Search results for: "Generosity"

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  2. Your Actions Are Yours
     … Which one of those are you still lacking? Are you lacking in conviction, lacking in a sense of shame or compunction, lacking in virtue, lacking in learning about the Dhamma, lacking in generosity and the goodwill that goes with generosity, or lacking in discernment? If you see that something is missing, work on that. Think of this as a set of skills you’re … 
  3. The Gift of the Practice
     … Because on the one hand, the skills you develop in the course of developing the path—generosity, virtue, all the various skills in the meditation—are skills you also need in order to deal with other people in a compassionate way. As you develop concentration, you’re coming from a more and more solid place. You develop the equanimity that’s needed to deal … 
  4. How to Read Yourself
     … If you’re down on yourself, think about your own virtue, your own generosity. All of us here have practice in virtue, practice in generosity. We’re all people of wealth: inner wealth, inner worth. There’s no need to get down on yourself. Just remind yourself that meditation does have its fallow periods. They usually come from a lack of heedfulness. You start … 
  5. The Light of the World
     … This is why the Buddha began the practice with generosity, virtue, and the development of goodwill, because these are harmless ways of finding happiness. They may not be totally able to bring you to the deathless, but they are conducive. At the very least, they’re a form of happiness that’s harmless. You harm no one when you’re generous; you harm no … 
  6. Sending Happiness
     … The same with generosity: If you hang around generous people, you’re going to be the beneficiaries of their generosity, but not just that. The proper attitude is seeing how they’re made happy by being generous with their time, and with their energy, not just with the material goods. If you have a sense that you’d be ashamed not to be generous … 
  7. Merit: Goodness of the Heart
     … The big three categories of being good are generosity, virtue, and meditation. When you engage in these activities, you’re not harming anybody, and you’re bringing positive good to yourself and to other people. The actions themselves are good; the happiness that results has a good impact on the mind. Think of the happiness of generosity. You develop a more enlarged mind because … 
  8. Shelter Through Restraint
     … You have to remind yourself that when the Buddha talks about goodwill, as one of the types of merit you make, there’s a sutta where he lists generosity, virtue, goodwill in the body of the sutta, and then at the end of the sutta there’s a little poem, and the list gets tweaked a little bit: generosity, virtue, restraint. Restraint is an … 
  9. How to Be Happy
     … Following that, there’s generosity, being willing to give. Give material things, give of your time, give of your energy, give of your knowledge. The Buddha would often teach generosity in conjunction with gratitude. We’re here to give, not to get, because we’ve already received so much. It’s the opposite of a sense of entitlement. People with entitlement are never happy … 
  10. Determination
     … The third quality is generosity. There are things you’re going to have to give up in order to attain that goal. Think of the practice as like a game of chess. You’re going to have to lose some of your pieces. If you’re not willing to lose your pieces, you’re not going to win. You have to decide that some … 
  11. Metta Can Hurt
     … What kind of actions will these lead to, especially for those of us who are here practicing, dependent on the generosity of others? Is this what you want to use their generosity for? You have to ask yourself this when thoughts like that come in the mind. Then there are the times when you can disguise your lust or anger as forms of mettā … 
  12. Food for Endurance
     … Suppose we lived in a world where there was no Dhamma, where all people could think about was gaining wealth, gaining power, with no sense of right or wrong, no sense of generosity, no sense of virtue. It’d be a hard world to live in—not the kind of world you would want to live in. But here we live in a world … 
  13. Body Contemplation
     … Think of the Buddha’s graduated or step-by-step discourse, talking about the virtue of generosity, the virtue of observing the precepts, the rewards of generosity and virtue in terms of sensual pleasures in the human realm and heavenly realms, but then the drawbacks of sensuality. The text even calls it the degradation of sensuality. Think of all the degrading things you do … 
  14. Ajaan Suwat’s Gift
     … It’s saying that you have to look after yourself wisely—which means that you develop good qualities of mind, such as generosity and virtue, that actually help other people, too. But you do have to look after yourself, because nobody else can do it for you. As the Buddha said, when you get yourself as a refuge, you get a refuge that’s … 
  15. Skillful Distress
     … It requires generosity. It requires virtue. And these activities set a good example in the world for true progress on the social level. The people who’ve attained the goal of the renunciate life, whether they’re monastics or laypeople, are the ones who shine a light in the world. So it is possible for a human being to pursue a noble goal, behave … 
  16. When You Practice on Your Own
     … He’d start with what’s called the “graduated discourse.” He’d start talking about generosity, acts of giving, and then virtue. Then he’d talk about heaven as a place where generosity and virtue are rewarded with sensual pleasures. If you’re listening to this teaching, and you’ve been practicing generosity and virtue, you feel good about what the Buddha is saying … 
  17. Building Character
     … There’s the list of the perfections—generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance—all those good Capricorn virtues; truth, determination, goodwill, equanimity. As Ajaan Fuang liked to say, when the Buddha was born in all his many lifetimes up until he became a Buddha, he was born for the sake of mastering these perfections. The list of good spiritual materialism in the suttas is … 
  18. The World Is Swept Away
     … But if you leave behind some generosity, it goes with you; and the generosity you’ve left behind helps other people. So as you pursue the perfections, you’re not the only person who benefits, but you know for sure that your benefits are yours, and they do lead to something that goes beyond the world. As we chanted just now: The world is … 
  19. Determination
     … There’s more to the practice than just meditating.” She said, “Go back and look more carefully.” And sure enough, the people were practicing generosity, they were practicing virtue, they were teaching their children gratitude. The woman who was doing the study began to realize that there’s more to the practice than just sitting here with your eyes closed. We’re developing all … 
  20. Being Right
     … As for the other three qualities, one is generosity. You share what you gain. You’re generous not only with material things, but also with your knowledge, your help, your forgiveness. The next quality is that you have your views in common. Your idea of what’s right and wrong is something that you all hold in common. And the sixth quality is that … 
  21. Choosing & Watching Your Choices
     … I have no choice.” But instead, you say, “Well, as an experiment, give it a try.” This is one of the reasons why we start with generosity, because generosity is one of the first places we notice that we do have freedom of choice. We’ve got something, and we can keep it if we want, or we could give it away. You realize … 
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