Search results for: "Nibbana"

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  2. Genuine Goodness
     … As the Buddha once said, one of the amazing things about nibbana is that no matter how many people enter it, it never gets full. There’s always room for more. Your true happiness doesn’t have to conflict with the true happiness of anybody else. That’s what’s good about it. And it’s good to reflect on that before you meditate … 
  3. All Fabrications Are Stressful
     … The only experience that’s not subject to these things, as I said, is nibbana: unbinding. That’s why he says it’s the only really worthwhile goal. So when you look at the suffering of your life, you might say, “Why am I suffering so much more than other people?” But that’s a useless question. Everybody’s suffering one way or another … 
  4. Chronic Pain
     … As Ajaan Chah once said, if those two qualities were enough to gain awakening and understanding, then chickens would have all gone to nibbana a long time ago, long before human beings. Getting past the pain requires that you be interested and probing, trying to understand: “What is this pain? Why does it have such an influence over the mind? And why does the … 
  5. A Basis in Well-being
     … After all, the Buddha said the purpose of his teaching is nibbana, which he said is the highest health. In fact, as far as he was concerned, it was the only true health. The health of the body is something temporary. Every part in the body seems to be designed to break down in one way or another. If you make a list of … 
  6. Rooted in Desire
     … All dhammas are rooted in desire—everything except nibbana is rooted in desire. You look at the four noble truths: The causal truths, i.e., the second truth and the fourth—the cause of suffering and the path to the cessation of suffering—are actions. There’s the action of craving and clinging. There’s the action of the desire in right effort. So … 
  7. Well-armed Efforts
     … The only unfabricated thing there is, is nibbana, which is outside of the six senses. So when people say they’re simply watching things happening on their own, on their own, they don’t really understand, because what’s happening is the result of past actions and your present actions, and if you think it’s happening on its own it means you don … 
  8. An Anthropologist from Mars
     … It’s so important that, as the Buddha said, one of the signs of a person who’s reached nibbana is that he or she doesn’t reverberate in response to criticism. He compares the awakened mind to a gong that’s been cracked. You hit the gong and there’s no sound. Or there may be little plunk, but it doesn’t reverberate … 
  9. Five Steps to Insight
     … This is the point where the mind gets more and more inclined to think that maybe what the Buddha taught about nibbana, maybe what he taught about the deathless really is a good thing. Wouldn’t it be good to have peace and happiness inside and not have to keep maintaining the causes? It’s like wanting to have a house where you don … 
  10. What Am I Becoming?
     … We’re not sitting here waiting for the nibbana yacht to come over from the other shore to pick us up and take us back. We have to put together a raft out of what we’ve got here. We’ve got the breath; we’ve got directed thought and evaluation. These are things we’re doing all the time: breathing in, breathing out … 
  11. Patience & Urgency
     … Because the practice isn’t a mechanical process where you simply force on the mind through the meat grinder and you come out with nibbana as the product. The technique is here to develop your powers of perception, to develop your powers of concentration, so that you can use your discernment to figure things out more clearly for yourself. If you rush through things … 
  12. The Karma Snake
     … Because that’s what nibbana is: beyond intentions. It’s something deathless, something unconditioned. It’s the only true happiness, the only reliable happiness, the only harmless happiness, and that’s why you want to go there. Only, it’s not a there to go to, but it is a dimension. And where do you find that? It’s a kind of freedom, and … 
  13. The Karma of Pleasure
     … The only pleasure that’s really free, though, as the Buddha said, is nibbana. Even the practice of jhana requires that we have a body that’s alive and needs to feed, so there’s a certain amount of burdensomeness placed on other people, other beings. The only truly free pleasure is one that’s not even a feeling. As the Buddha says, it … 
  14. A Safe Harbor
    Nibbana or nirvana is not the only name the Buddha gave to the goal of his teaching. He also called it shelter, harbor, refuge, because that’s something we sorely need. As in the chant just now: The world offers no refuge, it offers no shelter, there is no one in charge. We come into life and have some sense of protection that comes … 
  15. Your True Responsibility
     … to do at that point. It turned out ultimately that his decision was right. He was able to come back and offer something priceless to his wife and to his child: nibbana, arahantship. In the Therigatha there’s a poem attributed to his wife, in which she says that all the suffering was worth it because he showed her how to be responsible for … 
  16. Figuring Out Concentration
     … The image they have in the Canon, the image of nibbana, is of a fire that’s gone out. To understand that image, you have to understand how they understood the physics of fire back in those days. Someone once complained that they didn’t have physics back then. Of course they did. When you explain physical phenomena, those explanations count as physics. Now … 
  17. Use Your Defilements
     … You don’t wait for the nibbana yacht to come over, pick you up, and take you back to the deathless. You work with the trees and twigs and branches on this side of the river—the things you identify with, the aggregates—and you make them into a raft that helps you as you swim across. So as you’re meditating, don’t … 
  18. Outside the Box
    As the Buddha once said, “All phenomena are rooted in desire”—the word “phenomena” here covering everything except for nibbana. This means that the path is rooted in desire, just as our defilements are rooted in desire, the difference being that some desires are skillful and some are not. The skillful ones have some wisdom in them. There’s no such thing as just … 
  19. Dispassion Isn’t Depression
     … everything is inconstant, stressful, not-self. Therefore, you just accept that and basically give up. The monk didn’t use the phrase, “give up,” but that’s what he was saying. Nibbana wasn’t happiness, he said. It was equanimity, acceptance. At the end of it all, there’s nothing. Basically a sad end to a sad story—but that’s not what the … 
  20. Encouragement
     … we hear that Buddhism is goalless, or the path is the goal—that kind of teaching. But that’s not the way the Dhamma actually is. There’s a definite goal: nibbana. And as the Buddha said, it’s the highest happiness. I was reading recently a letter from someone who was teaching in India at a college that the Indians were trying to … 
  21. Culture Shock
     … When you pursue Awakening, when you pursue nibbana, it’s not going to lead to disappointment. Quite the contrary, it goes wildly beyond your expectations, wildly beyond your hopes. Even just the first taste of the Deathless, stream entry, is enough to produce a seismic shift in your whole awareness, your whole understanding in what you think you are, and what’s possible in … 
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