Search results for: "Generosity"

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  2. Heedfulness
     … that giving really is true; generosity is true; gratitude is a worthwhile emotion. In other words, when people helped you, it was their choice to help you. Often they had to go out of their way and face a lot of difficulties. For that they deserve your gratitude. If everything were predetermined, there’d be no need to be generous, because things would just … 
  3. Withstanding Pleasure & Pain
     … That’s your generosity. But you have to figure out how much energy you have, and how much you can increase the level of your energy. This is where concentration practice is very useful. If you’re less likely to be weighed down by pain and distracted by pleasure, the mind has more strength. It’s able to do more things then it could … 
  4. Strength from the Basics
     … virtue, generosity, meditation are really important things, and you want to have them always at hand. When your strength is down as you’re getting sick, you remind yourself: Stay with the breath. The breath is always there to help you. If you find yourself getting into an unhealthy breathing rhythm, where can you focus to get out of it? Focus your attention on … 
  5. Freedom & Security
     … having listened to a lot of Dhamma, generosity, discernment. These are the three positive treasures. “Listening” here means not only listening but also, when you hear something really good, trying to memorize it. Then you think about it, analyze it, try to come to an understanding of what it means and how it applies to your life. This is a treasure in that you … 
  6. For What It’s Worth
     … It’s based on acts of generosity, acts of virtue. When you train the mind to be generous and virtuous, it’s a lot easier to watch. If you’ve been dishonest about things, lazy about things, harmful in your behavior, it’s very easy to put up walls of denial. And when you’ve got walls of denial, how are you going to … 
  7. Determined to be Happy
     … All the forms of goodness—generosity, virtue, meditation—are totally harmless and they’re based on goodwill. With generosity and virtue, that’s easy to see: When you give to others, they’re happy. When you abstain from harming them, they’re happy. But especially meditation—getting the mind under control so that your greed, aversion, and delusion don’t take over: That’s … 
  8. Initiative
     … You engage in admirable friendship, which means that if they have good qualities, and the Buddha gives a list—conviction, virtue, generosity, discernment—you try to emulate those qualities. You actually ask them, “How do you do this?” If you have trouble being generous, ask people who are generous, “How do you do this? What is your way of thinking that allows you to … 
  9. The Buddha Teaches a Yakkha
     … truth, self-control, endurance, and relinquishment or generosity. One of the reasons Ajaan Suwat liked this story was because the Buddha was compliant. He wasn’t stubborn, but when it came to what was proper, he stood his ground. This was very much the character of Ajaan Suwat: He was compliant in a lot of ways, but when it came to a matter of … 
  10. Fear of Death
     … Of those four fears, one of them can be alleviated by the practice of generosity and virtue. That’s the fear that you’ll be punished for cruel behavior. People who’ve come back from near-death experiences often say that the things they regret most—when they look back on their lives, thinking that they’re about to die—are the opportunities where … 
  11. Taking Stock
     … the kind of happiness where everybody benefits, the happiness that comes from generosity, from virtue, and from training the mind. This is the kind of happiness where you still feel a connection, not only with the people around you right now but also with people who’ve helped you in the past, and the people who helped them, and the people who helped them … 
  12. Death Is Normal
     … It’s why we also have the practice of generosity and taking the precepts when someone has died. Of course, these are practices we do all the time, but it’s especially important to do them at a time like this so that you put the mind in good shape. There’s the pleasure and the happiness, the well-being that come from generosity … 
  13. We’re All Learning the Ropes
     … So generosity is a necessary part of the path. It develops a human quality, the quality of realizing that just as you love yourself, other people love themselves. And instead of taking that as an excuse to say, “Well, I’ll just love myself as much as I want, to hell with everybody else, let them fend for themselves,” use it as a jumping … 
  14. Brahmaviharas & Noble Truths
     … The generosity is an expression of compassion. All the brahmavihāras are there, embodied in your practice, but we go beyond the brahmavihāras. There’s a passage where the Buddha talks about how, in a previous lifetime, he happened to be a king. The tradition within that line of kings was that as soon as you had your first white hair, you would abandon your … 
  15. Heedfulness Is Auspicious
     … Years back, when I was giving a talk as a part of a retreat, I got to the topic of generosity, dealing with right and wrong attitudes to have toward generosity, and I wanted to give an example of something that was really right. I thought of the time that we built the chedi in Wat Dhammasathit, and Nok had been there from very … 
  16. From Anxiety to Confidence
     … Another treasure is generosity, the ability to give up things you know are going to get in the way of a higher happiness—the ability to trade up, realizing that to gain something of great value, there are a lot of things of lesser value you’re going to have to relinquish. So rather than try to gather everything that you like together, you … 
  17. All Winners, No Losers
     … These areas start out with something very simple, generosity, and go on through virtue and the practice of meditation. All of these are areas in which you gain happiness in a way that inflicts no pain or harm on anyone else. In fact, you can actually help them gain some happiness, too. When you’re generous, you give a gift. You acquire a magnanimous … 
  18. The Challenge
     … Ajaan Suwat once noticed when he was teaching a meditation retreat that one of the reasons why everyone was so grim about their meditation was that they didn’t have any more basic experience of the Buddha’s teachings, experience with generosity, experience with virtue, or at least the particular way the Buddha taught generosity and virtue. He noted that if you had that … 
  19. Strength to Be Good
     … But with the goodness that comes from the meditation, the goodness that comes with generosity, the goodness that comes with virtue: That kind of goodness spreads around. And because your gain in these things doesn’t mean that anybody else has to lose, these kinds of goodness create a good society where people can live together without constantly putting up boundaries and trying to … 
  20. True Happiness Starts with Giving
     … From there, the Buddha would go on to talk about the rewards of heaven that come from generosity and virtue. We have very few of his teachings on heaven, aside from his saying that if you can imagine a king and all the pleasures of the king, they’re not one sliver of the pleasure that comes from being in heaven. But then he … 
  21. It’s What You Give
     … It starts with generosity. This is why the Buddha starts his teaching with generosity. He’s pointing to the fact that what you put into the system is going to make a difference. So, as an example, he starts with something really simple, really basic: the simple act of giving a gift. Then he moves on to virtue. Here, too, he has you regard … 
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