Search results for: "Generosity"
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- A Home for the Mind… As for the good you leave behind, that’s your generosity to the world. That, too, is a good quality to develop, because it actually goes with you as well. So when you’re meditating, it’s not just a technique for relaxation or stress reduction, although you do relax, and the level of stress does go down. But it’s also an opportunity …
- Anger… Think about their virtues, think about their generosity, think about their good side so that your response isn’t one-sided. That’s the problem with anger: It looks at things from one side. It’s like a one-eyed beast. It has no perspective. When you bring in two eyes, you can look at the good side and the bad side of the …
- The Acrobat… One is generosity, which means being generous not only with things, but also with your time, with your help, with your forgiveness if that’s called for. In general, it means having a giving attitude in every relationship. Instead of looking to the relationship for what you can get out of it, you look for what you can put into it. That’s the …
- Limitless is the Buddha… pain and you have to exercise some restraint over your clingings and cravings. There’s going to be some resistance. But what does the path ask you to do? Noble things: generosity, virtue. When you meditate, you develop a sense of well-being inside that doesn’t harm anybody at all. And that’s just the path. The goal is even more harmless, more …
- Happy to Be Here… the happiness of generosity, the happiness of virtue. You want to reflect on that and bring that attitude into the meditation. You’re going to be providing food for the mind, and you don’t want to force the food on yourself. You want to lay the food out in front of the mind and wait for it to be interested in eating. So …
- For When the World Can’t Help You… We also have the example of the Dhamma he taught on how to train the mind in generosity, virtue, and meditation. Then there’s the Sangha—the people who’ve practiced in line with what the Buddha taught and found that, yes, it’s true: You can achieve the deathless through this path. That’s an external refuge. Then you try to internalize that …
- Mud Houses… Make them into a state of concentration; use this body to practice virtue, generosity, and meditation; use the mind to get into concentration, to develop discernment, and to allow these things to deliver you to something that’s beyond them. That’s when you really lose your passion for these things, and all the stitching of the seamstress comes undone. What’s left after …
- The Purpose of Empathetic Joy… He starts with generosity, giving, virtue, the virtue of restraint; and then the rewards of giving and virtue: the various heavenly realms that you can enjoy. That’s bright kamma. But then he talks about the drawbacks of sensuality. He calls them not only drawbacks, but also the degradation that sensuality involves. Here you are, just eating up the results of your old actions …
- When Aging Closes In… You develop more generosity, virtue, persistence, endurance, determination, goodwill, discernment, equanimity. All these good qualities are your real treasures. That’s what you want to keep in mind: that true worth of a human life lies in the quality of the mind, the quality of the heart. When you have that conviction, it nurtures your mindfulness so that it grows into concentration. From the …
- The Reflective Self… Then there’s relinquishment, which can cover both generosity—being generous with your time, generous with your energy—and giving up unskillful mental states. Here at the monastery we have our chores, and it’s good to think of them as an opportunity instead of seeing them simply as chores. Here’s an opportunity to do something well. Do it with a sense of …
- You’re Already Dead… Another treasure is generosity. You know that someday you’re going to have to give up everything you have, so before it’s wrenched from your grasp, learn how to let it go. If you see something that you have and someone else could use well, make a practice of giving it. The mind gets lighter, more expansive. That sense of spaciousness in the …
- Getting the Most Out of the Present… In particular, whatever goodness you may want to develop in terms of generosity, virtue, all the qualities that are called perfections: Those are things you develop. That’s the duty there, and in that way your life away from formal practice is not wasted. We have only so much time, but we also have duties that are imposed on us, either from outside or …
- Appreciating Goodness… He lists three types of goodness in particular—generosity, virtue, and the development of goodwill—because these are ways of finding happiness that don’t cause any harm to anybody. The Buddha never said that the search for happiness is a bad thing. He never said that you should try to deny your happiness for the sake of others. He said you should work …
- Discernment: Commit & Reflect… You see this with the precepts; you see this with the practice of generosity: really basic stuff. Consciously be more generous, consciously be stricter with yourself about the precepts, and notice what happens. If you’re going to be stricter about the precepts, you find you’re more careful. If you’re more generous, you find there’s a good quality—a spacious, wide …
- Prerequisites for the Practice… But if all you can find around you are people who are lacking in conviction, lacking in virtue, lacking in generosity, lacking in discernment, it’s best not to associate with them. You certainly can’t take them as a guide in the path, which means that you have to be especially stringent with yourself in terms of those other qualities: developing appropriate attention …
- A Valuable Gift… the merit that comes from generosity, the merit that comes from virtue, the merit that comes from meditating. He was talking to a lot of people who tended to be happy to give gifts but weren’t so interested in following the precepts or practicing meditation. So he told them that if you just give gifts but don’t follow the precepts or meditate …
- How to Feed Mindfulness… And on the basis of that, you realize, for example, that generosity is a good thing, gratitude is a good thing, because people do have the choice to act skillfully or unskillfully. You have to be grateful for the times when they’ve chosen to be skillful, and grateful to yourself for the times you’ve chosen to be skillful, because thinking in this …
- A Sense of Yourself… you can look at the perfections. These are the qualities that were detected in the various stories that built up around the Buddha’s previous lifetimes. In Theravada there are ten: generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance, truth, determination, goodwill and equanimity. You can take that list and ask yourself, “Where are you lacking?” If you don’t know about what it means to …
- The Mind When Trained Brings Happiness… You’re going to be less of a burden on them and you’ll be developing good qualities that you can share with them, qualities like generosity, virtue, and the discernment that you develop from training the mind. True happiness is something that is within our capabilities. So we have to look carefully at where we’re looking for our happiness because there are …
- Look after Yourself Happily… So these are our motivations for practicing generosity, virtue and meditation: our sense that we’ll benefit from them and that we have the ability to do them. You want to maintain those all the way to the last steps of the path. Then, once you’ve reached the end of the path and you’ve found the ultimate happiness, there’s nothing you …
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