By Nyanaponika Thera
Life, though full of woe, holds also sources of happiness and joy, unknown to most. Let us teach people to seek and to find real joy within themselves and to rejoice with the joy of others! Let us teach them to unfold their joy to ever sublimer heights! Noble and sublime joy is not foreign to the Teaching of the Enlightened One. Wrongly, the Buddha’s Teaching is sometimes considered to be a doctrine diffusing melancholy. Far from it: the Dhamma leads step by step to an ever purer and loftier happiness.
Nyanaponika Thera (1901-1994), born Siegmund Feniger, was a German born Theravada monk and scholar who lived in Sri Lanka. He was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. Nyanaponika Thera was a co-founder of the Buddhist Publication Society and the author of, among other things, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation, an excellent guide to mindfulness meditation and his most famous work. Upon his death, he was given a state funeral in Sri Lanka.