Jamyang Rinpoche
You do not wish to suffer, yet you do not want to change the mindset that causes suffering. Changing your external actions only does not solve the problem.
When a bullet hits your internal organs, no matter how well you stitch the wound, without healing the inner organs, you can't avoid a very painful outcome. It will inevitably lead to all sorts of sickness and eventually take your life.
By the same logic, trying to change your life through various external actions to avoid suffering and pursue happiness will never work. This is because the root of suffering is our afflictions of desire, anger, and delusion. Since the cause is desire, anger, and delusion, when the results of these ripen, you can't escape the suffering.
Wealthy people with status and fame should be the happiest and have the best lives. Yet, they have many worries, fears and deluded thinking which are actually very overpowering. Because wealth causes their greed and anger to increase and intensify. It feeds their arrogance and jealousy.
They might try to change things through external actions, thinking, "Maybe if I wear nice clothes I'll be happier? Maybe if I eat better food I'll be happier? Maybe if I travel to the most beautiful places I can find happiness?"
No matter how you try and search for happiness in the external world, you might feel brief pleasure for a few minutes, a few hours, or a few days, but you will never find true, permanent happiness.
What temporary happiness you find is just a fleeting dream. The pleasures we experienced before have already vanished. If we find a new pleasure now, would it satisfy us? It would not.
The moment you feel happy, thinking "This is great, I'm very content now," that feeling of happiness disappears soon thereafter and it is followed by various sufferings. Dissatisfaction returns.
Moreover, after enjoying brief happiness, when misfortune strikes, it leads to even greater sadness, worries, and pain because you have experienced good times and can't accept the sudden change to suffering…
Fame, benefits, status and other external factors are not the true causes of happiness. True happiness comes from a contented mind. Contentment comes from a mind that has been tamed and trained. If the mind is under your control, then everything else would be well. If mind is out of control, we can never have peace or happiness…
The purpose of Dharma is to bring happiness to sentient beings in this life and liberation in future lives. Liberation is eternal happiness. Practicing Dharma is not going around to offer some incense or burning some incense paper trying to accumulate merits. That is a misguided way of practicing Dharma. That way of learning Dharma is not very meaningful.
