Search results for: "Kamma"
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- Survival Dhamma… A lot of people create a lot of bad kamma that way. The Buddha, before his awakening, had a vision of the world as a stream that was drying up. The fish were flopping around in what little water that was remaining, trying to push the other fish out of the way and, of course, everybody ended up dying . But then, as he said …
- Dethinking Thinking… The Buddha’s analysis of the aggregates, remember that? “For the sake of feeling-ness, for the sake of perception-hood, you fabricate a feeling, you fabricate a perception.” In other words, there’s a raw material there from your past kamma, and you turn it into actual feelings, actual perceptions, for the sake of having feelings and perceptions you can use. There’s …
- The Power is in Your Hands… I’ve been reading recently about how some modern Dhamma teachers don’t like the idea of kamma. They say it’s laying blame on people for the sufferings they meet with in life. But the Buddha was never interested in laying blame. He was more interested in analyzing a problem and seeing what you were doing to cause the problem so that you …
- Mud Houses… What’s left after that? It depends on your kamma, but your relationship with the six senses is altered. For an arahant, there’s no more feeding on things because there’s no hunger. There’s no longer a being that needs to be fed. This is why, when people asked the Buddha whether an arahant after death exists or doesn’t exist, or …
- True & Beneficial… You still have kamma to come back. But your relationship to things will be very different. The important thing here is that you remember that we’re here for the sake of putting an end to suffering: not just to find truths, but to find truths that are useful for the end of suffering, or to take truths that we know and make them …
- Controlling… You’re experiencing the results of old kamma, and you can’t go back in time—that’s one thing that’s impossible—to change your actions of the past. But the present moment is largely composed of the activity of the mind right now, and you can exert some control here. It’s simply a matter of learning how to do it wisely …
- What We Have in Common… We start with the views of the Buddha’s teachings on kamma, that you do have choices as to how to act, and that different actions have different consequences, based on the quality of the intention behind the action. So you want to be careful about how you act. That’s the essence of right view right there. It doesn’t require that you …
- Intelligent Effort… So think about the fact that you’ve got the opportunity to practice now and that you can create some good kamma for yourself. That’s your mainstay. What kind of good karma are you going to create? Well, work on the mind. We have that blessing every morning: ayu, vanno, sukham, balam—May you have a long life, beauty, happiness, strength. Abhivadana-silissa …
- The Reflective Self… Are you really convinced that this is a good path, and that you’re up to the path? What more do you need to do? I received a letter recently from someone saying that she was trying her best to believe in rebirth and kamma, but she wanted advice on how to strengthen her conviction. I reflected back on my own experience. It was …
- Training Your Cynical Voices… They were materialists, they didn’t believe in the power of kamma, thought that going to nibbana was impossible or selfish. But were they the people who benefitted from hearing the Buddha? No. The Buddha taught noble truths. The word ariya, which we translate as “noble,” also means standard or universal. They’re true all over the world. The problem is simply a matter …
- Right Action & Right Livelihood… So don’t think that when you’re sitting here meditating that you’re in a kamma-free zone where your thoughts have no consequences. They bend the mind, and can bend it crooked if you’re not careful. Similarly, with the principle of right livelihood, Ajaan Lee talks about the livelihood of the mind—in other words, where you look for your happiness …
- When Nothing’s Happening… Once you arrive, the question again is, “Is this something that has to be maintained?” The genuine experience of the deathless will be something you can’t control, because it has nothing to do with intention, nothing to do with kamma at all. But it’s important that you realize that you can’t just land in concentration and then look around and see …
- The Intelligent Heart… You’ve got the kamma and memory of the unskillful actions you did, together with the memory of the past pleasure that’s gone away. Wisdom is when you realize that long-term happiness—the happiness that doesn’t harm you, doesn’t harm anybody else—is worth a lot of sacrifice. But it’s not just sacrifice in the sense of having to …
- Warm Your Heart… That will then become your kamma. So, as your own protection, you’ve got to exercise extra goodwill, reminding yourself of what that means: Their happiness is going to come from their actions, too. So you hope that they’ll try to act in ways that will lead to long-term welfare and happiness. If there’s any way you can contribute to that …
- The Human Condition… That chant we had just now, “I am subject to aging, subject to illness, subject to death, subject to separation from all that I love,” followed by the reflection on kamma: In the full text of the sutta, the Buddha doesn’t stop there, with just the fact that you are subject to these things. He says to reflect on the fact that all …
- Concentration: A Balancing Act… After all, this is a mixed kamma bag that we’ve got here in the human realm. You can try to find a better realm than this, go up to the heavens, and you can stay there for a while, but then you come back down. When you get up there, you tend to get complacent, you tend to get lazy, and you develop …
- Willing to Learn… Here we have rebirth; we have kamma. The training of the mind is the big value. Money is not the big value. The way people interact is a little bit different. And so in the beginning, it’s very normal to feel awkward. There are things you’re enthusiastic about but other things you’re very unsure about. And you’re going to be …
- Right View about Right View… The same when you think about kamma. There’s a time when certain truths should be used, and other times when they shouldn’t. There is a sutta where one of the young monks is asked by someone from another religion, “What does the Buddha say is the result of action?” And the young monk says, “The result of action is pain.” Now, that …
- Becoming Capable of Happiness… The lowest one is giving with the idea, “I’ll get this back through the force of kamma.” But after a while, you get tired of thinking in those terms because you begin to realize, “Well, I’ll gain this some other time. But once I gain it that next time, I’ll have to give it away again if I want to maintain …
- To Be Sure… You have to assume that they must have made some good kamma in the past, but someplace along the line their minds switched. This is why the practice of straightening out your mind and making it reliable is good not only for you, but also for the world around you. After all, if you can’t trust yourself, how can anybody else trust you …
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