Enlightenment is not "happy ever after"

Image: Hakuin

(I found the following note in my handwriting tucked into a copy of Red Pine’s translation of The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma , which I opened this morning for the first time in close to ten years. I laughed when I read what I had written, because I have no recollection of writing it, and, looking through the book, I can’t tell which part I wrote it in response to.)

The end of suffering actually turns out to be the end of separation from suffering.

Suffering does not dis...