Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. A Passion for the Path
    Sometimes the question comes up that when the Buddha listed the four noble truths why did he list the cessation of suffering before the path to the cessation of suffering? The answer is in the third noble truth. He’s not simply stating the fact that there’s a cessation. He’s also stating a principle. The cessation comes when you develop dispassion for … 
  3. The Right Place to Look
     … Sometimes we hear that the Buddha wanted to put a stop to all suffering, regardless of whether it was caused by things inside or outside. But as he said, the real cause for the suffering is your own craving and ignorance. That’s not outside. It’s inside. So if you want to put an end to suffering in the world, you have to … 
  4. Faith in Goodness
     … You see people who are suffering, or who are creating the causes for suffering, and you don’t just leave them and say, “Well, they deserve to suffer.” You have compassion: May they find some way of ending their suffering. If there’s anything that you can do to help, you’re happy to help. With empathetic joy, people are happy or creating the … 
  5. Responsible for Your Goodness
     … You try to get your head around suffering so you can comprehend it to the point where you can develop dispassion for the things that make you cling to it. As for the cause of suffering, you try to get your head around it enough to abandon it. But the end of suffering, the cessation of suffering, is not something to comprehend. You discover … 
  6. The Fangs of Conceit
     … We’re here because we’re suffering. There’s stress in the mind. There’s suffering in the mind, and we’re causing it to ourselves. That’s the big irony. There’s enough stress and suffering in the world without our additional piling it on. And everything we do should be for the sake of happiness. You’d think that’s why we … 
  7. Stick to Your Duties
     … Your business is the fact that you’re suffering and you need to attack the suffering at the cause, and not just try to let go of suffering. Trying to let go of suffering is like going to a house, seeing that there’s smoke filling the house, and you try to put out the smoke. As long as the fire is burning, the … 
  8. The Reality Principle
     … How do we not suffer in the face of that? Those are the real issues. This where the teaching on equanimity is important. It’s the brahmavihara that helps prevent the other brahmaviharas from causing us to suffer. We want all living beings to be happy. We see that some are suffering and we want to help them. Sometimes we can, but often we … 
  9. Endurance Made Easier
    Endurance Made Easier January 27, 2009 We’re practicing to put an end to stress, suffering, and pain. But the practice itself involves stress, suffering, and pain. As the Buddha said, there are times when you realize that certain unskillful qualities in your mind are not going away as you live at your ease. So you have to be willing to put up with … 
  10. Desire for Happiness
     … You slip up and you’re going to suffer. And then we chant, “May I be happy.” That contrast right there says a lot about life. We live in a world where there’s a lot of suffering. In addition to the basic suffering that comes from having a body, there are also all the horrible things that people do to one another: killing … 
  11. Bare Attention
     … You have to be responsible to see what works and what doesn’t work in putting an end to the causes of suffering: When is it better to be quiet; when is it better to be more proactive? The four noble truths provide the framework for that, looking to see—when there’s suffering—what’s causing the suffering and then attacking the problem … 
  12. Realizing Cessation
    Realizing Cessation February 8, 2023 The duty with regard to the third noble truth is to realize it, to realize that there is a dimension totally free of suffering. It’s unchanging, blissful, a type of consciousness that has no object, no restrictions: what the Buddha calls unrestricted awareness. And it’s the best thing there is. As Ajaan Maha Boowa once said, if … 
  13. Above & Beyond Suffering
     … Certain issues eat away at the mind simply because the mind still has a habit of allowing itself to suffer, to create suffering for itself. What we’re trying to do here is to learn how to be more and more skillful in how we approach what we do, what we say, what we think, so that we don’t create that suffering. Because … 
  14. The Brightness of Life
     … All they had seen in the texts were suffering, suffering, suffering, and impermanence. So they expected Asian Buddhists to be pretty depressed. But they found that they were actually very happy. And their original conclusion was that Asian Buddhists didn’t know their own religion very well. The scholars felt superior because they’d been reading the books. They assumed that the people in … 
  15. Opening Your World
     … There’s stress, there’s suffering of one kind or another. This is probably the Buddha’s greatest gift: teaching us how to take care of that problem from within. Sometimes you hear that Theravada’s the selfish branch of Buddhism where people are concerned only with their own sufferings. But how are you going to take care of anyone else’s sufferings if … 
  16. The Right to Repair Your Mind
     … But if you make up your mind that you really do want to solve the problem of suffering, everything you need is right here. You’ve got all the tools. The first noble truth is the truth basically that all forms of suffering can be reduced to clinging. That’s usually the last thing we look at when we’re suffering from something; we … 
  17. The Gatekeeper’s Duties
     … There is suffering, and it’s the clinging. There’s the cause of suffering, which is the craving. There’s also the end of suffering, which comes when craving is abandoned; and there’s a path to the end of suffering. We’re on the path. And the way the path works is that it doesn’t attack suffering right at the suffering, it … 
  18. Defiant Like the Buddha
     … If you go through life not sensing much in terms of suffering, you look at other people and you don’t think they’re suffering much, either. Or if you see them suffering, you have no idea what it’s all about. But if you appreciate your own sense of grief, your own sense of loss, and the suffering that goes with that, it … 
  19. Getting the Most Out of the Present
     … What is the suffering? There are so many different sensations and ideas that all get glommed together when the mind is in pain. And you have to figure out, where exactly is the pain? The Buddha lists all kinds of ordinary things that we can suffer over—aging, illness, death, separation—but then his conclusion is really unusual. He says the suffering is in … 
  20. The Middle Way
    The Buddha’s first sermon started with the topic of suffering. That was the big issue he was going to address all through the 45 years he taught: suffering or stress, and the end of suffering. But when he introduced the topic of suffering as his main topic, he prefaced it by talking about how people tend to act in trying to get away … 
  21. So Little Time
     … You could say that he deserved to suffer, but the Buddha didn’t take that into consideration at all. He said, “Here’s a person who’s suffering really badly and his suffering is spilling out and affecting other people.” By curing Angulimala’s suffering, or showing him how to cure his suffering, he saved a lot of other people, too. So if there … 
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