Search results for: "Wisdom"
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- The Limits of Control… It allows us to gain the wisdom that ultimately goes beyond them. As I was saying last night, you do develop a healthy sense of self as you pursue the practice. You do get a greater sense of control—but you have to make sure it stays healthy. Avoid the unhealthy senses of self that can develop around the practice. As the Buddha says …
- The Conditions for Goodwill… All the qualities that go into determination, wisdom, truthfulness, relinquishment, and calm are conditions for developing goodwill. So even though goodwill is unlimited, it’s not unconditioned. It requires the proper conditions inside you in order to stay unlimited. And, of course, it meets upwith situations where there are people who are suffering and there’s nothing you can do about it; or times …
- Refuge… You’re trying to develop the wisdom that the Buddha developed, to see where there’s suffering and what kind of suffering is totally unnecessary. The fact of being born and living in this world, where other people who, like us, are born, grow ill, and die, can leave the mind ragged. So it needs to be healed. A lot of healing has to …
- The Buddha Respects Your Potential… He said it is possible to find a happiness that is deathless, a happiness that does not disappoint, and it involves developing good qualities like wisdom, compassion, and purity as you pursue that happiness. He’s telling us to raise our sights as to what we can do, what we as human beings have in our potential. So have some respect for the potential …
- The Basic Pattern… At the same time, you learn from the wisdom of other people. The Buddha doesn’t recommend that you reinvent the Dhamma wheel every time you act. If, however, you notice that there was no harm from your actions, the Buddha says, “Take joy in your practice and continue with the training.” There are a lot of important principles here: the principle of truthfulness …
- True Protection for the World… When people are happy or creating the causes for happiness, goodwill means that you rejoice in their happiness, or the wisdom of their actions. You appreciate what they’re doing, or what they’re experiencing. That’s goodwill applied. Then there’s equanimity. When you realize that certain things are beyond your control, either because of that person’s past karma or your past …
- Unburdensome, Part 2… This way, you have full-time practitioners permeating society, where they can share their wisdom, share their example. And it’s in the context of this mutual dependence between the monastics and the lay people that we have the opportunity to help one another. If we have time to practice fully, that’s what we do; and if we don’t have time to …
- The Uses of Pleasure & Pain… So we carry these five khandhas, these aggregates, around with us, and the wisdom of the Buddha is in taking these aggregates that tend to weigh us down, like big lumps of metal in a suitcase, and opening up the suitcase to look inside. That’s when you begin to see that they’re not just lumps of metal. They’re tools, tools that …
- For When the World Can’t Help You… In terms of the Buddha, he’s said to have had three qualities—wisdom, compassion, purity—and you try to develop those within you. In terms of the Dhamma, the Buddha has said when you take the Dhamma as your refuge, you’re taking yourself as your refuge. In other words, you internalize the teachings. In particular, you establish mindfulness right here at the …
- The Armored Car… It basically means realizing that the causes of suffering come from within, from our own unskillful behavior, so a better part of wisdom is to say, “I’m not going to have ill will for anyone, because if I have ill will, I’m going to start acting in unskillful ways. I have to be harmless. And I have to try to overcome my …
- Battling Darkness… The qualities of insight, discernment, wisdom are like a sword. They cut through all the confusion, they cut through all the connections that keep those defilements together, that keep them strong. As you get to know the movements of your mind, you begin to see that there are lots of little events in the mind that you tie together. You connect this one with …
- Doing Meditation… In Pali they have nouns for them, too, but they also have corresponding verbs, which is one of the reasons why I prefer to translate paññā as discernment rather than wisdom. In English we don’t have a verb for “wising,” but we do have a verb for discerning. So remind yourself that while you’re meditating, you are doing something. There’s an …
- The Karma of Not-self… That’s basic wisdom. And it requires a skillful kind of self to do that. In one way, you might say that you have lots of different selves, and some of the selves can train the other selves: The self that forms around an unskillful desire can be trained sometimes by a self that forms around a skillful one. So it’s not the …
- No Preferences… There’s a sutta where the Buddha defines wisdom and discernment in terms of how you handle four courses of action. The first two are the things you like to do that give good results, and the things you don’t like to do that give bad results. Those two are not hard. They’re no-brainers. You avoid the things that you don …
- What We Have in Common… Each had something distinctive to offer to the group—in terms of wisdom, harmoniousness, or the sacrifices he or she made on the path. But it was all for the same purpose, which added to the honor of the group as a whole. So here we are, coming from many different backgrounds ourselves: different parts of the world, different strata of society. What brings …
- The Bureaucracy of the Defilements… As long as everything is transparent—you’ve got wisdom in charge, you’ve got discernment in charge—you find that this bureaucracy, instead of continually churning out problems and churning out suffering, can actually become harmless. Blameless. Useful. So it’s the bureaucracy of your defilements, not the bureaucracy of the ego, that you have to watch out for. The problem lies, not …
- The Lightened Mind… There’s a line of thought that says the path culminates in discernment or wisdom, but that’s not the case. The path culminates in release. Here release means release from all things fabricated, including the discernment that gets you there. This is how you ultimately lighten the mind. That’s when the mind is brought to its highest state. That’s when it …
- Our Variegated Minds… Then we can work from that desire, to develop wisdom, compassion, purity. We can also work with the fact that other people have that desire buried someplace in them. That’s how we can connect, It’s how we can live together, regardless of whether we like one another or not. As long as we can connect with that basic desire, there’s room …
- Evaluation… The Buddha never said that wisdom sees everything as oneness. He says it’s a matter of seeing things as separate, and then you see which separate things are related to one another, which ones are not, and you learn how to use that knowledge properly. We’re not presented with the present moment simply as a done deal. We’re actively shaping it …
- Right View from Right Effort… that it’s through effort that we gain wisdom. You look at the noble eightfold path: It starts out with right view, which informs our efforts. But then again the efforts turn around and train right view. The things you learn through the practice that you can’t learn from books, you can’t learn from hearing someone else talk about them: They come …
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