Search results for: "Generosity"
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- Values… You could think about your generosity or your virtue. Think about the times when you were generous and didn’t have to be. There was no compulsion, but you just simply wanted to share. It’s good to think about those times. Think about times when it was difficult to hold by your precepts, but you did. Or think about the *brahmavihāras, *or about …
- Choices… by the way you breathe, by the topics you think about, or by reflecting on the fact that you’re living a life of virtue, you’re living a life of generosity. You’re developing the qualities that the Buddha said will make you a deva: whatever theme you find is inspiring so that you’re happy to be here, because when you’re …
- Thinking Your Way to Stillness… There are also reflections on your generosity, on your virtue, on the fact that you’ve developed the qualities that make people into devas. Those are to remind you that you do have worth, that you do have potential in the meditation. These are some of the ways in which thinking is useful in the meditation. You analyze unskillful thinking and you try to …
- Admirable Friendship, Inside & Out… You ask them about their conviction, their generosity, their virtue, their discernment, and then you try to follow their example. Most difficult, of course, is the discernment. You find that it comes down to the questions they ask. Look at the Buddha teaching his son: At the very beginning, he said that if you’re going to do anything, look first at your intention …
- Acceptance & Equanimity… Like the Buddhist instructions on generosity: Give where you feel inspired or where you feel the gift would be well used. You may be inspired to want to see everybody happy, but as for your efforts to help other people to be happy, you have to focus them on places where they would be well used. And for that, you need equanimity, a more …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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