Search results for: virtue

  1. Working at Home
     … These are some of the virtues developed as you learn how to live wisely with other meditators, live wisely in a group. Psychologists call these virtues healthy ego-functioning, and even though the Buddha never talked in terms of ego-functioning, he definitely did teach these virtues as part of the path. So you try to use your concentration as a tool in developing … 
  2. Thinking Your Way to Stillness
     … There’s a tendency in modern literature to focus on antiheroes, people whose virtue lies in their being frank about their weaknesses—which is a kind of virtue, but not the whole story of virtue. For the sake of the practice, it’s more useful to read about people who’ve succeeded in doing what’s difficult. They’re our friends from the past … 
  3. Adult Dhamma
     … Because after all, what is the path that the Buddha points out? There’s virtue, there’s concentration, and there’s discernment. These are all qualities in your own mind. We all have them to some extent. Learning how to develop what’s in your own mind is what’s going to make all the difference. The Buddha’s discernment isn’t going to … 
  4. How to Feed Mindfulness
     … The first is well-purified virtue. Virtue here means the intention not to harm: not to do harm to yourself, not to do harm to other living beings. If you have harmful intentions in mind, part of the mind goes along with them and part of the mind doesn’t. There’s a conflict. And one of the mind’s tricks for going along … 
  5. Wisdom for Dummies
     … In other words, even though the qualities you develop in terms of virtue, concentration, discernment are not ultimately what you’re looking for, they do help you find what you’re looking for. When you’re looking at the results of your actions, you want to have some way of separating the gold from the gravel and dross, so you need the pan. It … 
  6. Dealing with Limitations
     … generosity, virtue, and meditation. These are all tools, but they each have their different limitations. Generosity is sometimes limited by how much time you have, how much energy, and of course the material resources you can draw on. You have to learn to be very judicious in how you apply your resources. You can’t pour them all into one basket, because then you … 
  7. Fear & Anger
     … You can die without letting your virtues die. You can die and yet maintain the skillfulness of the mind. There’s that great passage in the Canon where a monk is going off to a dangerous land and the Buddha says, “The people there are dangerous. They’re known to be very harsh, very barbaric and cruel. What are you going to do if … 
  8. Abusing Pleasure & Pain
     … In other words, anything that’s fabricated like the body or the mind—any of the khandhas or aggregates—is going to involve some stress simply by virtue of the fact that it’s fabricated. That’s part of the natural order of things. But there’s also a deeper stress, a deeper pain that comes from craving. That’s stress and pain in … 
  9. End of results