Joyful enthusiasm

Sometimes a single aspect of the Dharma comes into focus, and in it you find the path in its entirety. Recently that has happened for me with the paramita of Virya. Virya is often translated as "energy", but for me it has come alive as what I would call "joyful enthusiasm".

Imagine some children that have been out playing all day. They come home all bruised and exhausted. And yet they don't complain. Quite the opposite — they look forward to doing the same thing the very next day. That is joyful enthusiasm, a state of mind that makes any task effortless.

Of course, the children would not be able to maintain that joyful enthusiasm if the task was something completely different than playing, say cleaning their room. We are all like that. We can only muster joy and enthusiasm (to whatever degree we can muster them at all) for tasks that fit a very narrow view of what we "like doing". For the tasks we don't like doing we in fact have a whole arsenal of thought patterns which only purpose seems to be to destroy any trace of Virya in our minds. Like "Why do I always have to do this? Why can't he do it?" or "Doing this is so boring, I wish could hire someone to do this for me!"

So, of course the question is whether Virya is a state of mind that can be nurtured or generated. We can all agree that we would be much more successful at any task, whether it is cleaning the dishes or striving towards enlightenment, if we performed it with a mind filled with joyful enthusiasm. But most of us have the experience that enthusiasm comes rather randomly. Sometimes we get enthusiastic about certain things, sometimes we don't. Even doing the things that we normally enjoy doing there is no guarantee that Virya will arise.

The great new is that the Buddha showed us that there are practices that lead to Virya, and that Virya indeed is an important practice in itself. For example, Virya is among the six paramitas, the six perfections, which consist of generosity (dana), ethical behaviour (sila), patience (kshanti), enthusiam (virya), concentration (samadhi) and wisdom (prajna). If seen as a gradual path, the practice of generosity, ethical behaviour and patience lead to enthusiasm. Enthusiasm in turn is a prerequisite for concentration (meditation) and wisdom, and thus — ultimately — enlightenment.

I said at the beginning of this post that I felt as if I had discovered in Virya the path in its entirety. And it is easy to see that without joyful enthusiasm we will not get very far on our spiritual journey. It is possible to force oneself to disciplines such as giving or meditation, but if they are performed without joy or enthusiasm they will not amount to much. We will just get exhausted and fed up with the whole thing and before long we will find ourselves back in our old patterns. The old patterns where enthusiasm seems to be something that arises rather randomly and more or less by pure chance.

Virya is an necessary ingredient in all stages of the path. It is essential that we discover how to make it arise in our minds and how to strengthen it when it has arisen.

So, for the benefit of all beings, may I be able to do just that. With great joy. And great enthusiasm.