Search results for: "Wisdom"
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- Self View & Conceit… Even the beginning of wisdom starts with a question framed in terms of self: “What, when I do it, will be for my long-term welfare and happiness?” There you’ve got the self both as a producer and as a consumer built right into the question. What makes it wise is that you realize that there is such a thing as long-term …
- Strength in Humor… The Buddha said that one of the signs of wisdom is your ability to see what is your duty and what’s not your duty, where you can make a difference and where you can’t make a difference. Then, let go of all the things that you don’t have to take on as duties so that you can really focus on what …
- Capable… That’s genuine discernment, genuine wisdom. Then you just keep at it. Anything unskillful comes up, you learn how to let go of it. Anything skillful that hasn’t come around yet or is still very weak, you try to strengthen it. That’s where the persistence comes in. As long as the results aren’t what you want, you keep at it. But …
- Wise About Pleasure… That’s the real sign of wisdom. After all, the quest for wisdom begins with that question, "What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” This applies to how you deal with pleasures, how you deal with pains: pleasures of the senses and pleasures of the practice; pains of the senses, pains of the practice. So you want …
- The Unity of the Path… That’s the wisdom faculty there in right effort. Right effort is not so much a question of how much effort you’re putting in, although that is one of the dimensions of right effort. More importantly, it’s question of wisdom and understanding: what kind of effort would be most skillful right now? This goes back to right view. Right effort has to …
- The Economy of Goodness… Now, for the qualities that you do amass, that you do gather up—conviction, learning, and discernment, but especially with conviction—those are cases in which you’re basically borrowing the Buddha’s wisdom. With learning, you’re directly borrowing the Buddha’s wisdom. But it’s like what they call a non-refundable loan: You borrow it but you don’t have to …
- Victory over Death… That, the Buddha said, is the beginning of wisdom, or discernment: the question, “What when I do it will lead to long-term welfare and happiness?” “What when I do it when I do it will lead to long-term harm and suffering?” You’re taking your desire for happiness for granted and you’re using your wisdom to develop it, to provide for …
- Clearing a Space… That was back in the days when the only translation I knew for pañña was wisdom, and I kept thinking, “How am I going to use my wisdom when I don’t have any?” But he was talking about a faculty we all have. We all have discernment to one extent or another, and you have to put it to use all the time …
- Gifts of Noble Wealth… This is when you learn to go beyond just the wisdom you’ve learned from other people and heard from other people, and you start producing your own wisdom, your own insights as you need them. I made reference just now to the three skills of the archer that the Buddha used to compare with discernment. To fire shots in rapid succession: In other …
- You Are Not Powerless… But the Buddha’s wisdom is basically a wisdom of dualities: X is more skillful than y, so do x rather than y. This involves figuring out how to give rise to x, what the causes are, because from the very beginning of the path all the way to the end, you’ll be making choices. You want to be alive to the fact …
- In the Mood… But when you stop to think about it, there’s really no way you can get good results out of the meditation unless the mind has at least some good qualities in it, some cheerfulness, some patience, some wisdom. These are qualities that act as seeds, that allow the meditation to develop. We’re not totally empty-handed when we come to the meditation …
- Conviction & Confidence… The qualities of purity, compassion, and wisdom come from taking your desire for true happiness seriously. So these things are possible. They’re part of the range of possibilities of being human. That right there is a challenge. The Buddha, in effect, is asking you, “Do you want to live your life keeping this possibility open or do you want to close it off …
- Look Around… the characteristic of someone with some wisdom. After all, looking at things, making sure everything is straightened out from all sides, that’s what you’ve got to do with your mind. All too often we get in these vicious thought-cycles and we can’t get out because we can’t see another way of looking at things. Everything becomes very narrow: This …
- Breathing Easy… As the Buddha said, the beginning of wisdom is when you ask someone who knows: What when I do will be for my long-term welfare and happiness? The wisdom here is twofold: one, realizing that happiness has to come from your actions—it’s not going to just come floating by—and two, you want long-term happiness. Short-term happiness is something …
- Free from Buddha Nature… The teachings are here to bring wisdom to that desire. In dependent co-arising, the Buddha starts out with ignorance: ignorance of the four noble truths and the tasks appropriate for the four noble truths. When you’re ignorant of those tasks, you start doing unskillful things. With ignorance as a condition, there are fabrications. In fact, what you think you are is something …
- Mindful of Death… We want to learn how to get some control over that, get some wisdom with regard to that: What things do you want to take as your nourishment? As we’re focusing here in the present moment, it’s to see processes that are bigger than the present moment as well. They can be found here, they can be seen here, but they’re …
- Facing Your Responsibilities… As someone once said, there is wisdom in this technique of no escape. Now that you’re sitting here, you’ve got to face your mind: How are you going to train it, how are you going to make this not a miserable experience but actually a blissful, happy, meaningful experience? Those are the skills that most people in the world never develop. But …
- Looking at Your Life… That’s how wisdom is developed. Then there’s virtue. You want to make sure you don’t harm anyone. A sense of shame: The idea of doing something harmful comes up in the mind, and you’d feel ashamed to do it. Notice, this is not being ashamed about yourself. You’re ashamed of the action, and being ashamed of the action is …
- Fighting Attitude… So wisdom doesn’t lie in simply accepting things as they come. It lies in seeing what you have to accept and what you don’t have to accept. And you don’t know the difference unless you try to work your way around unskillful states. Wisdom lies in realizing how much power you have in the present moment. Some of the things you …
- Training Your Minds… That’s one of the basic principles of wisdom. The Buddha said it’s what distinguishes a wise person from a fool. The fool doesn’t see any need to train the mind, so the fool looks for happiness outside. The wise person realizes: You’ve got to train the mind so that it doesn’t sabotage its own happiness. So we start with …
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