Search results for: "Dhamma"

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  2. Training in Right Resolve
     … This is called practicing the Dhamma in line with the Dhamma. You take your ideas of right and wrong, and you check them against what the Buddha said is going to be conducive to true well-being. Whenever there’s a conflict between your ideas and his advice, you’re willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. This is what’s meant … 
  3. Inner Strength, Inner Wealth
     … And it’s especially important in the midst of our responsibilities to continue to practice the Dhamma. There’s a widespread misunderstanding that practicing the Dhamma means just meditation, but actually there’s more to it. There’s the practice of generosity, the practice of virtue, all the qualities that create strength in the mind and provide the mind with its wealth. There are … 
  4. Investment Strategies
    The Dhamma is something special—so special that only honest people can practice it. As the Buddha once said, “Bring me an observant person, one who’s honest and no deceiver, and I’ll teach that person the Dhamma.” In other words, truthfulness is the essential prerequisite for the practice. And there’s something deep down inside of us that responds to that, because … 
  5. Delight in Concentration
     … Take delight in the fact that you’ve got this Dhamma available and you can practice it. On the days when you don’t want to follow the path, you can ask yourself, “Do you really want to live in a world where there is no path, where there is no Dhamma?” Because that’s what you’re doing as you wander away from … 
  6. Thinking Your Way to Stillness
     … That’s the sort of person who found the Dhamma we’re practicing. You could think of similar ways about the Dhamma and the Sangha to get yourself inspired about what you’re doing here. As for yourself, sometimes you’ve got to get yourself inspired about yourself as well. That’s what the reflections on virtue, generosity, and the devas are all about … 
  7. How to Look, How to Listen
    We chant every day that the Dhamma is opanayiko. It’s translated as “pertinent.” But pertinent to what? Pertinent to the problems in your own mind. Another way of translating it is, “something to be brought inward.” You take the Dhamma inward and use it as a measuring stick for your own mind, to see where you’re still lacking, to see where you … 
  8. Nurturing Patient Endurance
     … And these were people for the most part who had heard one Dhamma talk from the Buddha and gained awakening. But now they were going to go out to teach, so the Buddha gave them a long Dhamma talk that afternoon that filled in the details, starting with some of the more basic principles, so they could teach the Dhamma to a wide range … 
  9. The Joy of Heedfulness
     … Given that the human birth is so hard to come by, what would you do?” And the king said, “What else would I do but right conduct, Dhamma conduct, meritorious actions, skillful actions?” So the Buddha then said, “Well, I declare to you, great king: Aging, illness, and death are rolling in, squashing all beings in their path. What are you going to do … 
  10. Three Weapons
     … Learning here of course means learning the Dhamma. It’s good to have a fund of Dhamma knowledge that you can draw on. When something comes up in meditation, you can stop and think: “What would the Buddha say about this?” The more you know what about he actually said, then the more likely you are to come up with something appropriate. As for … 
  11. Think Outside the Ruts
     … This is one of the reasons why it’s so important to see that, as we’re bringing the Dhamma to the West, we shouldn’t be in such a great hurry to make the Dhamma fit in with our Western views of reality. After all, our views of reality are making us suffer. The Dhamma’s offering us another way of looking at … 
  12. Doing Nothing
     … The Buddha sets out the basic outline in the various sets of dhammas. At different times in your meditation, you’ll find that different sets of dhammas speak precisely to what’s going on in your mind. But it’s important to keep in mind that there’s no single quality that will take you all the way. Analysis of qualities—this ability to … 
  13. The Source of Goodness
     … Several questions that were addressed in that group of people focused on the issue of the Dhamma of relationships, or relationships as a path. Although the Buddha never said that that path was equivalent to the path of meditation, you can’t just meditate and hope that it’s going to straighten out your life. You have to work on developing certain qualities in … 
  14. Self-Starting
     … That’s what it means to practice the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma: to practice for the sake of disenchantment, for dispassion, and not simply to fulfill a social role. Monks at that time were expected to stay in the village—often they were the village doctors—to perform social services. The monks who went out into the wilds weren’t trusted. We … 
  15. Study to Practice
     … This is why the Buddha always pairs the word Dhamma with attha, the meaning, the goal, the purpose of the Dhamma. You need to know both. In other words, when you read about a particular teaching, you want to know: What is it for? Then you apply it to that use. And when you finally reach the goal, that’s when you really know … 
  16. Your Judgments Matter
     … If it’s no, then you listen to the Dhamma they teach. Here again, you have to judge the Dhamma, the things that are being taught. If you put them into practice, will they develop good qualities of the mind or bad ones? And how are your own powers of judgment? Are they up to the task? This is one of the reasons why … 
  17. Being Responsible
    One of Ajaan Lee’s favorite teachings was that when you take refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, the real refuge is when you internalize their qualities. If you take refuge simply on the external level, the Buddha is the person who lived 2,600 years ago, the Dhamma is the Dhamma in books, the Sangha is the noble Sangha—somebody … 
  18. The Taste Is Release
     … This is where the Dhamma is aimed. All the customs around what the monks should do, all the customs around how lay people are supposed to behave: They’re all aimed here. As the Buddha said, the genuine Dhamma is like the ocean in having one taste throughout. The ocean, no matter where you go—the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic—tastes … 
  19. Victory
     … Both of them came right there before him, and he taught them the Dhamma: “Animosity is not ended through animosity. Animosity is ended through lack of animosity.” They were able to hear the Dhamma and it went to their hearts—and that was the end of that long cycle of revenge and retribution. So sometimes lack of animosity looks like you’ve lost, but … 
  20. Perception
     … I was talking to someone in New York this spring who was saying, “There’s no one right description of reality, and that means there’s no one right interpretation of the Dhamma, because every interpretation is a map, and all maps distort.” Well, think about the map on the door of a hotel room to tell you where the fire escape is. It … 
  21. Mountains Moving In
     … Aging and death are rolling in, what should you do? And your answer should be that you should practice the Dhamma. As for the answer to the other question: “What you doing right now?” The answer is: “I am practicing the Dhamma.” That’s an answer you can be proud of. But it requires that you stick with the practice all the time, because … 
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