My Blog

By Dr. Daisaku Ikeda

Youth is a time of rapid change, from day to day and moment to moment. It can also be a time of confusion. You may feel as if you are standing alone in a wasteland or on a battlefield. Sometimes you may think you can’t believe in anyone, that no one loves you, or even that you have no reason to live.

Grades at school or university are probably not your only worries. You may have problems at home, with money or health, with how you feel about your looks, with members of the opposite sex, or with friends. From feeling confident and upbeat one moment, you may be overwhelmed with insecurity, frustration or apathy the next.

You may have fundamental questions about yourself and your identity: Who am I? What should I do with my life? It is quite natural to feel unsure about the best way to proceed. If you haven’t yet decided on your future course, I feel the best thing is just to concentrate your energies on what you need to do right now, and gradually your full potential will emerge.

The most important thing is not to give up on yourself when you are young, giving in to negativity or cynicism. Don’t compare yourself with others. Be true to who you are and try to cherish and feel content with your own irreplaceable life. Even if you’re sometimes laughed at, or people let you down, keep going forward and never let yourself be defeated.

Setting yourself targets is a good idea. Even if you have the tendency to only stick at something for two or three days, just keep renewing your determination. When you’re studying and you think, "I can’t do any more; I want to go out," you may decide to challenge yourself to keep going for just another five minutes. People who can persevere even this much will achieve great things in life.

Youth is the time for building your foundation in life. You can’t build a tall building without first making its foundations solid and secure. In the same way, if you neglect study or shy away from hard work while you’re young, you can’t really build yourself a great future.

A smooth, easy life in which everything goes your way may seem great, but you won’t be able to develop your character if everything always works out according to plan. You may even become spoiled — a person who can’t think about others and who is no help when things get tough.

If your parents are poor or lacking education, or they’re always quarreling with each other, try not to think yourself unlucky. This is a truly human situation which will help you develop as a person. You may feel it would have been better to be born into a rich or successful family. But often people who grow up in such a world act like well-behaved automatons, bound by formality, tradition and appearances, lacking genuine warmth and spontaneity.

There is no such thing as a whole life of smooth sailing. Therefore, you do yourself a favor by taking on difficult challenges, forging and strengthening yourself in your youth, while you’re healthy and strong. I hope you can see all difficulties as the material that will enable you to develop a big heart and become people of depth and substance.

Try to be as active as possible. Just by being young you possess a treasure more valuable than power or fame. To be young is to have hope, passion and freedom. Your whole life lies ahead of you, brimming with possibilities.

Rather than a life of blank pages, it’s better to live a life crammed full of memories of struggles and wonderfully varied experiences. Not to make waves, not to leave behind any history, but just to grow old and die, is a sad way to live.

Don’t wait! While still in your youth, you can become the main actors in the human drama unfolding around you, the shapers of history. Even if you feel powerless, that it is difficult to believe in yourself, please try not to be easily swayed by the views of others, and hold true to what you know is right. Try to believe in yourself.

I hope you will develop sharp powers of perception, then lead the way in breaking through the apathy and stagnation of society around you. So many people are complacent, thinking, "Out of all these people, surely someone will do something." Such cowardly people avoid facing problems, assuming that everything will somehow work out in the end.

Please challenge the injustices and corruption you see around you—speak out and fight against any abuses of power and authority that you see. Confront and challenge every situation with the full force of your character. Live with honesty and integrity and produce results. Set your sights high and fight to achieve your goals with your whole being and spirit.

Edward Whymper was a young nineteenth-century English mountaineer who set out to climb the "unclimbable"—the Matterhorn in the Alps. Since ancient times it had never been scaled. At twenty-one, Whymper determined to succeed where no one had succeeded before. His first attempt failed, but he resolved not to give up, and year after year he pitted himself against the mountain. On one attempt he got within 430 meters of the summit, but he slipped and fell sixty meters and was seriously injured. Another time a rockfall forced him to descend. Seven times he was defeated, but he did not give up. On July 14, 1865, on his eighth attempt, at the age of twenty-five, he finally made it to the top.

Like him, by challenging a great goal, you can break through your limitations and realize incredible growth.

It all comes down to you. I hope you won’t rely on others or wait for them to do something. Try to develop such a strong sense of responsibility that you can stand up to the fiercest storms, confidently proclaiming, "I’ll do it. Just watch me!" Please confront reality, look it squarely in the face, and with guts, wisdom and strength, challenge everything that lies ahead of you.

An Essay: By Dr. Daisaku Ikeda, SGI President

What is the purpose of life? It is to become happy. Whatever country or society people live in, they all have the same deep desire: to become happy.

Yet, there are few ideals as difficult to grasp as that of happiness. In our daily life we constantly experience happiness and unhappiness, but we are still quite ignorant as to what happiness really is.

A young friend of mine once spent a long time trying to work out what happiness was, particularly happiness for women. When she first thought about happiness she saw it as a matter of becoming financially secure or getting married. (The view in Japanese society then was that happiness for a woman was only to be found in marriage.) But looking at friends who were married, she realized that marriage didn’t necessarily guarantee happiness.

She saw couples who had been passionately in love suffering from discord soon after their wedding. She saw women who had married men with money or status but who fought constantly with their husbands.

Gradually, she realized that the secret of happiness lay in building a strong inner self that no trial or hardship could ruin. She saw that happiness for anyone — man or woman — does not come simply from having a formal education, from wealth or from marriage. It begins with having the strength to confront and conquer one’s own weaknesses. Only then does it become possible to lead a truly happy life and enjoy a successful marriage.

She finally told me, "Now I can say with confidence that happiness doesn’t exist in the past or in the future. It only exists within our state of life right now, here in the present, as we face the challenges of daily life."

I agree entirely. You yourself know best whether you are feeling joy or struggling with suffering. These things are not known to other people. Even a man who has great wealth, social recognition and many awards may still be shadowed by indescribable suffering deep in his heart. On the other hand, an elderly woman who is not fortunate financially, leading a simple life alone, may feel the sun of joy and happiness rising in her heart each day.

Happiness is not a life without problems, but rather the strength to overcome the problems that come our way. There is no such thing as a problem-free life; difficulties are unavoidable. But how we experience and react to our problems depends on us. Buddhism teaches that we are each responsible for our own happiness or unhappiness. Our vitality — the amount of energy or "life-force" we have — is in fact the single most important factor in determining whether or not we are happy.

True happiness is to be found within, in the state of our hearts. It does not exist on the far side of some distant mountains. It is within you, yourself. However much you try, you can never run away from yourself. And if you are weak, suffering will follow you wherever you go. You will never find happiness if you don’t challenge your weaknesses and change yourself from within.

Happiness is to be found in the dynamism and energy of your own life as you struggle to overcome one obstacle after another. This is why I believe that a person who is active and free from fear is truly happy.

The challenges we face in life can be compared to a tall mountain, rising before a mountain climber. For someone who has not trained properly, whose muscles and reflexes are weak and slow, every inch of the climb will be filled with terror and pain. The exact same climb, however, will be a thrilling journey for someone who is prepared, whose legs and arms have been strengthened by constant training. With each step forward and up, beautiful new views will come into sight.

My teacher used to talk about two kinds of happiness — "relative" and "absolute" happiness. Relative happiness is happiness that depends on things outside ourselves: friends and family, surroundings, the size of our home or family income.

This is what we feel when a desire is fulfilled, or something we have longed for is obtained. While the happiness such things bring us is certainly real, the fact is that none of this lasts forever. Things change. People change. This kind of happiness shatters easily when external conditions alter.

Relative happiness is also based on comparison with others. We may feel this kind of happiness at having a newer or bigger home than the neighbors. But that feeling turns to misery the moment they start making new additions to theirs!

Absolute happiness, on the other hand, is something we must find within. It means establishing a state of life in which we are never defeated by trials and where just being alive is a source of great joy. This persists no matter what we might be lacking, or what might happen around us. A deep sense of joy is something which can only exist in the innermost reaches of our life, and which cannot be destroyed by any external forces. It is eternal and inexhaustible.

This kind of satisfaction is to be found in consistent and repeated effort, so that we can say, "Today, again, I did my very best. Today, again, I have no regrets. Today, again, I won." The accumulated result of such efforts is a life of great victory.

What we should compare is not ourselves against others. We should compare who we are today against who we were yesterday, who we are today against who we will be tomorrow. While this may seem simple and obvious, true happiness is found in a life of constant advancement. And the same worries that could have made us miserable can actually be a source of growth when we approach them with courage and wisdom.

One friend whose dramatic life proved this was Natalia Satz, who founded the first children’s theater in Moscow. In the 1930s, she and her husband were marked by Soviet Union’s secret police. Even though they were guilty of no crime, her husband was arrested and executed and she was sent to a prison camp in the frozen depths of Siberia.

After she recovered from the initial shock, she started looking at her situation, not with despair, but for opportunity. She realized that many of her fellow prisoners had special skills and talents. She began organizing a "university," encouraging the prisoners to share their knowledge. "You. You are a scientist. Teach us about science. You are an artist. Talk to us about art."

In this way, the boredom and terror of the prison camp were transformed into the joy of learning and teaching. Eventually, Mrs. Satz even made use of her own unique talents to organize a theater group. She survived the five-year prison sentence, and dedicated the rest of her long life to creating children’s theater. When we met for the first time in Moscow in 1981, she was already in her 80s. She was as radiant and buoyant as a young girl. Her smile was the smile of someone who has triumphed over the hardships of life. Hers is the kind of spirit I had in mind when I wrote the following poem on "Happiness":

A person with a vast heart is happy.
Such a person lives each day with a broad and embracing spirit.
A person with a strong will is happy.
Such a person can confidently enjoy life, never defeated by suffering.
A person with a profound spirit is happy.
Such a person can savor life’s depths
while creating meaning and value that will last for eternity.
A person with a pure mind is happy.
Such a person is always surrounded by refreshing breezes of joy.