What chocolate can teach us about Happiness
The Three Features of Experience in Buddhism
It is said that when the Buddha reached Awakening, he initially didn’t want to share his realisations with others. He thought that they might be difficult to understand, and even if people did understand them, they would be difficult to accept. The traditional story says that it took begging and convincing from the gods themselves for the Buddha to change his mind.
Although many practitioners in the West today are sceptical of such supernatural episodes of the Buddha’s life story, the point it makes is certainly a valid one. The Buddhist tradition has many valuable lessons for us today about how to deal with our minds, but because it requires us to step outside of our usual ways of thinking, they are often difficult to understand, let alone communicate. The Buddha overcame this difficulty by illustrating his teachings with vivid pictures and stories, and adapting his language to the audience — talking directly to the concerns of his listeners. This is one of the reasons why we think it’s very important to share the philosophical foundations of Mindfulness in ways that is easily graspable and relatable today. I started using the chocolate example to explain the Three Features of Experience during the time I taught at the Fo Guang Shan temple in central London, and we thought it would be worth sharing it here as well.
Why it matters
The way you see the world, your basic assumptions about yourself and what surrounds you, matters because it shapes your actions, and ultimately creates your life experience. Even more so, since your life experience feeds back into your beliefs, it can create self-reinforcing cycles. If you believe that nobody is trustworthy, you will not give anyone the opportunity to prove you wrong. Even if someone did something nice to you, you could chalk it up to some ulterior motive, rather than giving up your existing beliefs. Thus, with time, your beliefs, and along with them your habits and state of mind can become more and more entrenched in its — in this case very negative — ways.
The Buddha came to understand that most of our basic assumptions are wrong. Although the Buddhist tradition doesn’t give a clear origin point for this, modern evolutionary psychology provides a plausible narrative: the driving force of evolution is survival, not happiness. The way we see the world didn’t evolve to be “true”, only to help us survive and give life to children. Few people would say that going into a murderous rage is healthy behaviour in any society, although from an evolutionary point of view, it might have helped many of our ancestors survive. Being attracted to food full of sugar and fat was a good idea when they were hard to come by, but adopting a fast-food only diet today, based on our evolutionary urges would be rather counterproductive, even if our standards are only survival.
Correcting our views — with chocolate
According to the first ever teaching given by the Buddha — the Four Realisations — the root of all Unhappiness is Misunderstanding. We are misinterpreting our experience, and so we are responding in ways that are not in line with what’s really going on. In what way do we misinterpret reality? This is where the Three Features of Experience and chocolate comes in.
The Three Features of Experience represent the three primary ways we misunderstand our experience. They are also often translated as “Three Marks of Existence” — but this is misleading: here we are not making deep, ontological statements about reality. We are only talking about things that we experience. We can’t know whether there is an “objective world” beyond our experience, but this is besides the point. What we do know, is that there is a certain degree of objectivity that we can uncover, and that if we align ourselves to this observed objectivity, we can become happier. Buddhism and Mindfulness is all about how we train our minds to overcome Unhappiness — the Buddha found that questions about whether the world is eternal, and the like are rather unproductive in this regard.
The first feature of the chocolate bar: Not-Lasting
Most people I know, including me, love chocolate. We love it because we associate it with pleasure. We eat it, because we expect a certain type of happiness to arise in our experience as a result of it. We believe our life will be a little better because of the chocolate. When we practice this belief, our minds project a quality on the chocolate (and the joy that comes from it) that it doesn’t actually have: Permanence. And we come face-to-face with the error of this projection as soon as our chocolate is finished.
Like chocolate, all things in our experienced world have the feature of Not-Lasting, even though we often treat them like they don’t. When things inevitably stop existing in the form we are used to, we become sad and disappointed. That is, if we don’t embrace the First Feature of Experience.
The second feature of the chocolate bar: Not-Really-Satisfying
When we ran out of our chocolate, chances are: we want more. Even though we imagine pleasurable things to bring us happiness, to satisfy us in a lasting way, no thing has this power — again, it’s a mere projection. If the chocolate really had the power to satisfy us, we wouldn’t experience the subtle suffering of wanting more. If we see and embrace the Not-Really-Satisfying nature of all things, it will loosen our attachments, making us able to let go easier, and having a happier, more peaceful mind.
The third feature of the chocolate bar: Not-Independent
But if we don’t, we can decide to go for another chocolate bar, to tickle our itch for more. If we do, there is a good chance we realise that this chocolate bar doesn’t taste half as good as the first one, even though it’s the exact same kind. This is because the taste (and indeed, all characteristics) of the chocolate bar depend not on some inherent essence, but on external conditions: if the light is a different colour, if we have already eaten, if there is a weird smell in the air, if we are in a bad mood — these all affect the way the chocolate tastes.
This is the Third Feature of Experience: the chocolate’s existence is Not-Independent from other things. This is perhaps the hardest, but most important feature to understand. No things (or beings) have strict external boundaries — everything and everyone is deeply connected to other things. A more traditional translation of the feature is “No-Self”: but it is one that is very difficult to make sense of at first hearing.
The practical consequences of No-Independence or No-Self are far-reaching. If we truly understand it, we can see the futility of grasping at things, and trying to recreate the conditions that once evoked certain feelings from us. We can overcome the illusion that more of a thing we like is also better — in this way it can lessen greed. It can also ease self-centered attitudes: if we realise that we are deeply connected to other things, and everything about us is dependent on external conditions, we can become more loving, compassionate, and open to other beings.
Bonus feature: the Empty chocolate bar
Emptiness is a concept that summarises the Three Features of Existence, and takes it further. The chocolate bar is Not-lasting: we can also say that it is “Empty of Permanence”. It is Not-really-satisfying: it is “Empty of Satisfying Power”. It is Not-independent: it is “Empty of Self-essence”.
Emptiness means that although we project Permanence, Satisfaction and Independence on external things, in reality they are Empty of these mental formations. In fact, they are Empty of any concept, any form of identity. If we say a cup is a cup, it’s not really true — it’s also a lot of other things, like the fire that hardened the clay, or the table that the cup rests on (from which at the moment, is not separated). If we say it’s only a collection of atoms: it also doesn’t capture the full truth. Identity is always elusive, because it’s always only a myth. Emptiness is “No-Self” taken to the absolute: a chocolate bar is not chocolate, because ultimately there is no such thing as chocolate. There is not even such a thing as “thing”. What we see as chocolate exists in a continuum, a temporal and spatial flow of existence, a part of which we temporarily single out, and designate as chocolate. Things don’t have “deep existence”, they are only “surface-level” appearances, mere phenomena. This is what the Diamond Sutra — one of the most influential Buddhist texts — talks about, when it says at the end:
“So you should view this fleeting world -
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightening in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.”
In a world of eternally changing, flowing phenomena there is no reason to grasp — it is bound to slip away. Instead breathe, be in the present, focus your mind, and enjoy the ride. And next time when you reach for a chocolate bar, take a minute to contemplate the fact that you and it were never separate things in the first place…
