Search results for: "Generosity"

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  2. A Good-natured Attitude
     … It might be the Buddha, it might be the Dhamma, the Sangha, the good that you’ve done either in terms of your generosity, in terms of your virtue. Then when the dryness goes away or the antsiness in the mind goes away, you can bring it back to the breath. Remember that you’ve got to have a number of tools at hand … 
  3. A Sense of Duty
     … It’s part of our generosity. It’s part of developing our perfections. But what other people will do with the goodness we’ve left behind is totally beyond our control. Think of the Buddha toward the end of his life. One of the last things he said to the monks was that if they decided that any of the minor rules in the … 
  4. The Origination of Suffering
     … The practice also involves generosity and it involves virtue. But the fact that you’re doing something here that nobody else can do for you, and that you can’t do for anyone else—that should give you a good sense of priorities. This is work that has to be done within. After all, the true causes of suffering are within, the work is … 
  5. Ego
     … These pleasures come not only from concentration but also from understanding, from virtue, from generosity, the pleasure that comes from doing something noble with your life. You want to nurture this sense of pleasure and a sensitivity to this kind of pleasure, because when we talk about happiness it’s not just about people running around smiling all the time and being kind of … 
  6. Determined to Make a Difference
     … to learn how to focus them, get them to be still, and to follow all the other elements of the path that are required to provide a good foundation for concentration: Generosity, virtue—these things are necessary. As the Buddha said, a stingy person can’t get into the stages of right concentration. As for virtue, it is possible for unvirtuous persons to get … 
  7. Squeezing Goodness Out of the Aggregates
     … where your strengths are, where your weaknesses are in terms of learning, virtue, generosity, conviction, discernment, and particularly your ingenuity. So you try to develop these things. Try to get a sense of what you’ve got here in terms of these aggregates, and what you can do with them. Like the aggregate of form: What can you do with the different elements or … 
  8. Three Levels of Refuge
     … When you find a good friend like that, the whole point is to emulate that person’s wisdom, generosity, virtue, conviction—what human beings can do. That’s one level of refuge, the external level. Then the next level is that you try to develop the qualities of that person or of those people within yourself. Take the example of the Buddha. His main … 
  9. Rooted in Desire
     … Gladden it with generosity; gladden it with virtue. Then you can get it glad with concentration and discernment. The path creates a sense of well-being. It doesn’t lead only to nibbāna. That’s not the only pleasure it provides. It provides pleasure all along the way: When you’re generous, there’s a sense of self-worth, that you’re not a … 
  10. Practicing Your Scales
     … This is one of the reasons why the Buddha also prefaced meditation practice with practicing generosity and observing the precepts. As you follow the Buddha’s teachings in ways that are simpler and easier to follow and see the results that come, it gives you confidence in the teaching: that even though some of the instructions may seem counterintuitive, they work. When you come … 
  11. Trust in the Power of the Mind
     … Practice generosity. Practice virtue. Develop the qualities of goodwill in the mind. He teaches the precepts for the areas of virtue that can be taught. But then there are a lot of areas are not covered by the precepts, not covered by those three answers. That’s where he’s saying: Here’s how you go about answering those questions yourself. You start by … 
  12. Sense Pleasures & Sensuality
     … He would start with a talk on generosity, a talk on virtue, a talk on heaven. Heaven, of course, would be a description of the pleasures you could experience up there based on the fact that you’d been generous and virtuous down here. But then the talk would turn: He would say that actually there’s a downside to sensuality. He called it … 
  13. Sensual Passion
     … This is why we practice the Dhamma, why we listen to the wise people who say that when you want to find long-term welfare and happiness, you look for it in your practice of generosity, your practice of virtue, your practice of meditation; and especially the meditation because, as the Buddha pointed out, if you don’t have the pleasure of concentration, then … 
  14. Faith in Karma
     … The values of the society at large tend to go off in other directions—simply that in those societies some of the values of Buddhism in terms of patience, endurance, generosity, and goodwill have seeped more into the society than this Moon we’re on here in America, we in our little Moon colony. Still, the idea that you could really be practicing seriously … 
  15. A Greater Happiness
     … Events happen and we say, “Well, this is a special event, it’s an exception.” We know the basic principles of morality, we know the principles of generosity, and yet certain incidents come up and we say, “Well, this is a time when we can put those very nice teachings aside, because this is a more difficult situation.” But it’s precisely because of … 
  16. Everything You Need
     … We use the body as we practice virtue, as we practice generosity. And for those purposes, it’s useful to think of it as yours. But then the body has its illnesses. It grows old. It’s going to die at some point. You’ve got to learn how to put it aside, put it down, and not carry it around all the time … 
  17. Skills to Make a Difference
     … When the Buddha talks about how you reflect on yourself as you meditate, he says you reflect on your conviction, you reflect on your generosity, your virtue, your discernment, your learning about the Dhamma, and your ingenuity. To be ingenious, you have to think outside the box a bit. It’s the craftsmen who think outside the box who move their craft forward. In … 
  18. As Days & Nights Fly Past
     … thinking that what the mind did wasn’t that important, thinking that actions were not important, thinking all the generosity that they had given, all the precepts they had followed, were to no purpose. If you think that, that’s bad karma, and that bad karma can counteract a lot of the good you’ve done. It doesn’t wipe it out; it just … 
  19. Inner Wealth Management
     … If your friends are admirable, they teach you about conviction, they teach you about discernment, generosity, virtue. They themselves are good examples in these areas. When you hang around people like this, you use your wealth wisely. You invest it not only in your pleasure in this lifetime, but also in your well-being in future lifetimes. Now, those are the principles that are … 
  20. Desire
     … When you live a life of generosity and virtue, you find it really does make a big difference letting go of those unskillful desires. Then you start applying the same principle to the mind. This is why we meditate. Right effort is the first factor of the path that deals with meditation. It’s a factor of desire: It’s about generating desire to … 
  21. Encouraging Perceptions
     … For example, reflection on your own generosity, reflection on your own virtue, recollection of the Sangha, remembering all those monks and nuns who went through a lot of difficulties. Some of them were on the verge of suicide and yet they were able to pull themselves together and ultimately gain awakening. That’s encouraging. They could do it, why can’t you? Any of … 
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