Search results for: "Nibbana"
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- Visakha Puja – Shaking the Earth… The tradition has it that the Buddha was born on the full-moon night of this month, then thirty-five years later he gained awakening on the full-moon night of this month, then forty-five years after that he entered total nibbana, again, on the full-moon night of this month. So, we commemorate these events every year by paying homage to the …
- Rehab Work… That’s one of the Buddha’s names for nibbana: true health for the mind, a mind that’s been healed, because it knows how to do its own healing work.
- Feeding on Feeding… Some people like to think about nibbana as a total wiping out of any kind of consciousness of anything. If that were the case, though, the Buddha wouldn’t have described it the way he does: a path that cannot be traced. If it were a wipe-out, it would be very easy to describe. So it’s good to get your imagination stretched …
- Factions in the Mind… be heedful. You can’t be complacent. This is because your actions are important. Think about it: The Buddha could have said a few last words about something wonderful or grand: nibbana, limitless compassion, or emptiness. But instead, he focused on heedfulness — the principle that your actions are important and you have to be careful about what you do because actions can take you …
- Discernment Is in the Doing… There’s no image of anyone relaxing their way to nibbana. So you have to have the right attitude, the attitude of a warrior. What is the attitude of a warrior? One is that you’re going to take on battles that you have a chance of winning and that will be worthwhile to win. You don’t just jump into every battle. You …
- Representing the World to Itself… As the Buddha said, everything you experience, except for nibbana, is rooted in desire. Your intentions come from the basic desire for happiness. Your perceptions come from your desire for happiness. So keep reminding yourself that if you’re not there at the ultimate happiness, maybe you can turn around and look at the way you perceive things: using the analogies the Buddha gives …
- Timeless Practice… You see this teaching cropping up here and there, sometimes in the Theravada where they talk about no more openings for nibbana, no more openings even for jhana. Or in some the Mahayana sects where they talk about the Dharma-ending age. You have to regard these teachings simply as obstacles, as excuses for people who don’t want to practice. Or, in the …
- Limitless is the Buddha… Most of the teachings coming out of Bangkok in those days said that the time for nibbana—even the time for jhana practice—was over. Monks should lower their sights, they said, and help the government set up schools. Ajaan Mun also got a lot of flak from other people for not practicing in the traditional Thai way. But as he said, the traditions …
- Bless Yourself… Some people think of nibbāna as the ultimate separation, but it’s not. After all, saṁsāra is not a place. Saṁsāra is an activity, and it’s an addictive activity by which we bump up against one another. There was one time I mentioned that it was translated as “the wandering-on,” and someone said, “It’s more like the bumbling-on.” We keep …
- The Uses of Pleasure & Pain… If the Deathless were something you could force your way into, everybody would have gone to nibbana a long time ago. It requires a lot of finesse, a lot of skill in how you deal with the mind, learning to recognize the time for analyzing issues of stress and suffering, and the time for letting the mind rest so it that it can gain …
- What Right Mindfulness Remembers… As Ajaan Fuang used to say, “If we could push our way in to nibbana, everybody would have pushed their way in a long time ago.” It requires a really subtle and gentle touch. Then there’s the quality of persistence, which means that you keep at it, but it doesn’t mean you keep pushing yourself up against the wall. You find something …
- The Reality of Emotions… Although the happiness of nibbana is not a feeling, every other form of happiness is a feeling, and every feeling is fabricated. This means that all feelings have an intentional element. We put them together for a certain purpose. We want a particular feeling if for nothing else than to establish who we are and what we want. There is a purpose—many times …
- Training Your Desires … Ajaan Maha Boowa said that if you could take nibbana out and show it to everybody, that’s the only thing anybody would ever want. Everything else in the world would pale by comparison. But you can’t see someone else’s experience of it. Still, you look at the people who seem to have found it, and they seem to be good people …
- Peace Requires Character… That’s the only place where true peace is going to found—in nibbana—when the mind is finally free from hunger entirely. But you notice how the path works: You lift yourself above your ordinary ways of feeding and you realize there’s a part of the mind that doesn’t want to have to keep feeding, doesn’t want to have to …
- Mud Houses… But there is nibbana, and this is the path that takes you there. That’s why the Buddha called it a path, one that takes you someplace really good. You don’t stay on the path. You don’t take the path as your goal. If you stayed on the path, he wouldn’t have called it a path. It would have been a …
- The Armored Car… There are so many Dhamma teachers who say, “Well, nibbana is the ultimate ease, the ultimate rest, so the path should be an easeful, restful path. After all, you can’t do something stressful to get to rest.” But that’s like saying smoke comes from fire, therefore fire should be black, too. Causes are not necessarily the same as their results. Ajaan Suwat …
- At Play… And, when Ajaan Lee was first teaching in Bangkok, he had to emphasize jhana because the party line there among the scholarly monks was that the age of jhana had passed; the age, of course, for nibbana had passed; monks should be helping in the government’s schools. So Ajaan Lee had to prove that that was not true. One of his ways of …
- No Preferences… It gives rise to vision, gives rise to knowledge, brings about peace, knowledge, nibbana. So that’s what makes the Buddha’s teaching special: He had found a path of action. That’s what’s worth talking about: looking at which paths of action lead to suffering, which ones lead to the end of suffering, and then following the one that leads to the …
- Controlling… There’s no control over nibbana, and of course there’s no need for it. It’s not going to go anywhere. It’s not going to do anything bad. It’s not going to misbehave. It’s everything you could possibly want—better than things you could possibly want. So, instead of learning to be less controlling, you want to be more** wisely …
- One Thing Clear Through… Even the very last day of his life, he knew there was one more person he had to teach before he entered total nibbana. So, even though he was suffering from dysentery, he walked all the way to Kusinara — a full day’s walk — because there was one more person, Subhadda, he had to teach. What this means in our practice is that we …
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