Search results for: "Generosity"

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  2. Secluded from Sensuality
     … He starts with generosity, with virtue, and the rewards that come from developing these qualities in your mind. You get to the sensual levels of heaven but then you fall. You get carried away with your instantaneous sensual pleasures, and the integrity of the mind, the character of the mind, begins to erode. You get used to having whatever sensual pleasure you want, and … 
  3. The Gift of Meditation
     … All of the goodness we do in the practice—in terms of generosity, virtue, concentration, discernment—is the kind of goodness, the kind of happiness that spreads around, that doesn’t have clear boundaries—which is what makes it special. As the Buddha said, when you look after yourself, you’re looking after others; when you look after others, you’re looking after yourself … 
  4. Good Traditions
     … doesn’t give any really lasting benefit, and actually can cause harm if you get addicted to it. So you want to look inside to develop good qualities of the mind. Generosity is one of them. The purpose of being generous is to develop a sense of kindness, a sense of wanting to help other people, realizing that you have more than enough and … 
  5. Understanding Contentment
     … You develop the virtue of generosity. In other cases, you figure out how to fix them so that they actually are more useful in more situations. You use your ingenuity to make the most of what you’ve got. That’s an important element of contentment. People who are not content with what they’ve got but want more just sit around dreaming, or … 
  6. Nibbana Is Better than You Think
     … This is why, when the Buddha was introducing the four noble truths to lay people, he would start out with the goodness of generosity, the goodness of virtue, saying that these things do have meaning. But then they get rewarded. Many people who are generous, many people who are virtuous, go to the heavenly realms. There they get complacent and then they fall. So … 
  7. Take the Buddha Seriously
     … Or you could say it starts with the act of generosity. Part of you wants to hold on to something, and another part realizes that there’s a greater happiness that comes from giving it away. The first voice may say, “Well, I’m going to be poor, I’m going to be lacking.” And the other voice says, “What? Lacking in what?” Maybe … 
  8. Look after the Source
     … That’s your perfection of generosity. You try to be harmless: That’s your perfection of virtue. And that’s where you should focus your attention: on the good qualities you’re developing, both because they’ll lead to your true happiness, and also because a mind that’s imbued with these good qualities is going to come up with words and actions that … 
  9. Beyond Imagination
     … When you’re practicing generosity, you can use your imagination in how you’d like to be generous: the things you’d like to give or do as a gift. There’s a wide range there. As you practice virtue, you find yourself challenged in different ways—specifically around the precept on lying, which is probably the most important of the precepts—because there … 
  10. Nobody’s Servant
     … Conviction, conviction in the principle of karma, that your actions really do make a difference; generosity; learning the Dhamma, and discernment. All these things are goodness inside, and we develop them through the meditation and also through learning the Dhamma, stocking ourselves inside with good things, so when things outside are lacking, we’re not poor. We’re wealthy with internal wealth. That makes … 
  11. Happy About Kamma
     … When you understand kamma from his point of view, gratitude makes sense, generosity makes sense. So, if you learn how to think about kamma in the right way, you find that it is a good working hypothesis. Remember how the Buddha explained causality: Some causes give their effects immediately; other causes give them over time. Which means that what you’re experiencing right now … 
  12. Believe in Your Actions
     … Mundane right view grows into transcendent right view through the Buddha’s description of generosity and virtue and the rewards, followed by his description of how those actions—which we’ve all experienced, we’ve all engaged in—lead to rewards that are good but have their drawbacks. The purpose of that teaching is to inspire you to be ready to listen to the … 
  13. Looking Inward
     … when you look inside—that’s when there’s Dhamma. So this is where our practice focuses. Notice where the path lies: It lies in our thoughts, our words, our deeds. Generosity may be an act of giving things to other people, but it’s primarily a development of a quality of the mind. The same with the precepts: They govern our interactions with … 
  14. Appreciating Your Practice
     … the practice is to see that you’re making yourself happier in a totally innocent way. Innocent happiness is really rare in the world. It comes down basically to three things: generosity, virtue, and meditation. When you find an innocent happiness that’s good for you, it’s good for other people, too. By finding a reliable happiness, it’s also good for other … 
  15. Guarding the Truth
     … We practice generosity to know our intentions. Then, when we sit down to meditate, we’ve got the right focus, on intention. We intend to focus on the breath—ardent, alert, mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That’s the formula. We’re trying to get the mind into a state of concentration. As it settles in, you begin … 
  16. Basic Wisdom
     … This is how our practice of generosity, virtue, and meditation leads to wisdom and discernment. And it’s how the wisdom and discernment lead to the end of suffering. They’re embodied in the four noble truths. Craving leads to suffering. That’s an issue of action and result. The path leads to the end of suffering. That’s another action and result. And … 
  17. Making a Refuge
     … With the relationships, you look for admirable friends, people who are a good example in terms of their conviction, their generosity, their virtue, and their discernment. These are people you want to associate with because if they’re generous, they’ll be happy to share their knowledge with you. You can see the Dhamma not only in their words, but also in their actions … 
  18. A Sense of Time & Place
     … There’s also recollection of our generosity and our virtue to reinforce our sense of self-worth. These are places for the mind to forage, to go when it needs a particular antidote to a particular problem. But you can’t wait until the problem comes up to start practicing these things. You’ve got to practice them ahead of time. It’s like … 
  19. A Good Independent Self
     … When you realize that your true well-being lies in acting in skillful ways, acting on skillful intentions, then even if you have the idea of an independent self, you’ll want to act on impulses for generosity, virtue, the desire to train the mind so that you can be truly happy. At the same time, you avoid a lot of the problems of … 
  20. The River of Karma
     … What kind of pleasure is bad for the mind? Okay, learn how to develop the pleasure that’s good, i.e., the pleasure that comes from concentration, the pleasure that comes from generosity and virtue. You develop these forms of pleasure so that they can put the mind in a place where it can observe things clearly. So there are the two things: You … 
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