Happiness is the purpose of Buddhist practice. We chant and study to understand what true happiness is. Basically happiness comes from understanding the cause of unhappiness.
What most people think of as happiness is a form of happiness we call Rapture. It's the feeling we have when things are going right, we fall in love, consumerism i.e purchasing something we think will make us happy which also includes an experience like a holiday. This is all well and good but this form of happiness is fleeting. It doesn't last. We end up on a roller coaster ride of feelings going in and out of happiness, unhappiness, indifference, contentment, fear.
By chanting we raise our Life Force in order to gain a solid sense of peace within ourselves and establish the strength and wisdom we need to cope with suffering when it arises.
We all have a set-point of happiness that is natural to us. If you think of a scale between 0 (very unhappy) and 100 (very happy) we tend to have our own individual set-point. Say your set point is around 60. If you won a million dollars your happiness would increase to say 85. But research tells us after a time (usually a matter of only weeks) your happiness will go back to it's set-point of 60. If you fall in love, your happiness increases but we all know after the honeymoon period is over (within a year usually) your happiness reverts back to it's set-point.
Researchers can measure your set-point. It shows in your brain. They did studies on all kinds of people. They also measured the set-point of Buddhist monks who had been practicing for over 30 years. They found their set-point to be very high and when they measured the happiness part of the brain while the Buddhist monks were meditating, they found the happiness point was literally OFF THE SCALE.
Anyway .. the point is we can increase our set-point by using meditation.
There is an Australian documentary on self-harmers. They measured their brains at the beginning and found the unhappy parts of the brain were lit up and the happiness parts were dull. After a 6 week (?)course of meditation they measured the brain again. The happiness parts of the brain were lit up and the unhappy parts were dull. Needless to say they were self harming less.
It is a fundamental part of Buddhism that we can re-wire our brains through chanting/meditation which then increases our happiness and resilience.
I know myself when I keep up the chanting consistently I feel much more grounded and less likely to react in a negative way to situations and people.
I have also learned that my happiness is my responsibility. You can't rely on other people or situations to make you happy. That's a form of attachment. The problem with attachment is when the object of your happiness source goes away (impermanence) you tend to fall into sadness, depression or worse, depending on how attached you were. You see this when middle aged men lose their jobs or retire. You see this in mothers when children leave home to start their independent lives.
This is not to say that we shouldn't enjoy our sources of happiness. The key is to really appreciate our sources of happiness but at the same time develop an inner happiness that is not reliant on outside influences.
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