Search results for: "Fabrication"
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- What’s Relative, What’s Constant… The connection between ignorance and fabrication is a useful one to start with, because as you’re sitting here meditating, you’re getting direct hands-on experience with bodily fabrication—i.e., the in-and-out breath and all the variations of the ways that you can breathe. Verbal fabrication—directed thought and evaluation—all the different ways you can talk to yourself about …
- Right Effort… Other defilements, though, require what the Buddha calls exerting a fabrication. “Fabrication” here has many aspects: verbal, mental, and physical. Physical fabrication is the breath. In other words, when you see greed or anger or delusion arising in the mind, ask yourself, “How is the breath going right now?” See if you can change the mind state by changing the way you breathe. That …
- Breath Meditation: The First Tetrad… I was reading a piece recently questioning the standard translation of bodily fabrication, asking, “Why would the Buddha introduce a technical term here?” Well, part of the reason we’re doing breath meditation is because we’re trying to develop both calm and insight. Insight requires seeing things in terms of fabrication. So the breath is something that fabricates your sense of the body …
- Analysis of Qualities… They require first, though, that you understand the process of fabrication in the present moment. Fabrication, sankhara, comes in three types: bodily, verbal, and mental. “Bodily” is the in-and-out breath. “Verbal” is the way you talk to yourself before you break into speech. Technically, this is called directed thought and evaluation: directing your thoughts to an object and evaluating it—asking questions …
- Meaning & Becoming… Think about the different kinds of fabrications that go into this process of becoming. They’re the same fabrications that can be used to create a path. There’s bodily fabrication, the way you breathe; verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself with directed thought and evaluation; mental fabrication, perceptions and feelings. We turn these into states of becoming all the time. We …
- Anger… We get used to looking at things in the mind in terms of the different kinds of fabrication: bodily fabrication, verbal, mental. Bodily fabrication being the in-and-out breath; verbal being directed thought and evaluation being the way you talk to yourself; and mental fabrication being perceptions—mental labels, acts of recognition, acts of imaging things to yourself—along with feelings. You use …
- The Body In & Of Itself… After all, at the moment, all those worlds are just fabrications, total fabrications. You think about your friends: Your friends aren’t here right now. You think about issues at work: They’re not here right now. They’re just baggage you’re fabricating and carrying around. What is here right now: You’ve got the body sitting here breathing. And even though there …
- Happy to Be Here… In doing this, you’re employing all the different kinds of fabrication the Buddha talked about. There’s the breath itself, with is bodily fabrication, and then there’s the way you talk to yourself, which is verbal fabrication. Here you talk to yourself in a calm and soothing way. Then you take an interest in the breath, realizing that the breath and the …
- Learning by Doing… You focus on the breath—that’s bodily fabrication, and it’s also part of form. It’s part of the wind element. You think about the breath—that’s verbal fabrication. And you hold perceptions in mind—that comes under both name and mental fabrication. You’re trying to create a feeling of well-being—that comes under both name and mental fabrication …
- The Purpose of Empathetic Joy… We’re making it as pleasant as possible, to give the mind the food it needs in order to practice, to settle down, be still, and see things as they really are, to see the movements of the mind as they’re actually happening, to see the extent to which you’re fabricating your experience, and then the value of those fabrications: which ones …
- No One Size Fits All… As for the topics you use, in general, the Buddha said it’s an issue of learning how to look at fabrication: this process by which the mind creates thoughts, intentions, urges. You can look at fabrication from any number of angles: from the five aggregates, the six sense media, the six properties, dependent co-arising. A monk once went to see a several …
- The Raft… The Buddha taught that the path is something that’s fabricated, something you have to put together. It leads to something unfabricated, something unconditioned. But you’ve got to get the fabrications right for them to take you there. So hold on to your breath for the time being, because it is your path. Luang Pu Waen used to say, “Make Buddho the path …
- Deconstructing Suffering… It’s made out of directed thought and evaluation, which count as sankharas, or fabrications of the mind. Focused on the breath—which is a bodily fabrication—you’re dealing with perceptions and feelings, which are mental fabrications. What you’re doing is taking this process of fabrication and turning it from a cause of suffering into a path to the end of suffering …
- Controlling… For instance, you’ve got fabrication, the very first factor after ignorance. This includes bodily fabrication, the breath; verbal fabrication, directed thought and evaluation; and mental fabrication, perceptions and feelings. You have some control over all those things. You can change the way you breathe. You can change the way you talk to yourself, which is what directed thought and evaluation are all about …
- An Exercise in Freedom… There are processes the Buddha calls bodily fabrication, verbal fabrication, and mental fabrication. And they all hover around the breath. In fact, the breath itself is the bodily fabrication, it’s what creates our sense of the body. If the breath weren’t coming in, going out—if the breath energy weren’t flowing through the nerves—we wouldn’t even know we had …
- Damming & Diverting… You begin to see that there are these elements, these fabrications, that go into keeping the mind here. It turns out they’re the same fabrications we use to create any mental state, especially with an emotion. If the fear or lust or anger gets into your breath, it’s gone from the mind into the body. That’s all too often why we …
- Investing Your Intention… So what is there to see right here? Well, there are different kinds of fabrication. There’s bodily fabrication, which is the breath. There’s verbal fabrication: directed thought and evaluation. And there’s mental fabrication: feelings and perceptions. The path consists of comprehending these things. You’ve got them all gathered together here. You’re directing your thoughts to the breath and evaluating …
- Countercultural Conditioning… The conditioning that he’s talking about when we’re trying to go beyond conditioning is the fact that any experience that’s going to make any sense has to be composed of those three kinds of fabrication that he said, when they’re based on ignorance, will lead to suffering. There’s bodily fabrication, which is your in-and-out breath. Verbal fabrication …
- Deconstruct Your Emotions… Three, the breath energy is part of what’s called bodily fabrication. It’s one of the three kinds of fabrication that go into creating an emotion. Here in the West in particular we have the belief that our emotions are what we really are—what we really feel. But a lot of those “real” feelings are simply habits. A certain incident comes up …
- Equanimity… Why did the Buddha use all those terms? Well, the defilement has been something you’ve been fabricating all along. The mind has been fabricating defilement out of passion, so when you develop dispassion, you’re going to stop fabricating it, and when you stop fabricating it, it ends. That’s how it gets destroyed. That’s how all these things go together. Now …
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