Search results for: "Nibbana"
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- Count Yourself Lucky… The only thing that can stand as a really admirable goal, a real end in itself, is nibbana. Everything else should be regarded as a means. So when there’s pain, look at it as a means, something you can work with, whether it’s physical pain or mental pain. The same for pleasure: When there’s pleasure, look at it as a means …
- Commit & Reflect… There are very few images in the Canon of people coasting their way across the ocean of suffering into the harbor of nibbana safely without any effort. There are many more images of warriors going into battle, craftspeople trying to develop skills, people in searching for something—in other words, people putting forth effort in order to succeed at something. You do have to …
- Faith in the Buddha… Ajaan Maha Boowa once said if people who had reached nibbana could take it out and to show everybody, nobody would want anything else. Nothing else in the world would sell. This would dominate the market, he said—but it’s something that can’t be seen unless you’ve done the work yourself. This is where conviction moves from mundane right view into …
- Learning from Sensual Desire… That would exclude nibbana—taking it as the end of dhammas—but everything else, skillful and unskillful, comes from desire. We have this mass of desires and thoughts and intentions that we’ve got to train, so we use the whole citta—the whole mind, the whole heart—to train the heart and the mind. Citta is usually translated as “mind,” but there are …
- Delight in the Path… The ultimate happiness, nibbāna, doesn’t require delight, “delight” meaning talking to yourself to encourage yourself to enjoy a particular form of happiness. When they say the arahants are beyond delight, it sounds a little gray, but it’s actually because they don’t need delight. We hold on to delight because we’ve needed it all along. We’ve applied it to our …
- Cultivate a Limitless Heart… He was going to go straight to nibbana, he wasn’t going to go puttering around. But then he found pretty quickly that his practice got dry. He realized that the other people puttering around were actually doing something useful for their own minds. They were developing good qualities. They weren’t going dry. These are perfections: patience, endurance, goodwill, compassion. They all go …
- What You Bring to the Moment… The only thing that’s unconditioned in the Buddha’s teaching is nibbana. This is why, instead of totally wiping out preconceived notions, we learn to question the preconceived notions we have, and then replace them with notions that will actually be helpful, that will point our attention in the right direction and ultimately lead to the unconditioned. So let’s take a close …
- What Made the Buddha Exclaim… The Udana also contains all those exclamations about the nature of nibbana being unmade, unbecome, totally free from suffering, a totally different dimension: the kind of thing that would make even a Buddha exclaim. The attainment is that good. So whatever effort’s needed in the practice, however much we have to sit through pain and deal with distractions and all the other hard …
- Choiceful Awareness… That’s nibbana. It’s not the case that every path goes to the same place. So when a thought comes into the mind, ask yourself, “What kind of path is this? Where is it leading me?” We tend to choose our thoughts because we like them or we find them fun. But the question always should be, where is this taking you? Right …
- The Treasure of Virtue… And then forty-five years after that on the full-moon day in May, he entered total nibbāna. So today is a good day to think about him. Of course, we should be thinking about the Buddha every day, because in his awakening he found something really important that has a bearing on every day in our lives, which is that human action can …
- Circumspection… As he said, nibbana has no need for right views or wrong views, has no need for views at all, has no need for truths at all. Remember, the word “truth” can have two different meanings. One is a statement about facts, and the other is a fact itself. You use the statements to arrive at the fact itself. But part of arriving means …
- The Perception of Inconstancy… But it is meant bring you to your senses. “All fabrications are inconstant.” Notice that’s not “all things are inconstant.” After all, nibbāna is constant. It’s said to be permanent—although actually it lies outside of space and time, so “permanent” is not quite the right word. But it doesn’t change. Still, everything else that the mind encounters goes through the …
- Meaning & Happiness… Ajaan Maha Bua once said that if you could take nibbana out and show it to people, they wouldn’t want anything else. But it’s paccattam, as we chant: something that each person has to find for him or herself alone. And on top of that, there are so many people out there clamoring for your support in whatever they think is a …
- You Are Not Redundant… Bangkok was saying in those days that not only was nibbana no longer open, even jhana was not available. In spite of the fact that the Buddha said that the Dharma is timeless, very sophisticated arguments were given to support the official line. But the forest ajaans were not swayed by those arguments. They claimed their right to practice the Dhamma in accordance with …
- Older than the Cosmos… Some people say, “Well, let me try everything before I go to nibbana. I want to taste this, want to taste that, what this level of being is, what that level of being is.” But you’ve already been there. The problem is that you keep forgetting. And one of the reasons you forget is because the moment of death that separates being in …
- The Missing Truth… And the truth of nibbana is true in itself. But as long as you aren’t true, you’re not going to get to that experience of the truth, and you won’t really know how true the Buddha is, how true his words are. So that’s the missing truth: the truth of your application as you practice. But that’s something you …
- Don’t Get Discouraged… The Buddha can’t show you nibbana first to prove that, Yes, this really does work. But we’ve looked at all the other possibilities in the world and they don’t seem to match this one, because this is actually a skill you can work on. It’s not a skill that comes easily for everybody. Some people find the concentration easy but …
- Fear of the Truth… Ultimately, the Buddha says the highest noble truth—the truth of liberation, the truth of nibbana—is the ultimate protection for the mind, the ultimate place of security and safety. That, too, is a possibility in the mind, a potential in the mind—in your mind. So don’t let all the unskillful potentials scare you off. There are plenty of good things to …
- The Dhamma Eye… Those, he saw, would lead to affliction and would get in the way of nibbana. So already he had a high standard. He wanted to choose actions that were harmless, and at the same time not get in the way of the ultimate happiness. As for the second type—thoughts that were based on renunciation, non-ill will, and harmlessness: Those didn’t afflict …
- Fires of the Mind… That’s what the name for nibbana is about. But before you can get there, you’ve got to bring the mind to a steady burn. Part of the way you do that is to protect it. You know that if the flame is subject to a lot of wind, it’s not going to stay steady. So you do your best to protect …
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