Search results for: "Nibbana"

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  2. Strong Through Admirable Friendship
     … The only thing that gives you permanent, unchanging well-being is nibbana, and that’s beyond ends and means. You take that as your goal, and then when you’ve arrived, you no longer have any need for goals. But to get there, the means have to be good as well. So, take that as a lesson from your admirable friend, and use that … 
  3. Motivation
     … Sometimes they say that the Buddha doesn’t talk about nibbana that much, but he actually has a lot to say about how good it is. What he doesn’t do is to define it or try to pin it down in words, because it can’t be pinned down. There’s a long string of adjectives, a long strings of imagery that he … 
  4. Time & Place
     … It’s the bliss of nibbana. Action doesn’t cause it, but actions can take you there—just as the road to the Grand Canyon doesn’t cause the Grand Canyon to be, but if you follow the road, you get there. So when you’re thinking about action, you’re thinking about what to do in your life. Always keep that in mind … 
  5. Hold on for All You’re Worth
     … And craving to know what is it when they talk about nibbana. That would be a great thing to know. All of this is a good part of the path, because the path is not a process of cloning awakening. You hear that awakened people have gone beyond their sense of self, and so you say “Well, I’ll just drop my sense of … 
  6. Clinging-Aggregates in Context
     … Actually, the five aggregates end with nibbāna. Does that mean that there’s nobody there to be unbound? Is it a total wipe out? When the Buddha was asked that kind of question, he kept saying that all he taught was suffering and the end of suffering—the point being that there are questions he didn’t answer, that were not worth answering. But … 
  7. Right View Comes First
     … There’s no bridge going across the river, no nibbana yacht coming to pick you up to take you across. So what do you do? You have to make a raft. What do you make the raft of? You make a raft of things on this shore—twigs and branches—which the Buddha identifies with self-identity: i.e., the fact that you’re … 
  8. High-Level Dhamma
     … Often we read the stories about the famous ajaans, and it sounds like they were on a straight path to nibbana. We have to realize a lot of that is part of the genre. When you write about your teachers in Thailand, you don’t talk about the difficulties they had, you don’t talk about their backsliding, you don’t talk about their … 
  9. The Forerunner of All Things
     … You gain nibbana because of what you do. So you want to make your goodness independent, something that doesn’t have to rely on anybody else’s goodness. After all, all of us born in this human world have good kamma and bad kamma in our past. If we had nothing but good kamma, we wouldn’t be here. We’d be in a … 
  10. Four Determinations
     … It’s all for the calm of nibbāna. Now, in the factors for awakening, where some of the factors for awakening are energizing and some are calm, you energize the body and the mind first. If you start out saying, “I’ll just calm things down,” sometimes you put yourself to sleep. So you learn how to energize yourself by the way you breathe … 
  11. Desires Have Their Reasons
     … The one thing that’s not rooted in desire is nibbana. That lies outside. That’s the ending of all dhammas. But to get there requires desire. It requires, as Ananda says in another sutta, it requires conceit: seeing that other people have done this. They’re human beings. I’m a human being. They can do it. Why can’t I? Because that … 
  12. To Escape the Prison of Time
     … Then, of course after gaining those knowledges, he gained awakening to nibbana, which is something deathless. Those are all the premises we need. You might think of them as premises for skillful action. This is why faith in the Buddha’s awakening, or conviction in the Buddha’s awakening is so important. We don’t like the word faith—it’s become the F … 
  13. In Line with the Truth
     … Then, forty-five years after that, he entered total nibbana on a full-moon day in May. So, we’re commemorating three events tonight, the major events in the Buddha’s life. And, as he said on his final night, the best way to pay homage to him—and we want to pay respect, we want to show our gratitude—is through practicing the … 
  14. Not Getting What You Want
     … But you can’t wait for a nibbāna yacht to come over and pick you up. You’ve got to take what you’ve got: your breathing, your directed thoughts, your evaluation, your perceptions, your feelings. Those are twigs and branches, but you learn how to make them into a raft. Then you hold onto the raft as you use your hands and feet … 
  15. A Connoisseur of Happiness
     … offer pleasure. And we need to understand the different kinds of pleasure they offer, so we can use that pleasure as a means to the highest happiness or the highest pleasure: nibbana. The Pali word for pleasure and happiness is sukha. It’s one of the Buddha’s most basic terms, and—as is so often the case with the most central terms in … 
  16. You Are Not Powerless
     … And although it’s true that you can’t make a fabrication permanent, you can make fabrications that lead to well-being in this life, in future lifetimes, and the ultimate well-being, which is nibbana. In fact, the teachings are all about the powers we can develop. Look at the Buddha’s life. He was told again and again that his desire for … 
  17. Training the Mind to Train the Mind
     … As the Buddha said, all the things we experience, everything in fact outside from nibbana, comes from desire. Our unskillful mind states come from desire. Our skillful mind states come from desire. So a large part of the meditation is learning how to train your desires in the right direction. We’re not trying to snuff out desire right away. Eventually, you get the … 
  18. The Duties of Happiness
     … This is why they had the image of the nibbana, which literally means the fire’s gone out. It goes out because it lets go of the fuel. It’s freed because it lets go. It’s not that the fuel traps the fire. The fire is trapped by its own holding on. There’s a message there, that you’ve been clinging to … 
  19. Justice vs. Skillfulness
     … The only real closure in the Buddha’s teachings is nibbana, and that’s a closure that each of us has to find within ourselves. We’re not going to find closure out in the world, because the nature of the world is that everything falls apart—even the best things—and then gets reconfigured again and again, around and around and around. Even … 
  20. The Ennobling Path
     … We’ve never seen the happiness that the Buddha promises in terms of nibbana. The only escape we can see from the discomfort in the present is to run away from the present into the past or future. But you can never really run away for long. You’ve got to keep coming back, coming back. What we’re doing as we’re meditating … 
  21. Fear of Death
     … Even if you don’t make it all the way to nibbana, these qualities will stand by you as the body ages, as it grows ill, as it dies. One of the discoveries the Buddha made on the night of his Awakening was that things don’t end with death. There is a carryover. But it’s not the body that carries over. It … 
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