Search results for: "Nibbana"

  1. Page 11
  2. From Compunction to Release
     … He describes nibbana as activityless-ness, akiriya in Thai. But you don’t get there by doing nothing, or trying to do nothing. You get there by getting more and more appreciative of the principle of action, developing more refined standards for your judgment as to what’s worth doing, what’s not, based on the insight that you do fabricate your experience anyhow … 
  3. The Wrong Uses of Right
     … right views have to be put down because the goal is not measured in terms of right views and wrong views. Ajaan Lee has a nice Dhamma talk on this one. Nibbana doesn’t have right views or wrong views; it doesn’t have views at all. But you can’t get there without views – correct views – right views and using them rightly. The … 
  4. Equanimity
     … Ajaan Maha Boowa once said that if people who had attained nibbana could take it out and show it to everybody else, nobody would want anything but nibbana. Yet it can’t be shown like that, so people go through their lives without any interest in it at all. So even the Buddha can’t awaken everybody. As he said, he taught those who … 
  5. A Safe Place
     … He had the wrong view that if he tended to his concentration steadily enough, the quiet of the concentration would turn into the quiet of nibbāna. The interesting thing is that he was with Ajaan Mun all that time, and Ajaan Mun let him stay stuck on concentration for quite a while. It’s good to think about why. Perhaps he saw that Ajaan … 
  6. Put Your Books Back on the Shelf
     … After all, nobody has ever been able to catch nibbana and put it in a book. All we have are pointers. But what you want here is the real thing. This is where it’s going to be found. So keep watching it right here. And as you get more familiar with this place, the more you’ll see.
  7. Equanimity & More
     … Where are you going go to find a true, unadulterated happiness? There’s only one place, and that’s nibbāna—and it’s not even a place. It’s another dimension entirely outside of space and time. You think about that and you realize that that would be the only way to find true peace of mind, to find true happiness. Everything else is … 
  8. In the Driver’s Seat
     … Once you realize what it means to drive well, why go back to your old ways? And fortunately attaining a good rebirth and attaining nibbana don’t require a perfect driving record. You simply make up your mind that from now on you’re not going to change back to your old ways. Sometimes we’re told that Buddhism is all about accepting change … 
  9. Protection Through the Practice
     … One of the names for nibbana is “refuge.” It’s the ultimate refuge, totally safe, because it’s not affected by anything at all. So there are levels of refuge and there are levels of protection, recognizing that the big dangers are the ones inside. But you also have the potential to develop good qualities inside that can counteract those dangers. That’s why … 
  10. Respect for Tranquility & Insight
     … When he gives that image of the swift pair of messengers who bring the message of nibbana to consciousness, the messengers are both tranquility and insight working together. If you find yourself leaning in one direction or the other, take the time and have the respect that’s required to bring things back into balance. In that way, your practice becomes solid. It’s … 
  11. The Buddha’s Tools
     … both his knowledge of nibbāna, and his knowledge of how you get there. There’s an objective quality to those teachings that’s hard to find anywhere else. So try to use them as tools for getting more objective about what’s going on in your mind, so that you can see what the problem is, what the real problem is. A lot of … 
  12. Looking for Happiness Inside
     … Some people are afraid that when you go to nibbana, you’ll miss all your old friends or this or that thing on the human level. Buy the Buddha kept saying, “Don’t think in those ways. There’s nothing missing, there’s nothing lacking there.” But we define ourselves around our families, our friends, our jobs, all these other things, and we’re … 
  13. The Power of the Will
     … As Ajaan Fuang once said, if it were simply through brute force that we get to nibbana, everybody would have gone there a long time ago. So the will has to be trained. It has to be turned into the will of right effort, the chanda of right effort, the chanda of the bases for success, focused on the causes. The causes for samsara … 
  14. Dealing with Limitations
     … That’s the one constant in all of the Buddha’s discussions of nibbana, the most positive statement he makes about it: total freedom. Often he describes nibbana indirectly in terms of analogies and similes, but total freedom, total limitlessness, is his most direct description of the goal. To get there, you’ve got to explore your powers, what you can and can’t … 
  15. Still
     … The time, of course, for nibbana was passed. It was part of the government policy to get monks to teach in schools. So to counteract that belief, Ajaan Lee had to talk very explicitly about jhana. But Ajaan Fuang may have noticed that when people think about jhana, they start comparing their jhanas with other people’s jhanas. So to avoid that, he wouldn … 
  16. Your Judgments Matter
     … There are paths going to hell, paths going to the animal realm, paths going to the human realm, paths going to the realm of the hungry ghosts, the deva realms, and the path going to nibbana. There are different paths. And you want to learn how to judge which path you’re on. And if it’s a bad path, you want to learn … 
  17. Freedom
     … The goal is nibbāna: unbinding, total happiness. So freedom and happiness are the big themes here. Yet you look around and what do you see? You see monks having to abide by a very strict code of rules. You’re sitting here and there may be pains in your legs, pains in the back, pains in your stomach, that come from sitting in a … 
  18. Abandoning Effluents (1)
    The third knowledge on the night of the Buddha’s awakening, the knowledge that led to his awakening to nibbana, he called knowledge of the ending of the effluents. Effluents, *asava, *are things that flow out of the mind. They could also be translated as fermentations, things that bubble up in the mind and keep flowing back in a flood into samsara, engaging the … 
  19. The Intelligence of Restraint
     … As the Buddha said, “Nibbana lies outside of conditions. It’s unfabricated.” That *is *a possibility. Now, the Buddha can’t prove it to us. But what he says makes sense, and it’s a tantalizing possibility. So you want to turn around and look at all your actions. To what extent are they conducive to finding that kind of well-being? As for … 
  20. The Pursuit of Happiness & Goodness
     … After all, nibbana is the ultimate happiness. And it’s good to think about the Pali term for happiness—*sukha—*because it has many meanings, everything from pleasure, ease, and well-being, to bliss. So this is also the pursuit of pleasure, the pursuit of bliss, the pursuit of well-being—which I might qualify by saying it’s the pursuit of true happiness … 
  21. Peace vs. Clinging
     … But the essence of what the Buddha is getting at as he talks about happiness as a goal, nibbana as the highest sukha, is in his statement that there is no happiness, there is no sukha, other than peace. That’s because it’s peace of the mind that gives well-being. Even when we’re happy in the normal sense of smiling and … 
  22. Load next page...