Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. Happiness is a Skill
     … When he analyzes all those forms of suffering down to their common denominator, he defines suffering as the five clinging-aggregates, a point that’s not immediately obvious. When he assigns a duty to this suffering, he says it’s something you want to comprehend. It’s because we don’t really comprehend suffering that we keep on suffering. When he defines right view … 
  3. Free to Choose
     … The way the Buddha used that realization was to focus in on the problem of suffering. We each of have our own sufferings. They’re part of our experience that we don’t share with anyone else. You can sit and look at somebody suffer, and you can feel sympathy for them, but you don’t actually feel their pain. And no one else … 
  4. Seeing with the Body
    Seeing with the Body January 6, 2006 One of the Buddha’s essential insights was that the suffering that really weighs down the mind is a suffering we create — and it’s unnecessary. Even though we create it and we suffer from it, we cling to it. This has some unexpected implications. One is that for a lot of us, if we didn’t … 
  5. To Discern Suffering
    The chant just now talked about people who don’t discern suffering: You wonder who that might be. Everybody knows that they’re suffering. You can know it, you can sense it—but that doesn’t mean you discern it. To discern it means that you understand it. The word dukkha we translate as suffering can also mean stress or pain. Everybody knows pain … 
  6. Get Out of Yourself
     … The heaviest sufferings are the ones where you feel that you’re the only one who’s suffering in this fashion. You get yourself out of the line of fire when you realize that other people are suffering this way, too. Other beings are suffering, sometimes worse—in fact, many are suffering a lot worse. And that thought lightens things: The universe isn’t … 
  7. To Discern Suffering
    We see suffering all around us: in ourselves, in other people, other animals. So what does it mean, “not to discern suffering,” in that chant just now? It means that even though we see suffering, we don’t see it clearly. Especially within ourselves: Something comes up that we don’t like, something that’s really oppressive, and we try to run away, we … 
  8. True & Beneficial
    The Buddha said twice that all he taught was suffering and the end of suffering. The truths he taught were truths about suffering and the end of suffering. In other words, he didn’t teach truth in the abstract. As he said, we suffer, and the most heartfelt questions that come to us, come out of bewilderment around the suffering. The big question is … 
  9. Guiding Truths
    How are you suffering right now? What can you do about it? Those are the questions the Buddha has you ask: suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the path to its cessation. These are the Buddha’s truths, but not his own personal truths. These are the only truths to which he gave the name ariya sacca , or noble truth. In other words, these … 
  10. Painful Thinking
     … The phrase, “Those who don’t discern suffering,” sounds kind of strange. Everybody has suffering; everybody knows they have suffering of one kind or another. But the problem is, do we really understand it? The Buddha’s challenge is that if you really understand it, you’re not going to suffer. It’s because we don’t understand our suffering, we don’t understand … 
  11. What’s Real
     … What we do know, though, is that we suffer. Some people have the kamma to experience only a natural world; other people have the kamma to experience a lot of supernatural things. But both kinds of people suffer, and this is what Buddhism is all about: teaching us how to not suffer. The problem is not with the worlds out there. It’s what … 
  12. Ignorance
     … Otherwise you just keep on creating more suffering without realizing what you’re doing. But once you realize that there’s suffering, you look for what you’re doing that’s causing the suffering, what else arises in the mind at the same time as that suffering or stress. In particular, you look for where the craving is, what kind of craving it is … 
  13. The World of the Noble Truths
     … The truth of suffering—What is suffering? It’s clinging to the aggregates—that’s to be comprehended. We don’t usually comprehend our sufferings in that way. We think, “Why is this pain afflicting me?” “Why is this situation in the world outside afflicting me?” But the Buddha is saying that suffering is the act of clinging to form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, or … 
  14. The Happiness & Suffering of Others
     … That was how he was able to gain escape from his suffering. Notice the pattern. You get perspective on your own suffering first by thinking about the suffering and happiness of others and thinking about how we all want happiness. This is one of the reasons why we spread thoughts of goodwill to everybody every night, every morning.: to take us out of our … 
  15. The First Noble Truth
     … Suffering is there—he’s not saying that life is suffering. He says there are these different kinds of suffering and they all come down to this same problem: clinging. And it’s not something particularly wrong with you that you’re suffering. To take on identity as a being is going to involve suffering regardless. But you have the choice. You can disidentify … 
  16. Discernment
     … The primary ingredient in this glue is the sense that “I am the one who is suffering, this is my suffering, this is happening to me, I’m in the midst of the suffering, or I am the suffering, or the suffering is in me.” The Buddha has you take this sensation of suffering and tease it apart in terms of the aggregates and … 
  17. To Comprehend Suffering
     … In fact, that’s sometimes how the cause of suffering is defined: wanting things to be other than what they are, which carries the implication that if you could learn some patience and some equanimity, some endurance, some acceptance, there wouldn’t be any suffering. But the Buddha’s teaching goes a lot deeper than that. Suffering comes, he says, from three types of … 
  18. Breaking Old Habits
     … If the mind isn’t trained, it just keeps on creating suffering for itself without realizing what it’s doing. The phrase we chanted just now—“Those who don’t discern suffering”—on the surface sounds very strange, for everybody knows suffering. We’ve all suffered in one way or another in our lives. But the issue is: Do we really discern suffering? Do … 
  19. Refuge
     … So not only did they cause suffering for other people but they caused suffering for themselves. But people who acted on skillful intentions with right view, understanding that action was important, that you had to be careful about what you did: Their actions were harmless, and they themselves suffered less harm, less suffering. In one way, you might think that seeing this larger picture … 
  20. Clinging & the End of Clinging
    When the Buddha formulated his first noble truth—the truth of suffering and stress—he didn’t say something useless like, “Life is suffering.” He didn’t say something vague and obvious like, “There is suffering.” He said something more specific, useful, and insightful: “Suffering is the five clinging-aggregates.” As he pointed out elsewhere, the problem isn’t with the aggregates of form … 
  21. Willing to Learn
    As the Buddha once said, suffering usually results in one of two things, often both: One is bewilderment and the other is a search outside for someone who might know a way to get rid of the suffering. This starts from our childhood. We’re hungry and we look to our mother. We have this problem, that problem, and we look to our parents … 
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