Search results for: "Dhamma"

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  2. Practicing in Solitude
     … In other words, use the Dhamma to reframe the issues you’ve been carrying around. That’s what reading the Dhamma helps with. Other ways you get help from reading the Dhamma include the fact that it gives you ideas for meditation you may not have thought of, like ways of dealing with the breath in the different parts of the body so that … 
  3. Mindfulness of Death
    When I was a young monk, there was one time when Ajaan Fuang was invited to give some Dhamma talks in Wat Asokaram during the rains retreat. It turned out he was able to give only one talk. After that, he got sick. At the end of the rains, I went to Wat Asokaram for the Dhamma exams. It turned out that a monk … 
  4. The Teacher Inside
     … Even when you get advice from outside, with Dhamma talks every night, as the expression has it in Thai, “until your ears are all wet with all the Dhamma talks,” still you filter the Dhamma talks while you’re sitting. Then, as you go out and sit under the trees on your own, you’ve got to keep tabs on how things are doing … 
  5. The Dhamma Bucket List
     … If you’re going to come and stay here, you’re going to need to bring a doctor.” So she had an old doctor friend, a retired doctor, a woman in her eighties, who went along and sat and meditated with her, listened to the Dhamma talks together with her. Ajaan Maha Boowa gave then about eighty Dhamma talks during the three months they … 
  6. Analysis of Dhammas
     … In the factors for awakening, the discernment faculty, called analysis of dhammas—which can mean either analysis of qualities or analysis of actions—is fostered by paying careful attention to what’s skillful and what’s not skillful. Which thoughts side with the dark side of the mind? Which ones side with the bright side of the mind? Here again, there’s an assumption … 
  7. In Training
     … When we talk about practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma, it doesn’t mean just following the rules and the precepts. When you get into the meditation and you look at the Buddha’s instructions on how you train yourself, it gets more and more into the issue of: How do you use your ingenuity to get the Dhamma to work for … 
  8. No-Tech Meditation
     … As the Buddha said, you find the Dhamma by committing yourself to the practice of the Dhamma and then reflecting on it: watching what you’re doing and perfecting it from there. That’s the real work of the meditation, and it’s a large source of the insight. It’s not something you simply get out of the way before you get to … 
  9. Comfort Dhamma
     … So just like comfort food, this kind of comfort Dhamma is not necessarily good for you. Now, the Buddha does offer comfort in his genuine teachings. There’s the ultimate happiness of nibbana, and along the way in the practice there’s the well-being of concentration. This is what we’re working on right now so that you have a sense of being … 
  10. The Regularity of the Dhamma
    The Regularity of the Dhamma May 22, 2006 There’s a school of thought that says each present moment is so new and so unpredictable that you shouldn’t bring any preconceived notions from the past to apply to it. Any conditions you pick up from the past obscure the freshness of the present moment, so your duty as a meditator is to be … 
  11. Truthful & Observant
     … A year or so later, we were visiting a lay Dhamma teacher someplace else, and the Dhamma teacher started going off on a riff. My student noticed that because he’d been doing this training, the riff—which was a lot of exaggeration, fooling around—really seemed jarring. The more precise you are in your behavior, the more you see, especially when you meditate … 
  12. The Light of the World
    I had a conversation one time with a friend who considered himself basically Christian but dabbled in Zen, and he asked me: “What is it that Buddhists believe?” “And,” he added, “don’t say something vague like ‘Dhamma.’” He wanted something specific, so I told him something specific: We believe that the Buddha was awakened. That’s an event that has implication for our … 
  13. Delight in the Path
     … People in Sri Lanka who were reputed by their friends to be really into the Dhamma were given psychological tests, and the conclusion was that they were all suffering from a mild form of depression. They had resigned themselves to the impermanence of things, didn’t have any large scale hopes or expectations—life was gray. That’s what happens when you put the … 
  14. Delighting the Mind
     … The first is delight in the Dhamma. It’s similar to recollection of the Dhamma. You think about what a great Dhamma this is; how it’s admirable in the beginning, admirable in the middle, admirable in the end. In other words, it starts with good actions, leads to more good actions, and ends up with something that’s totally beyond actions and the … 
  15. Meaning & Importance
     … From the point of the view of the practice, we have to learn how to see them in light of the Dhamma as to whether they’re going to be meaningful for us or not. We have to learn how to put aside the question of what’s meaningful for us personally in terms of our sense of self and our role in the … 
  16. The Whole Elephant
     … They don’t know the Dhamma and so they fight over the Dhamma because they don’t really know it. In the Chinese version, though, the blind people stand for all people, Buddhist or not, basically saying that even Buddhists are blind. There’s nobody who can really know the Dhamma. All we know is winnowing baskets, brooms, granaries, and posts. We don’t … 
  17. Four Determinations
     … This is in line with one of the meanings of the principle of practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma. We’re not here to change the Dhamma or to update it. The Dhamma is timeless, as we chant almost every day: It’s akāliko. There’s nothing in the Dhamma that needs to be changed. What needs to be changed is in … 
  18. Shame & Compunction
     … So how can you live safely in a place like that? There’s one thing you can depend on, and that’s the Dhamma. The Buddha teaches us how to find refuge, how to find safety through developing good qualities in the mind. That’s another meaning of the word dhamma. There’s the Dhamma of the teachings, but also the dhamma of the … 
  19. Cook Your Mind
    The passage we chanted just now, Setting the Wheel of Dhamma in Motion, often leads to the question, “Where’s the wheel?” It’s in the part where the Buddha talks about how he came to a realization of each of the four noble truths that had never occurred to him before, and not just noting what the truth was in each case, but … 
  20. Dreams & Voices
     … What matters is, what are they telling you to do? Is it in line with the Dhamma? This is one of the reasons why it’s good to study the Dhamma, so that you can get a sense of what’s really in line with the Dhamma and what’s not. The dreams you might have about past lifetimes or different facts about nature … 
  21. Universal Truths
     … Ajaan Lee makes the comment many times that people tend to take high Dhamma and think that it’s low, and low Dhamma and think it’s high. The Dhamma of trying to pin down a self identity is very low. High Dhamma is the Dhamma that the Buddha started off with and ended up with: the noble eightfold path, starting with right view … 
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