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Dharma Thoughts
60 EASTERN HORIZON | DHARMA THOUGHTS

Vijaya Samarawickrama is an accomplished Dharma educator,
teacher, and author. He retired after 60 years of teaching in
schools, colleges and universities. However, he continues to give
Dharma talks throughout the country, participates in inter-faith
dialogues, speaks at various international seminars, and writes
for Buddhist books and journals.

Happiness:

Heaven or Nibbāna?

By Vijaya Samarawickrama

One of the greatest paradoxes of human less than sixty two different belief systems
existence must surely be that while every pertaining to the nature of this life and the
single one of us desperately wants happiness next. Abraham Eraly summarizes some of
it is one thing that no one on earth can claim these beliefs in Gem in the Lotus (2000):
to experience to any satisfactory degree “Eternal is the world, this is the truth, all else
for any length of time. The yearning for is delusion. Others held not eternal is the
happiness is so pervasive that every religion world, this is the truth, all else is delusion.
that ever appeared on earth has promised Others again held: this world is finite or the
its followers that this will be the ultimate world is infinite or again body and soul are
reward when they are admitted to heaven one and the same. Others said body and soul
provided that they had been ‘good’ and are different things……And each maintained
obedient to their creator’s will when they that his own view was the truth, and that all
were alive, but the problem with this is that else was delusion. So they lived quarrelsome,
there is no empirical evidence to indicate that noisy, disputatious, abusing each other with
such a heaven exists at all. And this can be words that pierced like javelins.” (p212)
proven by the fact that no two religions can
agree on what constitutes heaven. In order Naturally of course all these differing views
to overcome this somewhat uncomfortable led to conflicting ideas on what constituted
truth followers are required to accept the happiness and how it was experienced. Prince
possibility of heaven on the basis of Faith, Siddhartha Gautama spent several years
as a result of which countless millions of studying these various world views under
people over the years pinned their hopes different teachers and eventually dismissed
of happiness on heaven in the life to come them all because he discovered that they did
although they had no way of verifying it. not point to true happiness.

But not everyone was willing to go along The future Buddha began his own quest
with the herd. By the Buddha’s time in by rejecting all forms of speculation about
India alone there were broadly speaking no existence and about beliefs which could