Search results for: "Dhamma"

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  2. Comprehending Pain
    The wheel of Dhamma has twelve spokes. Back in the time of the Buddha, when they explained things in sets of variables, instead of making a table, they would just go down the list of all the combinations of how the variables played off against one another. Because the list went around all the possible permutations, they called it a wheel. You see a … 
  3. The Buddha’s Currency
     … Once when he came to see Ajaan Suwat in Thailand, he gave a Dhamma talk, and the message of the Dhamma talk was: Everything else in the world comes in pairs, but with the Dhamma it’s one thing clear through—the wisdom and the happiness that come from letting go. Here you’re letting go of material goods, but you’re letting go … 
  4. Asalha Puja – Completeness
     … The Buddha had gained awakening two months before, and then on this night he gave his first Dhamma talk, his first sermon: Setting the Wheel of Dhamma in Motion. As a result, he gained his first awakened student. Kondañña, the leader of the five brethren, gained his first glimpse of the deathless after hearing the Buddha’s talk. So tonight is a symbol of … 
  5. The Third and a Half Noble Truth
     … It’s like the Dhamma teacher I once heard who said that after many years of teaching she didn’t know if there really was a cessation of suffering, she didn’t really know if the third noble truth was true, but she had her own truth. She called it her third and a half noble truth, which is that suffering is manageable. I … 
  6. Death Without Drama
     … But if it happens to let somebody in, then you’ve got the soldiers inside, which stand for right effort, armed with knowledge of the Dhamma. In other words, if something unskillful does come into the mind, you remember what the Dhamma has taught about things like that, and you do your best to get rid of it. Then you’ve got concentration, which … 
  7. Doing Favors & Making Merit
    I knew an elderly Thai couple who came to the Dhamma late in life and became so dedicated to the practice that Ajaan Suwat had the husband become the lay chairman of the monastery up in suburban LA. They were new to the whole idea of monastery life, monastery etiquette. One Sunday, as people were leaving after having come to make merit, the wife … 
  8. Free Like a Wild Deer
     … But then as monks they were going totally unarmed, and their protection was taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha: in other words, trying to develop the qualities of the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, in their hearts, in their activities. And they learned over time that that really was a much more solid protection: the protection of being inoffensive … 
  9. Pride, Good & Bad
     … Ajaan Fuang would sometimes speak with scorn of the people who want to make the Dhamma more modern, more up to date. As he said, the Dhamma and the Vinaya are timeless, and we have to have pride in our timeless tradition in order to maintain it. Now, you do have to be careful about that pride. You notice in the sutta on the … 
  10. The Arrow in the Heart
     … We talk about taking the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha as our refuge. We do that in the sense of taking the life of the Buddha, the life of the members of the noble Sangha, as our example. We take the Dhamma as our guidance, so we can give rise to the qualities in the Buddha’s heart, in the hearts of the … 
  11. A Complete Training
     … He says, all dhammas are not-self. Even the dhamma of seeing this, the dhamma that would be the discernment of seeing the drawbacks of these things: That, too, is something you have to let go. Ajaan Maha Boowa’s image is of climbing a stairway up to a house. You climb the stairway that’s composed of developing skillful senses of a self … 
  12. Admirable Friendship
     … I was there to learn the Dhamma, and he had an awful lot to teach in that area. If Ajaan Fuang had been a political leader, he probably would have been a dictator. He thought dictatorship was the best kind of government for Thailand. But that was beside the point as far as I was concerned. The point was: What were the good Dhamma … 
  13. Dhamma Books & the Actuality
     … It’s the same with the Dhamma you’ve studied and the Dhamma you’ve thought about. Like the contour lines on a map, they can give you some general ideas. But what you’ll actually see as you develop good qualities in the mind: That’s going to be something the map can’t depict at all. So the only way to gain … 
  14. Taking the Buddha at his Word
     … But it’s also dangerous, and in the midst of the dangers you realize you’ve got to depend on the Dhamma to get you through your particular fears, your particular anxieties, the dangers, the boredom, the restlessness. You have no alternative things to fall back on, so you find yourself committing yourself more and more to the Dhamma as your refuge. There’s … 
  15. To Understand the Path
     … Sariputta once said that the four noble truths cover all the Dhamma, encompass all the Dhamma in the same way that the footprint of an elephant can encompass the footprints of all the other animals on land. So when you’re practicing, it’s good to think in terms of the four noble truths, not only what they are but also the duties appropriate … 
  16. Conviction & Truth
     … To learn the truth about the Dhamma, to learn the truth about ourselves, we have to be as true as we can, as circumspect and all-around in our practice as we can. We have to prove ourselves, and only then can we be in a position where we can prove the Dhamma. So, take that as inspiration. The Dhamma asks a lot, but … 
  17. Anti-slacker Dhamma
     … You can understand this kind of teaching as a corruption of the Dhamma that happens when people try to sell the Dhamma. Salespeople like to sell things that are popular, and there are plenty of slackers out there that would like to hear that the Buddha was on their side. But the problem is that this line of thinking didn’t start just with … 
  18. Refuge
    In the Pali phrases for taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha, the word sarana, which we translate as refuge, can also mean something you remember, something you hold in mind, something you keep in mind. This is part of the way in which it becomes your refuge. You try to keep the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha in mind … 
  19. The Power of Intention
    A couple of months ago I was giving a Dhamma talk on kamma up in the Bay Area. After the talk, a woman came up and said, “You know, this made me think, ‘Maybe my life isn’t determined by my DNA after all.’” I was surprised. She’d been going to Dhamma talks for a fair while and yet was still able to … 
  20. A Well-Thatched Roof
     … The Pali term for those things outside is loka-dhamma, the dhammas of the world. Most people’s minds are not simply penetrated by these things; they’re totally flooded, totally overwhelmed. Gain, loss, status, loss of status, praise, criticism, pleasure, and pain: These things are constantly raining down on us, and most people are out in the open totally exposed, with no protection … 
  21. Only Your Best
     … There’s a Dhamma talk by Ajaan Fuang—one of his few Dhamma talks that was recorded—where he makes just this point. We don’t know how much time we have, but we do know that we have this time. What was especially poignant about the talk was that soon after he gave that Dhamma talk, he got very sick, and only a … 
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