Happiness and Beyond: The Jain Way and other Perspectives

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

The book, Happiness and Beyond: the Jain Way and Other Perspectives discusses various perspectives about happiness, unhappiness, popular myths, relationship between religion and happiness, role of positive psychologists before delving deeper into Buddhism and the cardinal principles of Jainism, such as anekantavada (multi- sidedness), ahimsa (non-violence) and aparigraha (non-possessiveness), without being dogmatic about them. It traces happiness in deeper relation with ecology since all living beings, including plants and animals, are inter-connected. Social, economic and environmental wellbeing define gross global happiness. This book is meant for an average educated reader worldwide seeking happiness as one of the most cherished goals. It makes a novel attempt to explain not only the link between virtue ethics and happiness but it also makes the reader look beyond happiness. Though the pursuit of happiness can be beautiful, it should never become an obsession. One should find it in the journey and certainly not in the destination. Despite focusing on Buddhism, Jainism and positive psychologists, this book avoids being preachy, hasty or a quick-fix. Rather, it takes the reader on an interesting, jerky and untrodden terrain.

DR ASHA GUPTA, a gold medalist and National Merit Scholarship holder, has been a Director at the Directorate of Hindi Medium Implementation and Principal at Bharati College, University of Delhi, India. She has also been the Convener of International Political Science Association's Research Committee on Welfare State and Welfare Societies and Military's Role in Democratization. A recipient of the Indo-Shastri Canadian Fellowship, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Fellowship, Norwegian Fellowship, alumni of Salzburg Seminar, UGC Career Award in Humanities, UGC Major Research Grant, for a postdoctoral project on Vocationalization and Privatization of Higher Education, Dr Gupta has published 15 books and more than 90 research papers. Her books include Socialism in Theory and Practice: Narendra Deva's Contribution, Changing Perspectives of the Welfare State, Beyond Privatization: A Global Perspective, Higher Education in the 21st Century: Looking Beyond University, Uchatar Shiksha Ke Badalte Aayam, Tulnatmak Shashan Aur Rajniti, Samajwadi Chintan, etc. She has participated at various national and international conferences. Reading, writing and traveling have been her main passions in life.

This book is a novel attempt in the sense that it has evolved beautifully in the last five years on its own. It has been quite a learning experience and had great transformative effect on me as a person. Despite many traumatic experiences due to a pending court case over my retirement age, financial hardships, panic attacks, loss of my eldest brother due to Covid-19 pandemic, general depression and hopelessness prevailing around during the Covid-19 pandemic, I found a lot of solace through writing this book. This project came handy and served me as an anchor after my retirement when I had to struggle with all sorts of problems!

This project had always been in my mind since long but I wished to take it up only after my retirement when I would be free not only in terms of available time at my disposal but also free from all sorts of academic obligations towards my university and International Political Science Association as a Convener of the Research Committee on Welfare States and Developing Societies or as an active paper giver or chair at various international conferences organised by the International Studies Association, International Sociological Association, Indian Political Science Association, Salzburg Seminar, Indian Association for Canadian Studies, etc.

Born into a middleclass Jain family, I was always fascinated by the cardinal principles of Jainism - I call them 'Triple Action Formula' towards happiness - ahimsa (nonviolence), anekantavada (multi-sidedness) and aparigraha (non-possessiveness). Since my childhood, I not only contemplated over them in depth but also tried to practice them in my day-to-day life. It made me calm, understanding, empathetic, caring and loving all lives as valuable. It made me not only a patient listener but also inculcated in me the art of valuing others' opinions and avoiding taking any hasty decision. It also encouraged me to lead a simple, peaceful, honest, virtuous and happy life.

It had been my long-cherished desire to share the significance of these marvellous Jain principles with people of different cultures, religions and values, undergoing a lot of problems and turmoil in modern hi-tech and consumerist societies where despite tremendous progress made in the field of science and technology and highly net-worked and well-informed societies, people feel spiritually homeless, restless, alienated and sad.

It is equally paradoxical to note that despite progress made in terms of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product), many countries show sharp decline in terms of GHI (Gross Happiness Index), known as the Easterlin Paradox.

No wonder, we find a mushroom growth of the Happiness Industry worldwide during the past few decades to the tune of multi-billion dollar, in the form of self-help books, meditation centres, yoga classes, courses on happiness at various schools and universities, expensive therapy sessions, mental health programmes, etc. Though we all know that money cannot buy happiness yet we cannot stop the clever entrepreneurs from selling the 'happiness pills' at exorbitant costs. For instance, even a day pass to the Goop's Wellness Summit in London costed £1000 in June 2019 (with two nights in a hotel over a weekend, a VIP Sunday workout and one's favourite meals).

If we find a sharp rise in the happiness industry, it is obvious that there is a rise in the demand for happiness as a good to be consumed. In ancient times, happiness was seen as the end of life and not everyone's forte. Today, it is being promoted as an inalienable right. Also, if someone is not happy, it is presumed that there is something wrong with that person and s/he needs to see a psychologist and/or a psychotherapist! In fact, the psychotherapists today are performing the job similar to the one performed by the priests in earlier times making people happy and contented, on the one hand, and pursuing meaningful lives, on the other.

This book makes an attempt to find out the causes of widespread unhappiness around us and explores the ways and means of spreading happiness at individual, social and universal level. It also traces relationship between religion and happiness in contemporary times when we find morality, power, position or wealth, unable to make us feel happy on a long-term basis. Rather, we find people obsessed with such pursuits, polluting our inner world in the same way as we have been polluting our external world due to excessive consumerism, environmental degradation and loss of humanness. With data explosion and Artificial Intelligence, we are further bound to be replaced by bio-mechanism or 'self-replicating cyborgs' soon.

Hence, we cannot deny that our happiness is still likely to increase if intertwined with morality and inherent goodness. In today's scenario, pursuing happiness no longer remains a right but also a humble duty towards general human wellbeing. Happiness makes us feel good and therefore, remains one of our natural desires. The desire for happiness plays an important social role of unifying all of us with one another and also with other living-beings, including plants, animals and ecology. Such a role motivates us to cope up with our own difficulties in a more creative way and also help other people in need. It promotes our mental health and leads us towards 'cosmos as a whole.' It plays a pivotal role in the unification of our 'inner world' with 'outer world' through collective consciousness. It leads us to spiritualism - the true essence of humanism.

No wonder, happiness has become the new religion for millions of people worldwide dealing with so much negativities around. With the rise in modernism and scientific progress, we generally find abysmal decline in faith in God and prevailing religions worldwide.

It was a great compliment to be invited by Dr. Asha Gupta to write the foreword to the book you are now reading-Happiness and Beyond: The Jain Way and Other Perspectives. This is the first book of its kind, coming from a Political Scientist who has a rich cultural background and upbringing based upon Jainism. She provides a unique perspective that is very timely in view of the rise in the interest in Jain philosophy worldwide. It definitely has a global appeal for all readers who are inclined towards global well-being.

It is very well structured. Dr. Gupta has explained the link between happiness and religion in general, and in Buddhism and Jainism in particular, at a time when happiness has already become a multi-billion- dollar industry. The author cautions us and aims to save humanity from falling into the trap of superficial paths to happiness. She provides an amalgam of Indian and Western perspectives along with the role of positive psychologists before pointing out how the world is interconnected, including plants and animals. She argues that we can be truly happy only by respecting all lives and our wider environment.

Quite interestingly, in the tradition of anekantavada, the author avoids taking any dogmatic view about Jainism. In fact, she goes beyond the concept of happiness as understood since ancient to contemporary times. She finds happiness in the process of seeking it, and not as an end. To Dr. Gupta, our own happiness cannot be the sole aim of our lives. Rather, our aim has to include the welfare of all beings. She claims that happiness has to be seen as one of the virtues and not the ultimate virtue or goal.

Much of my own scholarly work has been focused on the Jain teaching of the complexity of reality, the many perspectives to which this complexity gives rise, and the nuanced, non-dogmatic mode of expression which follows from these two insights. In Jain philosophy, these concepts are called, respectively, anekantavada, nayavada, and syädvada. More broadly speaking, however, my main concern has been with happiness, though it is not a topic on which I have written much explicitly.

I have written about the topics I have in the hope that a wider understanding of these concepts can help to mitigate the tendencies towards dogmatism and fanaticism which continue to plague humanity even in the twenty-first century. Like many who grew up enjoying science fiction, I had some hope that, by now, we would have made greater progress in putting aside our negative tendencies than we in fact have; for the alternative is global self-destruction (another alternative that science fiction also explores, but that one hopes we might avoid).

One of my heroes, Swami Vivekananda, famously said in 1893 that:

Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now.

Certainly, one of the keys to human happiness is overcoming these evil tendencies these "horrible demons" and replacing them with their opposites: open-mindedness and open-heartedness toward those who hold different views from ours (whatever they may be), and a desire to learn from many perspectives, even as we live by our own commitments.

In writing this book, Dr. Gupta is adding her voice to the call for humanity to step away from its destructive course and learn from the wisdom of a tradition based on gentleness, kindness, and a wish to do no harm to any living being. Indeed, ahimsa, in its deepest meaning, is not simply nonviolence, but the absence of even the desire to cause harm to others.