Search results for: "Nibbana"

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  2. Worry vs. Heedfulness
     … Now, that may seem far away, because the Buddha’s talking about nibbana. A little bit closer are the skills you can develop as you meditate—and in particular, wisdom in terms of where you look for your happiness and for your security. When you realize that the most important things in life are not so much your work, your family, your relationships, but … 
  3. Judging Your Thoughts by What They Do
     … We can’t just relax our way into nibbana. It’s going to require some work. Again, this is one of the reasons we try to get the mind into concentration, to give ourselves the strength we need in order to do that work, the sense of well-being that allows us to say No to the thoughts that otherwise would run right over … 
  4. Patience
     … This is not to say that it’s not possible, but just that most of the people who could get results in seven days have already gotten results and gone to nibbana. That leaves the rest of us here muddling along — which doesn’t mean we should be any less dedicated in our practice. We should just realize that it’s going to take … 
  5. Being Somebody, Going Somewhere
     … There are also paths to the human realm, paths to the heavens, and there’s a path to nibbana. The Buddha himself chose that last path. All during his quest for awakening he was very much somebody, going someplace. “Bodhisatta,” a being aiming at awakening: That’s what he was. And he did everything in his power to get to awakening, to make sure … 
  6. A Pure Happiness
     … After all, the Buddha says nibbana is the ultimate happiness. That’s what we’re working toward. So we use these teachings on stress and inconstancy and not-self as ways of watching and judging our actions, and peeling away our attachments to things that get in the way of nibbana. And it’s usually not horrible things that get in the way. It … 
  7. Neither Here nor There
     … Even when they say that someone “enters” nibbana, the word “enters” doesn’t exist in those phrases in the Pali. Basically, a person is unbound or unbinds, with no sense of going to any particular place. That’s the whole point. As the Buddha said, the mind at that moment is not established anywhere and cannot be found. There’s a famous story about … 
  8. Samvega vs. Dispassion
     … So even though you don’t get to nibbana or dispassion just by imagining them, at least you can imagine that they’re good, and that they’re better than you can imagine. That can provide a lot of the motivation for sticking with the path and really committing yourself to it.
  9. Little Things
     … How could little things like this build up to such big things as release, liberation, nibbana? That’s what we think. And yet it’s precisely the little unskillful things that get in the way of the big results we want, so we have to pay careful attention to them each time the mind pulls away from the desire for peace or the desire … 
  10. Refreshing
     … Again, Ajaan Fuang said, if nibbāna were a place we could get to through the force of desire, everybody would have gone there by now. Well, it’s the same with this. You can prakhawng, you can shelter it, treat it gently. Be very gentle with your body, be very gentle with your breath, but consistent at the same time, and it’ll develop … 
  11. Respect for the Training
    There’s a chant we often recite about the forms of respect that bring you into the presence of nibbana. One of them is respect for the training. The training is very basic—virtue, concentration, discernment—and in some cases it’s so basic we tend to overlook it. We want to go to the higher Dhamma, things that are more abstract that seem … 
  12. Crossing the River
     … That’s nibbana. At that point, you’re totally safe. At that point, you don’t even need the raft anymore. But we’re still on the near shore, not on the far shore. We’ve got to get across. This shore is not safe. That shore is safe. So we have no choice but to go across. And we have to use a … 
  13. Carrying Your Duties Lightly
     … This is why we work for nibbana: true freedom, ultimate freedom. But in the meantime, we try to create the conditions for whatever conditioned freedom we can manage. In Thai they have the word wat, which has several meanings. There’s wat which means the monastery and then there’s wat, spelled differently, which means your duties in the course of the day. And … 
  14. A Good Example for the World
     … How many people are practicing the way to nibbana? It’s a very small number. And they’re offering an especially valuable gift to the world. In my own case, in going to Thailand, I’d been looking for a meditation teacher for years, and had pretty much given up hope in finding a good one. Then I met Ajaan Fuang and that changed … 
  15. On Top of Your Actions
     … It’s your actions that take you to hell, your actions that can get you to heaven, your actions that can get you beyond heaven and hell, taking you all the way to nibbana. So you want to be on top of what you’re doing right here, right now. Because this is where all the issues are, all the factors of the path … 
  16. A Mind Like Earth
     … As Ajaan Chah once said, if patience were the only thing that were required, chickens would have beat us to nibbana a long time ago. They just sit, sit, sit on their nests. We’re here to develop patience so that we can see things clearly. It’s like doing a scientific experiment. If you have very precise equipment but you put it on … 
  17. The Real World Isn’t for Real
     … In fact, shelter is one of the words for nibbana. You see all these things that are not your own, but there are still good goals that you can lay claim to, thinking, “This is what I really want to do. This is what I really want to accomplish.” In other words, you take your sense of agency and you use it well to … 
  18. What Are You Bringing?
     … If people all learned from suffering, we would have all gone to nibbana a long time ago. Most people resist learning from suffering. They can actually turn around and get worse. Most of the cruelty in this world comes, if not through the fact that people are already suffering, then through their fear of suffering. So you wouldn’t gain any advantage from their … 
  19. Learning by Doing
     … That’s one of the reasons why the Buddha said that respect for concentration is an important part of getting close to nibbana. You have to realize that a state of mind in which things are very, very quiet, very, very still, is not a state of mind in which nothing is happening—a lot of things are happening. There’s that passage in … 
  20. Four Determinations
     … We’re determined on truth, because nibbana, what the Buddha calls the undeceptive, is the highest noble truth. The relinquishment of all our mental baggage that would get in the way of freedom is the highest noble relinquishment. Then we’re determined on calm, because when the mind is freed from its defilements, it reaches the highest noble calm. So those are four aspects … 
  21. A Radiant Practice
     … You notice that his list of blessings and protections has everything from who you hang out with, trying to choose wise people, through helping your relatives, helping your parents, being generous, all the way up to experiencing nibbana and being an arahant. There’s no clear dividing line between what’s mundane and what’s transcendent there. It’s all part of a continuum … 
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