Good Dhamma, Happy Life

Preface from Wish Books

Not long after the New Year, many people are still cheerful and refreshed at starting life anew in the new year. Some have new tasks and new goals, and many may have taken on new roles at the start of the year. From a Dhamma practitioner’s point of view, about this kind of enjoyment we often hear it said: do not get carried away by life, because that can make us lose mindfulness, until we make mistakes in how we live. Such mistakes do not choose their time or their situation. Whenever mindfulness grows thin, anything is ready to slip in and affect our lives at any moment.

Learning to live along the path of mindfulness is something well worth practicing, especially now, when the world moves at speed and danger moves just as fast. So what can be the way to create happiness, so that we can live our lives with peace, cleanness and light?

Good Dhamma, Happy Life is a small Dhamma book by Phra Ajahn Somthop Parakkamo, a practicing monk and preaching monk who has taken it upon himself to point the way and to bring forward the Buddha’s teachings, telling them and explaining them so that people in society may recognize the real essence of the Dhamma, not coated in faith without reason. Wish Books invites everyone to open their hearts and read the Dhamma: “Happiness in Merit,” “The Truth of Life,” and building faith the right way in “Mutelu with Knowledge and Understanding” (mutelu is the Thai word for luck-seeking beliefs and rituals), so that wisdom may arise in all of you, ready to walk toward your goal and toward happiness.

Wish Books respectfully thanks the Dhammasomthob team, who were a vital force in helping to coordinate the material. Finally, we pay our respects to the kindness of Phra Ajahn Somthop Parakkamo, who has given this good Dhamma for people to read and to understand, a first foundation for learning ever deeper Dhamma.

Wish Books

Author’s Preface

I rejoice with all the members of the team who transcribed these Dhamma talks so they could be shared with relatives and friends to study and learn from. This book is called Good Dhamma, Happy Life. To sum it up clearly, it means “Do good, and life will be happy.”

When we speak of the happiness in this world that we know well, it is sensual happiness (kāmasukha): happiness in contact with the pleasures of the senses. Seeing beautiful colors, hearing lovely sounds, smelling fragrant scents, tasting delicious flavors, touching what is soft, enjoying pleasure in the mind, we are happy. There is happiness in having a house, a car, wealth, children, a wife, rank and fame. Savoring the taste of these sensual pleasures, beings get stuck in them and are happy, and delight in them. This kind of happiness still depends on something else to lean on. It is outer happiness, future happiness. But this book, Good Dhamma, Happy Life, puts the emphasis on happiness from within.

The happiness the Buddha taught has several levels:

1. Giving, letting go and sharing. The happiness of giving is the happiness of generosity (dāna-sukha).
2. The happiness of abstaining from killing, stealing and sexual misconduct, the happiness of speaking truthfully, the happiness of not bringing intoxicants into the stream of one’s life: this is called the happiness of virtue (sīla-sukha).
3. Once body, speech and mind are clean, whenever one reflects on it, gladness and rapture arise, peaceful happiness and joy arise in the heart, and the mind grows steady. This has several levels, such as the first, second, third and fourth jhānas (meditative absorptions) and the formless jhānas. Concentration at every level is called the happiness of concentration (samādhi-sukha).
4. Having gained concentration, one uses it as the base from which wisdom works, and wisdom does its work fully. This is called gaining the happiness of wisdom (paññā-sukha), which has several levels, from contemplating kamma and its results, to seeing the stream of life as impermanent, suffering and not-self, developing step by step until reaching nibbāna, which is the supreme, true happiness.

As I have said, Good Dhamma, Happy Life puts the emphasis on goodness at several levels. I hope that all of you will come to savor it, to learn, to study and explore, and to find the way to develop your own happiness until it becomes ever more refined.

”…Happiness within the heart is true happiness, lasting happiness:
the happiness of virtue, of concentration and of wisdom.
If you all reach true happiness like this,
this life you were born into is a life truly fulfilled.
There is no need to run after happiness outside yourself, or future happiness,
which does not last, which is happiness adrift.
Instead you can find happiness in the stream of your own life,
and press on with virtue, concentration and wisdom
until you truly reach the happiness of virtue, of concentration and of wisdom.

May you all find the supreme happiness:
true happiness is the end of the defilements and of the mass of suffering.
May happiness and fulfillment arise for you,
for every one of you, in every way. I rejoice with you…”

Phra Ajahn Somthop Parakkamo
22 January 2023