The Pursuit of True Happiness

ME's posting and question regarding happiness ("cake") spawned such heated debate, I thought I'd post an excerpt from a commentary on happiness by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Thanissaro is an American monk and teacher in the Theravada school of Buddhism. He also places very heavy emphasis on meditation, as does the Zen school.

The Pursuit of True Happiness
By Thanissaro Bhikkhu

"The practice of the Buddha’s teaching can been called the serious pursuit of true happiness, with the emphasis on the serious and the true. Serious not in the sense of grim but in the sense of sincere, unwilling to settle for anything less than what’s true. True here means a happiness that doesn’t change, a happiness that doesn’t let you down. This is why so many of the Buddha’s teachings focus on suffering, because most of the happiness or the things that we take for happiness in daily life really do end up causing suffering as they change. So many times the happiness we gain turns into something else. And of the happiness that turns into pain, the Buddha asked, "Is it a noble thing to search for that kind of happiness, is it a wise, skillful thing to search for that kind of happiness as an end in and of itself? If you know it’s going to let you down at some point, why put so much effort into it?" That’s the question he asked himself. That’s the question that led him to go off into the woods, into the wilderness to find if there was a true happiness that could be gained through human effort."

For more, here is the link.