Views, Virtue, & Mindfulness
December 06, 2011
The Buddha compared mindfulness to a gatekeeper in a fortress at the edge of a frontier. In a fortress like that, you’ve got to have a gatekeeper who really knows what he’s doing, knows whom to let in and whom not to let in, whom to trust, whom not to trust. In the same way, the function of mindfulness is to remember, to keep something in mind. In particular, you want to keep in mind what’s skillful and what’s unskillful, and to recognize skillful and unskillful qualities when they show their face. Then the function of right effort is to actually make the effort to encourage skillful qualities in the mind and to abandon unskillful ones.