom in the Buddha’s perspective. Regular meditation does alter the mind. My own practice, spotty as it sometimes is, has helped me greatly to be less reactive, more able to let things go, to worry less and it does bring me at least passing moments of bliss. But learning to meditate is hard and doing it regularly takes tremendous discipline and I wonder how many people—even in Buddha’s day—can attain the level necessary to achieve enlightenment.

And, truth be told, I am more of a Thoreauvian by nature. I want my passions, my sensual pleasures and, for me, the world of nature does seem revelatory of the divine. I find my sensibilities echoed in these words by the poet Dorothy Monroe:

Death is not too high a price to pay
for having lived. Mountains never die,
Nor do the seas or rocks or endless sky.
Through countless centuries of time, they stay
eternal, deathless. Yet they never live!
If choice there were, I would not hesitate
to choose mortality. Whatever Fate
demanded in return for life I'd give.
For, never to have seen the fertile plains
nor heard the winds, nor felt the warm sun on sands
beside the salty sea, nor touched the hands
of those I love—without these, all the gains
of timelessness would not be worth one day
of living and of loving; come what may.

Perhaps the way to satisfaction and meaning in life is not a matter of choosing either Buddha or Thoreau, but taking wisdom from both. For me, in the end, I think I concur with Mary Oliver: To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

Major Source: Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis, New York: Basic Books, 2006