Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. The Psychology of Harmlessness
     … that by letting go of the craving and clinging there is an ultimate happiness that has no suffering, no stress at all. That truth changes the landscape. The things that you’re holding on to look pretty paltry in comparison with the possibility of the total end of suffering. Why are you holding on when the end of suffering is possible when you let … 
  3. Adult Dhamma
     … The first was his saying that the path is basically a matter of learning to embrace our sufferings together with our pleasures in the world, to realize that you can’t have the pleasures without the sufferings—which is pretty much saying that there is no real end to suffering. The other disturbing point was that he illustrated his principle with a story about … 
  4. Goodwill as a Guardian
     … But, then you have to ask yourself further: “What do I gain from their suffering? What would the world gain from their suffering?” You might say, “Well, maybe they’ll come to their senses.” But a lot of people, when they suffer, don’t come to their senses at all. They just get more and more entrenched in their old ways. The world would … 
  5. Patient & Inquisitive
     … So here the Buddha’s saying that the way we feed is making us suffer. In fact, the need to feed is his paradigm for suffering. So you have to figure out: What does he mean? And why would that be suffering? He sets out the four noble truths not simply as a nice thing to think about. He’s challenging you. Each one … 
  6. Warrior Knowledge
     … But there’s also a lot of suffering that’s totally unnecessary: the things we inflict on ourselves through our own lack of skill in managing our minds. That’s something we can work on in the meditation, learning how to deal more skillfully with issues as they arise, recognizing which patterns of thought are skillful and don’t lead to suffering, which ones … 
  7. Not-self as a Raft
     … And all of those ways are suffering—the first noble truth. There’s a duty with regard to each of the four noble truths, and the duty with regard to suffering is to comprehend it, i.e., to develop dispassion for it. The duty with regard to the cause is to abandon it. The cessation of suffering is to be realized and the path … 
  8. Discernment Is in the Doing
     … In other words, you see people who are down—they’re in a position of weakness and suffering—and you’re not going to pile on. You want them to get out of that suffering. Of course, that applies to you, too. You see that you’re suffering, so you want to get out of that suffering. This is the motivation for our practice … 
  9. Noble Standards
    Noble Standards May 15, 2012 The truths the Buddha taught about suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the way to its cessation are called noble truths. And the question is, what’s noble about them? To begin with, they’re motivated by the desire to put an end to suffering—which on the one hand may seem pretty common. Everybody tries to suffer less … 
  10. Bad Stuff Happens
     … He’s saying, “Look inside for the causes of your suffering. If you take care of those causes, then things that happen outside won’t make you suffer.” So we have to be willing to look within. What are we holding onto? That’s his analysis. We suffer because of clinging. Sometimes this is hard to admit to ourselves, which is one of the … 
  11. Refuge
     … We live in a world of aging, illness, death, and separation, but he says we don’t have to suffer from that. I received a letter from someone today who had been reading a book saying that the Buddha didn’t really teach that craving is a cause of suffering. Instead, he taught that suffering is the cause of craving. Of course, suffering is … 
  12. All Fabrications Are Stressful
     … 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. And over a *long course of time, your level of suffering has gone up and down. The level of your skill *has gone up and down. The useful … 
  13. The Brightness of the World
     … Then there’s the Buddha’s first noble truth about suffering, which many people misinterpret as saying that life is suffering. He never said that. All he said was there is suffering, and that it’s clinging. It’s one of four noble truths. But there are other noble truths, too. Life also has the cause of suffering, the end of suffering, and the … 
  14. Asalha Puja
     … There’s the truth of stress or suffering—dukkha—the truth of the cause, the truth of the cessation, and the truth of the path of practice leading to cessation. Those are the four truths. In explaining stress, the Buddha gave a list of examples. There’s the stress of suffering at birth, aging, illness, and death; sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, despair, having to … 
  15. Appropriate Attention
     … the first—suffering; the second—the cause of suffering; and the fourth—the path to the end of suffering. But he didn’t have experience yet of the third, which meant he didn’t have complete knowledge of those truths. That piqued his curiosity: How could he really know the other three if he didn’t know the third? So he devoted himself more … 
  16. Attention to Your Potentials
     … When there’s suffering, you look to see, what is the suffering here? And the Buddha says something radical. He starts out, of course, with pretty common examples of sufferings: birth, aging, and death; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair; having to be with what you don’t like, having to be separated from what you do like, not getting what you want. That … 
  17. Perception
    Perception August 19, 2005 That phrase in the chant just now — “those who don’t discern suffering” — sounds a little strange, doesn’t it? You’d think that everybody would discern suffering, but the verb here is important. Everybody experiences suffering, but not everybody discerns it. “Discerning” means to understand, to see it for what it is, to the point where you can let … 
  18. A Simple Path Through a Complex Map
     … If the original questions were going to lead you to suffering, you can apply appropriate attention, asking questions related to the four noble truths. Then all of a sudden that feeling becomes part of a process leading out away from suffering. And again, if this sounds too abstract, remember that this is how your mind actually functions. When pain comes in, you can think … 
  19. But Not Sick in Mind
     … There are certain desires that are the causes for suffering, and others are part of right effort. The desire to make the mind skillful, the desire to bring the mind to concentration: That’s part of the path. It’s not a cause of suffering. There will be some suffering in the sense that if you want the path to show its results and … 
  20. Rooted in Desire
     … 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 the question is, which desires are you going to follow? And how deep does it go, this question of how … 
  21. Suffering Comes from What You’re Doing
    There’s an old cliché we keep even now hearing from time to time, which is that the Buddha taught that life is suffering, that that’s the first noble truth. Actually, if he’d said that, it would have been pretty useless. What he actually taught was something much more useful: Suffering is clinging, and clinging comes from craving. In other words, the … 
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