I live in an uncommon way. My head is shaved and my clothes are gray. The place I live in is different too. Most people live in a virtual marketplace, but I live in a mountain temple. There is one more difference. I live alone. Usually when people grow up, they marry and start a family. But I live alone. The question I have been asked the most since I became a monk is why I live alone. Whenever I am asked that question, I answer that I live alone in order to be happy. When people hear my answer, they just laugh. Then they say that I can never be happy if I live alone. Sometimes I agree with what people say. But those moments are very short. Most of the time I am very content living alone like this on a mountain, having the truth for a friend. I feel happy. I like my gray robe because it has room enough in it to embrace freedom, and I like living on a mountain as I can be with the green forest and the blue sky at any time.

When I meet my family and friends, I am happy because I can discuss the truth with them. Even in a place where people say that it’s impossible for me to be happy, I am truly happy. For I have a clear answer to life. That is happiness. To me, becoming a monk was the way to find happiness, and enlightenment means happiness. I wonder if, among all the possible purposes in life, there is any other clearer or more beautiful purpose than this one. That’s why I smile at flowers and I get excited just looking at the blue sky. This is possible because my mind’s frequency is fixed on happiness all the time.

Happiness is just a matter of changing one’s mind. When you constantly seek happiness, you will finally discover it. Even though you encounter difficult times, if you don’t lose your happiness frequency, you can be a happy person.

Every morning I recite a stanza for the happiness of the day. It goes like this:

The face without anger is a true offering,
A soft word is subtle incense,
The mind that doesn’t have a stain
Is nothing but the unchanging mind of the Buddha.

While reciting this stanza, I can feel a smile immediately spread through my mind. After living in the mountains for quite some time, this happy smile came to me naturally. Now, I have discovered a way to find happiness. Here are some basic rules, the laws of happiness.

1. Reflect on clear, transparent light in your mind. With that light in your mind, you can find lightness and so be free from the weight of your body.
2. Have conversations with everything you run into. Talk to everything, not only to people, but also to flowers, trees, and the sky. Then you will feel loneliness disappear and your mind will become beautiful.
3. Remember at least one phrase that makes you happy. Recite that phrase whenever you have time, taking the meaning into your heart.
4. Learn to grasp the happiness of calm relaxation through breathing. There’s nothing you can gain with excessive tension for it brings nothing but stiffness and stiffness ruins any kind of accomplishment.
5. If you are angry at some kind of loss, think that you are finally paying back your debt from previous lives. Our present life is connected to all previous ones so remember there’s no effect without a cause. While living, there are times when you are cheated or hurt by other people. If you think that you have finally paid back a debt, then you feel comfortable.

The laws of happiness that I have found constantly whisper to me and make me smile in every situation. They calm my mind in this rapidly changing world. My mind gets hit by arrows from the world, but in my mind there’s no mark, only peace. The world is a process and we, too, are a process. Gaining and losing have no meaning as they also only exist as a process. Buddhism teaches us that the property, the things that we have collected for a hundred years through our greed, is nothing but dust, which can disappear in a second. However the mind cultivated for three days is a treasure for a thousand years. Which is more important?

I became a monk in order to be happy, and I want to live my life with a smile on my face all the time. How about you? How do you walk on the path at the present time? Are you smiling? If not, why don’t you find your own way of being happy? I don’t think there’s anything more important than that.

The leaves are changing color here in the mountains. Leaves have happy smiles even when they are falling. That smile suddenly becomes the hwadu of my mind.