True Happiness Is a Light in the Mind

True happiness is in fact very simple: it is the light in your mind. Perhaps you feel this to be inconceivable, but things are always this simple, aren’t they? Those most beautiful tulips in the world, which you traveled all over the world looking for, are actually in full bloom in your own garden. Too bad if you never discovered them.

Apart from “love,” the word that is the easiest for people in the world to misunderstand is probably “happiness.” Many people who think they understand happiness in fact do not understand what true happiness is. They generally take the feeling that is produced when desires are satisfied to be true happiness. For example, they generally think that the more a person has, the happier that person will be, and the more famous a person is, the happier that person will be. Simply put, happiness in their view must be based on certain material conditions. Obviously this is a very unreliable happiness.

This is because, to develop the conditions that foster “happiness,” many people inevitably exhaust themselves spending their lives seeking external things. Among these people, some are constantly gaining, and some are constantly losing, and some are still seeking without results, but none of them can find true happiness. With those who are constantly gaining, what they gain are not the things they really want, but rather some impermanent external things and even more impermanent happy feelings. Thus, what comes in quick succession is inevitably the loss created when expectation and reality do not match. People who are constantly losing think that if only they would get something, then they would be able to achieve happiness, but they still cannot get things to go as they wish, and so they fall into a great sense of loss. People who pursue things without any results, while in the process of pursuing them, even forget what ultimately they are looking for. All they can do is follow their own footsteps from yesterday, and keep on going ahead blindly step by step, getting farther and farther away from true happiness. … In fact, people are not necessarily able to be happy by gaining things, and are not necessarily able to be happy by losing things, and people on the road may be even more unable to be happy.

So then, in the end, what is true happiness? Before I answer this question of yours, probably you must first make a slight adjustment to your state of mind. Otherwise, you may not be able to understand what I say. Look and see. If I say to you that true happiness is just a feeling of the mind and spirit, will you be able to understand the full meaning of this statement? Will you be able to experience this kind of purity of the spirit? Maybe not. This is because this is a value you may not have thoroughly understood, or you may never have experienced. It is like me: it comes from that deep yellow earth of the Western Regions. It is absolutely different from that attitude of materialistic pride and biased clingings of contemporary people. So please first try to completely forget about those ideal models related to apartment buildings and cars and salaries and stock shares and even wives and children and all such things, and at least for a short time screen them out. Only if you do this, can you let down your defenses, and enter into the “world” which I am going to describe.

I always say, I do not want to change the world: what I want to change is just myself. I do not want to illuminate the world: what I want to illuminate is just myself. I do not want to use literature to make the whole world hear me talking, and I do not want to use my writings to broadcast anything. I am just having a chat between the literary world and me. All the goals of my cultivating practice are to let myself achieve absolute independence and happiness, just this, that’s all.

As luck would have it, there are many people in this world who have the same needs as me – they too are seeking this kind of independence and happiness. Ultimately, seeking love and freedom is basically the inherent nature of humans. Since I realized this before them, I must take expedient means and the road I have traveled and offer it to them. For this reason, in all my written works I say things which many people may not be able to understand, and which they may not have the patience to listen to, but these are all the words in my mind. I believe that after they read these words, those people who are on the same frequency as me will all be able to smile. Perhaps these words will only be able to bring these friends a good state of mind, or a bit of awakening, and this too is good. Then too, some friends and students have told me that these words which my true mind has revealed have even let them restore their courage for living, their dreams and their love, and have let them have the strength to transform their ordinary lives. This is very good. However, for me, this is definitely not such an unexpected thing, because I too have traveled along a journey like this, and I understand everything in it.

Although I have looked this way all along – having a beard, wearing a robe with long red sleeves, wearing pale blue loose-fitting trousers, being unconcerned and happy, always free and at ease, as if nobody is around – I have also gone through a journey of spiritual searching. On this point, this is no different than all those children seeking happiness and not being able to find it. Thus, I really understand them, and perhaps I also really understand you.

You keep your head down and travel your night road, sometimes thinking about many things from the past, sometimes thinking about many hopes for the future. You cannot discern the existence of the bright moon. Especially when you go into the shade of a forest or of the high-rise buildings, you feel even more that you have been swallowed up by the endless infinite darkness. All around you are flickering secretive shadows, and so your mind is filled with loneliness, desolation, and fear. But once you put a stop to your endless thoughts, and lift up your head, and gaze into the depths of the night sky, then you discover, not knowing where it started, that in this backdrop of night, ultimately there is a clear bright moon accompanying you. It is tranquil and silent, but it is as if a warm laugh has come forth from the silence, and this laughter soaks into your mind, and stirs up a feeling like a wave of warm water, and surprisingly you become aware of the beauty and wonder of the night where everything is silent. And from this, you change, as you trudge through the darkness of night, and you are no longer alone, and the bright moon’s laughter fills your mind and spirit, and makes the journey itself change into something exceptionally poetic.

I wrote a bit of doggerel: the purpose was to dispel the way some people were “deifying” me, and it also expressed my mind: “Xue Mo is a donkey, traveling the road with his head down. When he happens to lift his head, he sees the moon in the sky. Seeking wisdom without wisdom, seeking knowledge without knowledge. It’s just that the mind has light, and because of this he is not sad.” This is right. When I understand, I am just that donkey with a light in his mind.

True happiness is in fact very simple: it is the light in your mind. Perhaps you feel this to be inconceivable, but things are always this simple, aren’t they? Those most beautiful tulips in the world, which you traveled all over the world looking for, are actually in full bloom in your own garden. Too bad if you never discovered them. When you are the way I was in the past, if you “happen to lift your head,” you will see that pure, still, poetic moonlight in your mind. Then you will slowly come out of that long dark night, and from then on you will not be sad.

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