Search results for: "Fabrication"
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- The Six Properties… You’re sensitive to bodily fabrication, the way you breathe; you’re sensitive to mental fabrication, your perceptions and your feelings; and in both cases you calm them down. Seeing things in terms of fabrication is a matter of insight; calming fabrications is a matter of tranquility. With the breath, you can get it so calm that it actually feels like it’s stopping …
- Tranquility & Insight… If you ask how to understand the way you’re fabricating things, and how to look at the fabrications in a way that helps develop dispassion so as to lead to greater tranquility, that’s what develops insight. The Buddha doesn’t talk about tranquility and insight as techniques. They’re qualities of mind developed by these different questions. But the process is all …
- The Endurance of a Long-distance Runner… Here again, it’s a matter of what the Buddha calls the three kinds of fabrication. The first factor in dependent co-arising, after ignorance, you get fabrication. Fabrication is what shapes your experience of the present moment. The Buddha does point us to the present moment all the time, but he doesn’t just say, “Well, look at it and see that it …
- Know the Dhamma by Its Results… And in every case, you learn how to be sensitive to the extent to which you’re fabricating things and learn how to do it more subtly, with more refinement. You still the fabrications. You calm the fabrications down. And as you do that, you get more and more sensitive to ways in which you fabricate your experience that you don’t recognize, until …
- Mindfulness of Death… Then there’s verbal fabrication. The Buddha doesn’t mention verbal fabrication in his sixteen steps, but the examples he gives of telling yourself to breathe in and out focused on pleasure, focused on rapture, focused on mental fabrication, “I will breathe this way. I will breathe that way”: Those are examples of verbal fabrication, examples of how you should be thinking. Like breathing …
- Verbal Fabrication… The Buddha talks about three kinds of fabrication, and we’re engaged in all three as we put the present moment together. There’s bodily fabrication—the i-and-out breath. Verbal fabrication—directed thought and evaluation; how you talk to yourself, focusing on a topic, making comments, asking questions. And then mental fabrication—your perceptions and feelings. As Ajaan Lee would point out …
- The Tools of the Path… In that case, you have to exert a fabrication. Now, what are the fabrications? The Buddha talks about three fabrications: bodily, verbal, and mental. These have to do with the five aggregates that are suffering when you cling to them. So, you actually learn how to use these aggregates. You get hands-on experience with them in using them to get rid of unskillful …
- Change Your Perceptions… There’s an awful lot of emphasis on the different kinds of fabrication: bodily fabrication—the way you breathe; verbal fabrication—technically, it’s directed thought and evaluation, but in plain terms, it’s the way you talk to yourself; and then mental fabrication—perception and feelings. As you look at the Buddha’s teachings, you can see that a lot of them have …
- Accepting the Way Out… And it’s important that you learn how to translate the abstractions into the immediacy of what you’re doing, so that you can see, “Oh yeah, there is a fabrication going on.” The breath, that’s fabrication right there. It doesn’t come ready labeled, so that when you first breathe in as a baby, something tells you, “Okay, here’s bodily fabrication …
- Dispassion Isn’t Depression… Ultimately, you get to the point where the mind doesn’t fabricate anything: Its sensitivity gets greater and greater until you realize that any kind of fabrication, even skillful fabrication, involves stress. It’s inconstant. So you ask yourself, “Why do I keep engaging in this?” When your sensitivity is developed properly, then you can see that there is an escape. The fact that …
- Fourth Truth, First Duty… Feelings feel, perceptions perceive, fabrications fabricate, consciousness cognizes. They’re defined by the activity they do. And you can begin to see how you constantly hold on to those activities, which is what suffering is. Now, for the sake of concentration, you do want to hold on to them for the time being. But an important part of both right mindfulness and right concentration …
- A Divine Seat… Bodily fabrication, as I said, and then verbal fabrication: directed thought and evaluation itself. That’s the Buddha’s term for how you talk to yourself: the comments you make, the questions you ask, the answers you give to those questions. You direct your attention someplace and then you discuss it with yourself. Then there are perceptions and feelings, which are mental fabrications. Perceptions …
- Two Kinds of Defilements… Now to understand the Buddha’s term, “exerting a fabrication,” you have to think about the three kinds of fabrication. There’s bodily fabrication, verbal and mental. Bodily fabrication is the breath. That gives you one of your primary tools for digging around: learning how to change your breath around a particular issue. When anger comes and there’s a catch in the breath …
- Focus on Your Intention… Form deforms, feelings feel, perceptions perceive, fabrications fabricate, and consciousness cognizes—the point being that these are activities. The word “aggregate” has an unfortunate connotation. It sounds like gravel, little bits and pieces of rock. The aggregates probably got that name in English from a convention in early modern European philosophy which said that groups of things were either systems or aggregates. Systems were …
- Looking after Yourself with Ease… Evaluate it. “How is it? Is it good? Is it not good?” So you’ve got the verbal fabrication right there as you’re working with bodily fabrication. And then with the perceptions and feelings: You have the feelings of ease that you’re trying to create and trying to maintain. And the perceptions are the images you hold in mind—in this case …
- Brahmaviharas & Noble Truths… realizing that there’s more you’ve got to do, because the brahmavihāras are fabricated states. If you just stay with those fabrications, you’re never really free. Freedom comes when you can look at the mind as it fabricates things, and then step back from its fabrications. We do that as we develop the path, because right view, which is part of the …
- The Food of Feelings… All of that is a product of our own fabrication in the present moment. So as long as we’re fabricating things in the present, we might as well learn how to do it skillfully. That, in particular, is what the practice of concentration is about. In the various analogies given in the Canon for the different aspects of the path, concentration often shows …
- Free Not to Suffer… With those the Buddha says you have to exert a fabrication, and there are three kinds of fabrication he’s talking about here. The first is the breath: That’s bodily fabrication. The second is what he calls directed thought and evaluation, his terms for the way you talk to yourself. That’s verbal fabrication. Then there are perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are labels …
- Heart & Mind… As the Buddha said, this process of fabricating emotions, if we do it with ignorance, will cause suffering. If we do it with knowledge, it actually becomes part of the path. There are three factors here. There’s bodily fabrication, which is the breath, and “breath” here is conceived in very broad terms as the energy flowing through the body. It courses along the …
- Right Here, Right Now… The Buddha talked about sankharas, fabrications, as being the main focus of insight. It’s when you understand fabrications, he says: That’s the knowledge that’s going to clear away all the bonds of the mind, all the fetters on the mind. Now, what are those fabrications? There’s the bodily fabrication, which is the breath. Verbal fabrication: directed thought and evaluation. When …
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