Search results for: "Kamma"

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  2. Befriending the Breath
     … If you find a certain parts of the breath energy that you can’t help in this way, just chalk it up to past kamma and focus on the areas where you can help. This is an important principle about equanimity. The Buddha’s not saying to be indifferent to everything. He says there are certain things that you simply have to accept the … 
  3. Rebirth is Relevant
     … And even among the people who believed in rebirth, some said that there was no connection at all between rebirth and your kamma: that rebirth had nothing to do with your actions, and instead just happened to follow a fate that was determined by something or somebody else. But the Buddha’s take was very different. For one thing, he never talked about what … 
  4. Do You Want to Stop Suffering?
     … So you’re learning an important lesson about kamma, that kamma is not just results of things you did in the past and you don’t always have to wait a long time for the results to come. You focus on the breath right now and, if you do it with skill, you can get good results right now. You’re shaping this experience … 
  5. Borrowing the Buddha’s Wisdom
     … Some people say, “I understand the principle of kamma. And yes, I agree with it because I’ve seen it in my life.” Well, you’ve seen shadows of it. You’ve seen hints. But it took the Buddha the ability to remember many, many, many eons back to see that, Yes, the principle of kamma really did work that way. After all, it … 
  6. A Skillful Heart
     … There are a lot of people who want to have Dhamma without kamma. And so they say, “We have goodwill for all beings because all beings have Buddha-nature or all beings are intrinsically good.” In a case like that, your goodwill is not really independent. When you run across people who are definitely evil in their intentions, what are you going to do … 
  7. Living Forward, Understanding Backward
     … And the happiness you see in other people is not a sign that they have more good kamma than you do. There’s no such thing as a single kamma account for each person, and what you see is not the running balance in that single account. We all have lots of different actions in the past, and those actions are like seeds that … 
  8. Dhamma Opportunism
     … Now, it may place some constrictions on what you can do, and what kind of practice you’ll be able to do, but just tell yourself, “Okay, this is the hand my kamma has dealt me, so I might as well learn how to play it well.” So even though the situation may be not what you want, you can still find some way … 
  9. Heedful of Ruts in the Mind
     … That means taking seriously the principle of kamma: The thoughts that you have will lead to states of becoming in the mind; states of becoming in the mind will lead to becoming on the large scale. It’s there in the first verse of the Dhammapada: manopubbaṅgamā dhammā, manoseṭṭhā manomayā All phenomena have the mind as their forerunner, mind as their chief, they’re … 
  10. Guarding Against Trouble
     … The protection you get from the Dhamma is that you’re not creating any new bad kamma right now, but it doesn’t protect you from your old bad kamma. So you still have to watch out. I noticed that Ajaan Fuang was a very wary person—wary of dealing with other people. He wouldn’t trust people right away. He would watch them … 
  11. At Home with the Breath
     … This is why the Buddha’s central teaching is on kamma. It’s what we do that influences the extent to which we find well-being or not. And the word “doing” here includes not only physical actions, but also words you speak and thoughts you think. In particular, you want to see which thoughts you’re thinking that are adding a lot of … 
  12. The Power of Intention
    A couple of months ago I was giving a Dhamma talk on kamma up in the Bay Area. After the talk, a woman came up and said, “You know, this made me think, ‘Maybe my life isn’t determined by my DNA after all.’” I was surprised. She’d been going to Dhamma talks for a fair while and yet was still able to … 
  13. Take Care
     … In fact, the Buddha said that the question of how kamma gets worked out is so complex that if you tried to follow every little strand of influence you’d go crazy. But if you stick by the basic principle that the quality of your intention determines the sort of results you’re going to get, you don’t have to trace things out … 
  14. Concentration & Renunciation
     … Where do they come from? In other words, what kind of kamma do you create as you search for that pleasure? Are you going to do anything that breaks the precepts? Are you going to do anything that’s harmful to yourself or other people? That’s not in accordance with the Dhamma. And then, where are they going? If the pleasure aggravates more … 
  15. Taking an Active Role
     … This is probably one of the most important things to understand about the Buddha’s teachings on kamma. It’s not that you’re presented with the present moment fully formed and then you react to it. Instead, it’s as if you’ve got lots of potential present moments, and you choose among them. So even though there may be the potential for … 
  16. Hunker Down
     … After all, we all have past kamma, good and bad, and a lot of the thoughts that appear in the mind come from our past actions, our past intentions. That doesn’t mean you’re responsible for them right now. What you’re responsible for right now is how you handle the situation. And as any good warrior knows, you don’t fight every … 
  17. No Slivers in the Heart
     … knowledge of his previous lives, knowledge of how beings are born in line with their kamma. But he didn’t stop there. He told himself, “There’s got to be something more.” There was still, as he said, an arrow in his heart and he wanted to pull that arrow out. And so as long as there was the least little bit of anything … 
  18. Goodwill as a Guardian
     … If you get used to having nothing but good things happening to you as a result of your past good kamma, it begins to spoil you. Then you get complacent and you start misbehaving, you fall again, and then you have to start all over again. When the Buddha saw that his listeners could acknowledge these drawbacks, then he’d teach them the four … 
  19. Survival Tactics
     … All your kamma is being created right here in the present moment. If you’re not here, a lot of things get decided on a subconscious level, on a reactive level, while you’re off someplace else. These are the forces shaping your life, and yet you’re not watching over them. So the first thing is to bring yourself into the present moment … 
  20. When Your Will Is Ill
     … beginning, who was the first mover in a particular story. It’s like coming in on the tail end of a movie: You don’t know who got their just desserts. Kamma itself doesn’t go around dishing out just desserts. Think of the case of Angulimala. He killed all those people but then he had a change of heart. The Buddha saw that … 
  21. Being Still
     … We talk often about how there’s a doing , there’s a kamma in every present moment. There are choices you make with every present moment, and sometimes the emphasis may seem too much on the doing. But remember that being quiet is also a form of doing, and sometimes it’s the most skillful doing, the most skillful thing you can do. Try … 
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