The Meaning of Happiness

PREFACE TO THE SECOND (1952) EDITION

This book first appeared in the spring of 1940, at the very moment when the Second World War broke loose in all its violence. Despite the fact that it was published at that most inauspicious time and the fact that its title gave it the outward appearance of a type of “inspirational literature” far removed from its inner content, The Meaning of Happiness has been “sold out” for many years—during which I have received repeated requests for its republication.

I have hesitated to comply with this demand because in so many ways my ideas have gone far beyond the philosophy of a book written when I was only twenty-four years old. Yet this book and an even earlier book, The Spirit of Zen, remain the favorites of many readers. Setting aside, however, certain immaturities of style and organization, as well as of certain lines of development, the essential theme of this book is, for me, as valid and as important as ever. It has continued as the basic insight of all that I have written subsequently—books in which I have tried to express it in terms of a variety of differing philosophical and religious “languages.”

This theme is concerned with the realization of “happiness” in the Aristotelian and Thomistic sense of man’s true end or destiny, in which sense happiness means union with God, or, in Oriental terms, harmony with the Tao, or moksha, or nirvana. The point on which I have insisted in many different ways is, in brief, that this special and supreme order of happiness is not a result to be attained through action, but a fact to be realized through knowledge. The sphere of action is to express it, not to gain it.

The exposition of this theme involves a number of peculiar logical and psychological difficulties. From a rigorously logical point of view, the words in which this theme is stated mean exactly nothing. In the terms of the great Oriental philosophies, man’s unhappiness is rooted in the feeling of anxiety which attends his sense of being an isolated individual or ego, separate from “life” or “reality” as a whole. On the other hand, happiness—a sense of harmony, completion, and wholeness—comes with the realization that the feeling of isolation is an illusion. In fact, that which feels itself to be the separate, individual consciousness is identical with that universal and undivided Reality of which all things are manifestations.

The Meaning of Happiness explains that the psychological equivalent of this doctrine is a state of mind called “total acceptance,” a yes-saying to everything that we experience, the unreserved acceptance of what we are, of what we feel and know at this and every moment. To say, as in the Vedanta, that “All is Brahman,” is to say that this whole universe is to be accepted. To put it in another way, at each moment we are what we experience, and there is no real possibility of being other than what we are. Wisdom therefore consists in accepting what we are, rather than in struggling fruitlessly to be something else, as if it were possible to run away from one’s own feet.

But if you cannot run away from your feet, you cannot run after them either. If it is impossible to escape from reality, from what is now, it is equally impossible to accept or embrace it. You cannot kiss your own lips. Speaking logically, the idea of accepting one’s experience in its totality means nothing. For “yes” has meaning only in relation to “no,” so that if I say “yes” to everything the word ceases to have any content. To abolish all valleys is to get rid of all mountains. By the same logic, it is equally meaningless to say “All is Brahman,” for statements which are applied to all experiences whatsoever add nothing to our knowledge. When I have said that this whole universe is life, reality, Tao, or Brahman, I have said no more than that everything is everything!

It is easy, then, to sympathize with the reviewer of this book who said, “The mountain has labored and brought forth a mouse.” Yet he was mistaken in one slight respect. There was no mouse. And in this tremendous trifle lies the real significance of the book—the meaning which was hidden between the lines because it could not be stated in the words. For between the lines is the paper, the seeming emptiness or nothing, on which the words are printed and which is quite essential to their being printed at all. In a rather similar way, Reality or Brahman is the essential basis of every thing and experience. If I say that paper underlies every word on this page, I might perhaps be understood as saying something like this:

which is neither sensible nor true.

Just as the words cannot “utter” the paper beneath them, because the paper is not another word, so logic cannot express Reality. In logic, words mean nothing if they do not describe particular experiences. But just as the paper is not a word, Reality or Brahman is not a particular experience. The statement “All is Brahman” is indeed nonsense if “Brahman” is held, like most other words, to denote a special experience. Yet if Brahman is nothing that we can experience, why trouble to talk about it at all? Am I not saying a great many words about something of which I know nothing?

Here is the whole point of the nonexistent mouse over which the mountain labored. I do not know Brahman just as I do not see sight. If I am Reality, I cannot grasp it. The life, the Tao, which is the experience of this and all moments I can neither escape nor accept. Every attempt to escape from life or to accept life is as much a vicious circle, as plain an absurdity as trying to know knowledge, to feel feeling, or to burn fire.

It is only when you seek it that you lose it.

You cannot take hold of it, nor can you get rid of it;

While you can do neither, it goes on its own way.

You remain silent and it speaks; you speak and it is silent.

So what?

So that is what millions of human beings make themselves perfectly miserable trying to do. The laboring of the mountain is the fantastic effort of man to grasp the mystery of life, to find God, to attain happiness, to lay hold on absolute, eternal Being. He clutches at his own hand. He seeks what he has never lost. He suffocates from holding his breath.

This absurdity is only possible on the basis of the feeling that “I” am one thing and “life” or “reality” another, that the knower is separate from his knowledge, the known. This book suggests a total acceptance of experience by way of what is called in Buddhism upaya—a device for bringing about an awakening. The hope is that in trying to accept life totally one will discover, not in theory alone but in fact, that “whosoever would save his life shall lose it,” because one is attempting the impossible task of self-love. The psyche of the average man is in a perfect knot of tension through trying to lay a firm, permanent hold on the life which is its own essence. The attempt to “accept” life tightens this knot to the point where the very impossibility of the task reveals its absurdity.

When this is realized in fact, and, I repeat, not in theory alone, there comes into being that state of liberation or release from self-tension which is the meaning of moksha and nirvana, and Tao—the creative power of life—flows forth freely, no longer blocked by the attempt to turn it back on itself.

Written so long after the book itself, this is perhaps more of an epilogue than a preface, and the reader may do well to refer to it again after what follows it in the space of pages but precedes it in the course of time.

Alan W. Watts

The American Academy of Asian Studies

San Francisco, 1952