Search results for: "The Sangha"
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- Refuge for All Beings… the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha are refuges for all beings. There are no questions asked, like: What is your past? What have you done to the Buddha in the past? The Buddha had to teach people who had mistreated him in the past but he didn’t hold it against them. He taught them how to put an end to suffering. They …
- Samsara… Or if he seems a little too unreal, too superhuman you can think about the Sangha, the noble Sangha. The word “Sangha” doesn’t mean just anybody who sits and meditates. In its noble sense it means people who’ve got at least to the point of stream-entry. They’ve had their first taste of the deathless. And when you look at the …
- Motivation… There could be a possibility of a split in the Sangha. And would you be able to dwell in ease if any of those things happened? And death, of course, is not necessarily far away. You don’t know where you are in the line. If it suddenly came up, would you be ready to drop everything and just say, “Okay, that’s it …
- Strength Training… Recollection of the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha. The four sublime attitudes. Recollection of death for when you’re getting lazy. You don’t know when death is going to come. We make plans in our life, we have to make plans in life, but at the same time, we have to realize that those plans could be blown out of the water …
- Getting Back on Your Feet… One is that you can read about the Sangha. There are poems in the Theragatha and Therigatha, and some of the autobiographical talks and writings of the ajaans. They give you a sense that even successful meditators have had their problems. Everybody has had setbacks. Ajaan Maha Boowa talks about how, at the beginning of his practice, he’d get his mind really centered …
- Capable… The part of the book he said he liked the most was when, toward the end of his life, King Asoka, said that all the merit that he had made through his gifts to the Sangha, he didn’t want to dedicate it to becoming a king ever again. What he did want was “capability within himself”—in other words, enough knowledge and enough …
- Wise About Pleasure… You have conviction in the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha, and you have virtues that are pleasing to the noble ones. After all, if you really have conviction, you have to act on it. It has to show up in your actions. That’s the first strength. The second strength is persistence. Once you determine that you’ve got to develop skillful qualities and …
- Life Well Lived… That’s one kind of reflection… This is why we have these chants every evening on the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha: to remind us to take the movies in our minds and turn them in this direction. Because where do these movies lead? They lead to stillness, they lead the mind coming into the present moment. And then, once these movies have …
- To Be Debt Free… But first we put ourselves in debt to the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha. We take on these better debts—let’s put it that way—and we practice, eventually to get out of debt even to them. As the Buddha said, the arahants are totally without debt. He himself was without debt after his awakening. There’s that story of his contemplating …
- The Forerunner of All Things… Well, if you develop the Buddha’s qualities, the Dhamma’s qualities, the Sangha’s qualities, they have a protective power. They protect you from doing things you’re later going to regret, and from doing things that are going to cause you to suffer right here and now. So as you carry this awareness of your own mind into the world, that’s …
- Asalha Puja… As I mentioned this morning, we think of Visakha Puja as homage to the Buddha and Magha Puja as homage to the Sangha. Asalha Puja, some people say, is in homage to the Dhamma. But it’s actually in homage to all three, because this was the point where all three became complete. The Dhamma as a teaching was finally established in the world …
- Hindrances to the Heightened Mind… You could think about the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha, think about your generosity, think about your virtue. As long as you’ve got the energy to think, think about good things. And finally, uncertainty: Ask yourself, what’s wise about uncertainty? You’re looking for the allure of these hindrances, that’s basically what it comes down to. Why do you go for …
- A Path Under the Trees… When you’ve seen that this path really does lead to the deathless, that’s when your doubts in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha are ended. The Buddha really did know what he was talking about—the path is the path to the deathless. And the deathless really is deathless because it’s outside of space and time, so there’s no …
- Mind Reading… Or you can recollect the Sangha. If you read through the Theragatha and Therigatha, you find that the people in the past had lots of problems, many of them very similar to yours, sometimes even worse, and yet they were able to overcome them. They found the strengths within them to overcome their problems, and you can tell yourself that if they can do …
- Choosing Freedom… You can think about the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha. You can think about your own generosity. You can think about your own virtue. Maybe your virtue isn’t perfect, but there have been times when you’ve been good. You’ve done the honorable thing; you’ve acted on your principles. You could think thoughts of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity. Extend those …
- The Taste Is Release… Then the admonition ends with a passage to remind you of what this is all about, why we’re here, why we have the Saṅgha, why we have a monastery. It’s interesting that the teachings in this section come from the last year of the Buddha’s life. The section starts with what are called the four noble dhammas, saying that concentration nurtured …
- The Ennobling Path… It might be the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha; qualities of generosity, goodwill, any of the brahmaviharas ; the practice of virtue. Contemplate these things until the mind feels inspired. Once it gets lubricated, you can settle down with the breath again. And you find that the mind is willing to settle down and be still. So the practice of concentration is designed specifically …
- Undomesticated Happiness… We take refuge in him, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, but not in the sense that they’re going to do the work for us. In society, we expect people to be responsible for one another’s happiness. But as the Buddha pointed out, we can’t do that, because your happiness has to depend on your own skills. Other people’s happiness has …
- Accepting the Way Things Function… In addition to goodwill, there’s recollection of the Buddha, recollection of the Sangha. Just thinking about them can often put the affairs of the day into a different perspective. If you’re feeling discouraged, think thoughts about your generosity and your virtue: the good that you’ve done. Think in a way that gets the mind more and more in the mood to …
- Respect for Happiness… That’s one of the reasons why the Buddha has the Sangha—people who dedicate their lives to the practice—because the world out there has all kinds of weird ideas about where happiness comes from. So it’s good to have some people to associate with who are not blown around by the opinions of the world so that you can get reliable …
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