Search results for: virtue

  1. Unchanged by Loss
     … The serious loss is when you lose your virtue or your right view. The things of the world, the people of the world, are all subject to aging, illness, and death. These losses will happen no matter what you do. But you can keep yourself from losing your virtue or right view. There’s that passage where King Pasenadi has come to see the … 
  2. For Goodness’ Sake
     … And one of them was, “When Westerners come to the monastery, what do they come for?” He’d been talking about virtue and generosity to the laypeople, so I mentioned that a lot of people don’t come thinking about generosity and virtue at the very beginning. Their first motivation for coming is to find peace of mind. One of the people in the … 
  3. Becoming Capable of Happiness
     … As you develop skills—the skills of generosity, virtue, and meditation—they can overcome those weaknesses and change you into a different person. And they are skills. Generosity is a skill. At the very least, it’s an exercise in free will. So many of the Buddha’s lists of teachings start with generosity because an act of real generosity—when you give something … 
  4. Worry vs. Heedfulness
     … When you have your virtue, when you have your endurance, when you develop the quality of determination, all these perfections are things you can hold on to. That may be one of the reasons why the Pali name for these qualities is parami: When you hold on to them, they take you over to param, the other side of the flood that, if you … 
  5. Seeing Danger in Birth
     … heedful in our virtue, heedful in our concentration, heedful in our discernment. Heedful in virtue means realizing that whatever we might gain by even the slightest infraction of the precepts isn’t worth it. Those little gains get washed away, and then you’re left with the kamma. Heedful in your concentration means trying to be as careful as possible in your efforts to … 
  6. A Snare of Death Laid Out
     … When he gave his graduated discourse, he started out with generosity, virtue, and the rewards of generosity and virtue, which would be to experience sensual pleasures here in the human realm and then up in the higher realms. Then, before he taught the four noble truths, he had to take you through that step of seeing the drawbacks and degradation of sensuality, to the … 
  7. The Prison Break
     … That’s why we have the practice of generosity, why we have the practice of virtue. You’re training the heart and mind in the basic habits you’ll need as a meditator, and you want a good foundation. Now, it’s not the case that you have to wait until your foundation is good before you start meditating. You meditate while you’re … 
  8. The Desire to Be Free from Desire
     … Through your meditation, through your practice of virtue, concentration, and discernment, try to make yourself worthy of judging to see if what the Buddha said is really true. That kind of desire can be used to put an end to desire, to free you from this slavery to craving that otherwise drives the world and keeps us under its thumb.
  9. A Conglomeration of Germs
     … If you use it to meditate—to give rise to concentration, to give rise to discernment—or as a means for generosity and virtue, that’s a sign that you really know how to use your body. Take advantage of this conglomerate of old kamma that you’ve got, and while you can hold it together, learn how to use it well.
  10. Equanimity as a Skill
     … I’m surrounded by dishonest people,” he said. “How can I find happiness in life? How can I find peace in life?” So I talked to him about generosity, virtue, meditation. “How do you meditate?” I gave him the address for the website. He seemed pleased, shook my hand, and went back to work. The irony was that night I was going to give … 
  11. Worries & Regrets
     … The Buddha doesn’t say that your virtue has to be perfect before you can sit down and meditate. We’re all coming from ignorance, we’re all coming from a lot of wrong ideas and wrong actions in the past. Now we’re trying to straighten the mind out, and that’s the whole point: that we can straighten it out. As the … 
  12. Anybody Home?
     … the sense of self that can meditate, the sense of self that can practice generosity, practice virtue. That kind of self we need as long as the path hasn’t yet been fully developed. We need a sense of confidence that we can do it and a sense of competence that we can do it, along with the sense of responsibility that if we … 
  13. Appreciating Your Practice
     … generosity, virtue, and meditation. When you find an innocent happiness that’s good for you, it’s good for other people, too. By finding a reliable happiness, it’s also good for other people, too, because if your happiness isn’t reliable, you’re frustrated and you start taking it out on others. If you’ve got something of solid worth inside and you … 
  14. The Buddha’s Questions
     … When you learn how to read your mind in this way, developing both that sense of heedfulness and greater skill in how you manage your practice of virtue, concentration, and discernment, then you finally get to those questions that he asked the five brethren: “Is form constant?” They say, “It’s inconstant.” “If it’s inconstant, is it pleasant or stressful?” “Well, if you … 
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