My boulder, my Santoṣa

I have been fascinated by Sisyphus ever since I read Camus’s The Outsider, which was my gateway drug to The Myth of Sisyphus. As an impressionable young man, I was drawn to the opening lines of Camus’s foundational philosophical essay: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

For an intellectually pretentious young man, this was philosophical gold dust and I knew that Camus was not being a drama queen – though I am sure I was! Camus was being exact: If life has no inherent meaning, why continue living? Forget about all the other philosophical questions with which we get consumed, this is really the one that needs to be addressed first. The one question from which all others are birthed. And it’s a question with which I became fascinated.

Sisyphus, for those who feel that reading this is like pushing a boulder up a hill, is a Greek king who, having cheated death twice through sheer cunning, is handed his final bill by the gods: push a boulder up a hill for eternity. Not metaphorically. Actually. The boulder rolls back down every time it nears the summit, and has done so, presumably, since before we had a word for futility.

But the story’s central theme is not really about the futility of life, well certainly not for Camus, who takes the myth and turns it into the central image of his philosophy of the absurd (the gap between our desperate need for meaning and the universe’s complete silence on the matter).  Camus’s argument is that humans are meaning-seeking creatures in a universe that offers none. All we can do about this is to keep pushing our boulders… and be happy about it. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” says Camus.

I attached to this as it played nicely into my pseudo-nihilism at the time, without being so obviously defeatist, and its intellectual simplicity was proportional to its philosophical profundity. But, as is the case with maturity, over time, I started seeing Sisyphus in a different light. It began when I realised that happiness itself is not the apex emotion. Happiness is a tasty by-product of thought or deed. The emotion that drives the thought or deed, seems more important, more real, more true. Love without happiness, for example, is surely preferable to a lack of love with happiness? I guess this is the Philosophy 101 happy pig argument (would you rather be a happy pig or an unhappy human). Worth is found irrespective of happiness. Meaning is greater than pleasure. Also, happiness doesn’t dissolve the boulder. Sisyphus’s happiness is not separate from toil. Happiness built on suffering, still contains suffering, whether masked or not.

However, by outwitting the Gods (so, not by pushing the boulder up the hill), Sisyphus gains more than happiness, he gains contentment. This is not pride or defiance, or even the happiness Camus is suggesting, but real contentment. Sisyphus understands that it is only his contentment that makes the punishment meaningless. It’s not easy to outwit the Gods. But being content with their punishment is sublime. This is Sisyphus’s Santoṣa.

Santoṣa is the second of the five niyamas – the personal observances Patañjali lays out in the second chapter of the Yoga Sūtras as the interior ground of practice. The word comes from Sanskrit: sam, meaning completely or altogether, and tuṣ, to be satisfied. Not partially satisfied. Not satisfied pending better conditions. Completely.

That’s the challenge – the boulder is unimportant.

We tend to treat contentment as conditional. It comes after: after the body is stronger; after the relationship is easier, after the work is done; after love settles; after healing, when memories fade; after the sting of betrayal lessens. But, Patañjali is claiming that Santoṣa is meaningful precisely because it is unconditional. Again, the boulder is meaningless. And it’s not a reward for having the right life. It is a practice undertaken inside the life you already have.

A lot of criticism I get from students I present the concept of Santoṣa to, is that it’s an awful lot like surrendering, or blindly accepting your lot. But that is not Santoṣa at all. Santoṣa doesn’t mean settling or surrendering. Sisyphus hasn’t merely resigned to his fate… his contentment is active. You can be content and still act, still discern, still change what needs changing (yes, you can desire change when content. Contentment is not an absolute. It’s not perfection). The difference is from where the action comes: it comes from a place of fullness rather than lack. From sufficiency rather than the chronic background ache of not yet.

Sūtra II.42 says simply: santoṣāt anuttamaḥ sukha-lābhaḥ: from contentment, the highest happiness is gained. Not pleasure. Not relief.

That’s what we’re practising toward. Not a feeling. A way of meeting what is.

I would suggest that a Vedic interpretation would see Sisyphus not as a tragic hero but as a precise symbol of saṃsāra, the endless cycle of conditioned existence driven by karma (action with attachment) and ahaṃkāra (the ego that believes it is the doer). He pushes the boulder because he believes he must (curses are seldom psychologically specific), and because he identifies himself as the one doing the pushing. Here, the boulder is not his punishment, it is his identity. Here, the boulder is far from meaningless – we don’t know of Sisyphus without the boulder. This is the Vedic definition of bondage. And this is suffering – Sisyphus becomes the pusher of the boulder. It’s all he is. This is what the gods wanted. This is all too real. This is dangerous as we become our heartache.

However, relief does come in the Upaniṣads (who offer a subtle difference), where the boulder would simply be māyā – a thing, and hence an illusion. Here, Sisyphus suffers not because the boulder is heavy, but because he takes it to be real and his. The moment the boulder rolls back down is not defeat, it is a teaching, if only he could receive it. Every return to the base is an invitation to enquire: who is the one pushing? The suffering here is ignorance, the misidentification of who is doing the pushing. But māyā seems more of a spiritual bypass than an actual solution to suffering, regardless of its intellectual weight.

The Bhagavad Gītā perhaps offers the most direct answer to Camus. Kṛṣṇa's teaching in the Gītā is precisely addressed to someone in Sisyphus's condition: Arjuna is paralysed by karma. The solution is not absurdist defiance, not imagining the boulder-pusher happy, but naiṣkarmya, action without the sense of doership, without attachment to outcome. Here, happiness is the by-product. Again, similar to the Vedas and Upaniṣads, but slightly and importantly different. Māyā here is secondary, which seems more psychologically honest. More adaptable as a working model to our modern, Western, ego-centric lives.

Karmaṇy-evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana — “Your right is to action alone, never to its fruits.” (BG 2.47)

Sisyphus’s error is not that he pushes the boulder. It is that he pushes for a result, and when the result fails, he is crushed inwardly as well as outwardly. The Gītā Sisyphus would push the boulder with full presence, full effort, and zero clinging to the summit. He would not be liberated from the pushing, he would be liberated within it. Which is not that far removed from what Camus is stating. Through his happiness, Sisyphus has, in effect, removed all “doingness”, and desire for an outcome.

So, what does this all actually teach us? Well, I think we all have our boulders and while we can look at this as an analogy for the meaninglessness of life, I think it is helpful to apply it to the minutia, or those aspects of life where we recognise the pattern of our pushing. I see value in pushing my boulders. I see value in the toiling and, unlike Camus, I don’t need to perceive Sisyphus as happy. I am not convinced I even need him to be content. And, I don’t think in this situation I want to align with the Vedic interpretation of the boulder being māyā, even though intellectually, this is what I most align with (I have learnt that the intellect shouldn’t always be the default winner). If the boulder is māyā, emotionally, my meaninglessness is even more exposed.

There is something romantic about committing to the boulder. There is a beauty in the struggle (as long as it doesn’t define you), in knowing that the love you carry can move the boulder in the first place. There is something comforting in knowing that your meaning is unconditional, and lies beyond the act of doing. That in that split second when you get to the summit and before the boulder rolls down again, there is stillness, truth, beauty. And maybe, just maybe, one day, someone will meet you there.