Learning Happiness (The Discipline of Transcendence on Buddha's Sutra of Forty - Two Chapters)

Perhaps the most fundamental truth that Buddha brought to the world is his penetrating insight into the essential nature of happiness. In the discipline of Transcendence, Volume 3- one of a series of four volumes in which he comments on the 42 earliest-known teachings of Buddha-Osho explains why Buddha insists that happiness does not have to be created. It already exists in the present moment; all that has to be learned is the knack of living in the present.

Osho outlines and clarifies the three steps in Buddha’s carefully defined path to liberation: the path of awareness, the journey from sex to spirituality.

Happiness and unhappiness are both present in your life. The happiness may be just a little, perhaps only a glimpse, a hope or even an illusion, but still it is there. And unhappiness is there as well. You want to get rid of the unhappiness, so you approach the one who knows because he offers you same possibility of relief from your unhappiness. But when you approach the man who known, he tells you to cast off the happiness as well as the unhappiness because only then can knowing happen.?

Really, this is where the difficulty lies. You don’t want to cast off the happiness that is yours. You have only recently got married; the wife is beautiful, people have been congratulating you, expressing their delight that you are married and now you have the one you wanted. You want to preserve this happiness. The arrangement you are seeking is one in which the unhappiness of the world disappears, but the happiness remains- and this is impossible.

No one has ever been able to manage this, nor ever will, because the happiness and unhappiness of the world are two sides of the same coin. Either you retain the whole coin or you throw the whole coin away. You are trying the impossible, and that is why you are divided within yourself. You want to leave one half and keep the other. But this life cannot be divided. Life is whole; to divide it is impossible.