Happiness unto him who gives happiness unto others

Unquenchable is man's thirst for happiness, Ahura Mazda. In this thine wide world, there is enough room for all to live and food to eat and good things of life to enjoy and be happy. At the gray dawn of history, Zarathushtra gave thy message to mankind that the individual's happiness depended upon the happiness of all, and gave out thy golden rule that happiness came to him who gave happiness to others.

In this world of joy and sorrow, happiness and misery, life would be intolerable if it were not for the sympathy, kindness, and affection of man for man. Unbearable is the burden of life when unaided. It loses its crushing weight when men live in fellowship with their fellowmen and share one another's burden. Life is incomplete when man lives for his own self, oblivious of the happiness of others. Life is best lived when it is lived for others. Thus preached our beloved prophet, the first among thy holy prophets to teach this universal truth.

Thy sainted souls of all time and clime have loved others more than themselves and have held that the greatest pleasure of life consisted in making others happy. They have lived for others, worked for others, spent their lives for others, risked their all for others, endured everything for others, and died for others, that their fellow human beings may be happy.

Give us wisdom, O Wise One, to see that our interests are served the best by working for the common welfare, in cooperation for the common good. Teach us to seek our happiness in the happiness of all, to regard the sorrows and sufferings of others as ours and to hasten to assuage them. Enable us to see that we are all fellow-mariners steering the common barque across the sea of life and that a common fate to swim or sink awaits us. Inspire us to feel that common is our goal to reach and common our ideal to realize in thy divine dispensation.

Strengthen us to stand united in thee, one with another, and be mindful of the eternal fact that we are brothers and sisters all and belong to one great human family and are children of one father that art thou, Ahura Mazda.

This page was last updated on Friday, February 11, 2005.