Search results for: "Nibbana"
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- Questioning & Acceptance… But equanimity is not nibbana. The Buddha’s very clear on this. He says you can get stuck on equanimity, and that can prevent your gaining awakening. You have to go beyond equanimity and break through to something that really is deathless. You can do that only by questioning, by figuring out what’s working and what’s not—and having very high standards …
- Reflections on Kamma… There’s no place anywhere where you can come to the end of having to keep on making the effort to act skillfully unless you make it to nibbana. So this reflection on kamma is useful in all aspects of the practice. When we’re spreading thoughts of goodwill, what are we actually saying? We’re saying, “May all beings understand the causes of …
- Selves with Skills… As the Buddha said, there’s no way you can anticipate what nibbāna is going to be like before you really hit it. He gives you some general ideas, but he says that those are just arrows pointing in that direction: It’s the ultimate bliss, freedom, a state of consciousness that doesn’t depend on anything. It’s a truth—you can rely …
- Learning from What You Do… He didn’t believe that nibbana had anything to do more than just that: a state of equanimity. There’s nothing transcendent, nothing outside the realm of what we normally know in our senses: That’s what he said. But that viewpoint is a result of a very narrow range of imagination, a very narrow concept of what can be done in the practice …
- Right Next to Ignorance… Or as Ajaan Maha Boowa would say, if you take ideas of self and not-self and try to plaster them on nibbāna, it’s as if you’re covering it with excrement. But when you find it, it’s pure. That’s what they say. So check and see for yourself.
- Appropriate Attention… If you’ve ever read about his awakening, there were three knowledges that he developed before he attained nibbana. The first was knowledge of his past lives. He was thinking about eons and eons: That was where he lived, this was his name, this was his appearance. It’s interesting what the texts focus on: his name, his appearance, the food he ate, his …
- Skills for Awakening… As the Buddha said, all phenomena, or dhammas, are rooted in desire and that includes the path to awakening. Awakening itself is not rooted in desire. It’s not a thing. Nibbana isn’t even a phenomenon, according to the Buddha. But the path is a phenomenon and it has to be based on desire. This means that you have to learn how to …
- Timeless Practice… We usually translate it as suffering to emphasize the fact that compared to nibbana, everything you experience in the six senses is suffering. But the Buddha talks about two types of suffering: the suffering of the three characteristics and the suffering of the four noble truths. The suffering of the three characteristics is simply the fact that things are fabricated, and there’s stress …
- When You Practice on Your Own… They prefer to think that they can think their way to nibbana—without realizing that they haven’t touched the pride that runs through their thinking at all. Other people just want to be very quiet. Their attitude is, “Don’t disturb me. Let me just be quiet, quiet, quiet. I don’t want to have to think. I don’t want to have …
- Walking Meditation: Stillness in Motion… To develop respect for these things, as the Buddha said, puts you in the presence of nibbana.
- Open Are the Doors to the Deathless… Let those with ears show their faith.” In other words, it was going to require faith and conviction on their part to listen to him and to try out the teachings that he was going to present as a path of practice, because he couldn’t take nibbana out to show it to anybody. The release he’d gained was something they would have …
- How to Use the Three Perceptions… You have to ask yourself, “Okay, is this constant? Does it really meet all the criteria?” Because nibbana is not inconstant, it’s not stressful. If you watch carefully, you begin to realize that even in those peaceful states, there is a little bit of wavering, there is a little bit of uncertainty, a little bit of instability, and that right there is an …
- An Environment for Practice… What’s the problem? Which part of your mind feels constrained by the rule? None of the rules get in the way of nibbana, but a lot them get in the way of your particular defilements. This is one of the best ways to see them. This applies not only for the monks’ rules, but also for the five precepts. They’re not general …
- Always in Training… After all, the Buddha’s images for people who practice are never images of people relaxing their way to nibbana. They’re always images of people who are fighting, people who develop skills, people who are searching for something. So there is a fight, but it’s a good fight, and the Buddha provides you with all the tools you need. It’s simply …
- In Training… The only closure there is in saṁsāra is nibbāna, and that’s an individual thing. So we forgive others. That doesn’t erase their past actions. What it does, though, is that it gives you the right attitude so that you’re not going to create new bad karma yourself. That’s generosity. Virtue: How are your precepts? In particular, the precept against lying …
- Attention to Your Potentials… Ajaan Maha Boowa talks about how when he was young, he had heard the party line in Bangkok, which was that nibbana was no longer possible. He was afraid that if he practiced, he would just be putting himself through needless torture, needless pain. But he stopped to realize: The Buddha didn’t set out the path to torture anybody, to be fruitless. The …
- A Sense of Direction… I’m just a layperson, how can I think of going all the way to nibbana?” or whatever. Learn how not to fall for the tricks that delusion can sometimes play on you. In that way, you can be true to your own best interests, true to the interests of people around you. This, of course, will involve giving up certain things. Because we …
- Dimensions of Right Effort… How do you get it right if you didn’t understand it the first time around? The people who got the Buddha’s message right the first time around have all gone to nibbāna. They’ve all succeeded on the path. We’re the ones who are left over, which means we’re the sort of people who have to follow the path step …
- Mindful Judgment… After all, he talks about nibbana. Where is it? Where do you see it? It’s not in anything he could point to. But what he did depend on was the fact that people are suffering and they want to know a way to put an end to suffering. He’s offering that to them: If you want to find an end of suffering …
- Fabricated Path, Unfabricated Goal… But it turns out that you can’t just relax into nibbana either, because the mind is constantly fabricating things all the time, and doesn’t let them go very easily. Our hand has the ability to let go, but also has the ability to grab things. Then it goes back and forth between the two. In the same way, the mind lets go …
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