Below is an excerpt from a monologue by Phra Paisal Visalo, the abbot of an up-country Buddhist temple in Thailand. Note that in Theravada Buddhism there is no creation story and no God, and thus the discourse is allegorical.
The original is in Thai. I translated the following from an audio recording:
There’s a story about the creation of the world. God created all things, the earth, animals, and humans, and then to humans he was going give happiness. But there were devils, who had malicious intentions against humans, and so they stole happiness. Before God could even bestow happiness, it was stolen. And then they needed to find a way to hide it, a hiding place. Where could happiness be hidden? So they had a discussion. There was a whole troop of devils, and together they talked. Where to hide happiness? One devil, one of the younger ones, said, “Hide it in the navel of the sea. Hide it in the deepest place. Humans will never find it.” But this proposal didn’t pass, because the smarter devils knew that, sooner or later, humans would find it there. No matter how deep, it would certainly be found. And then another devil, a bear-devil, said, “Hide it in a cave, the deepest and highest place, the highest peak of the mountains.” At first, many agreed, but the leader of the devils said, “No, it won’t work. Humans will find it. Not only the mountain peaks, humans will reach even the moon and stars.”
So where could it be hidden?
They couldn’t think of a place, and then one of the devils, who was small as a mouse, spoke up. He said, “I know where to hide it.”
The leader asked, “Where?”
And the devil replied, “Hide it in the human heart.”
And that’s where it is hidden. There’s almost no chance humans will find it. Isn’t this true? Of all places where it could be hidden, no place is as difficult to pursue as the heart. Because we humans are interested in the external; we know so much about the outside world. We can send people to the moon. We can send spaceships to the edge of the universe. Now there are many ships in space, that have gone far out into the solar system, and some have even gone beyond the edge of the solar system. We know about stars many billions of light years away. We see everything, and know everything, but we know very little, almost nothing, about our own heart and spirit. Why?
Because it’s so close that it’s almost out of reach.