Search results for: "Wisdom"
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- An Environment for Practice… When things come up in the practice, what are the things to focus on, what are the things not to focus on, what are the real important issues in life? The Buddha once made the point that a large part of wisdom lies in knowing which questions to answer straight out, which questions need to be reformulated, which ones have to be dropped, which …
- Dealing with Pain… This requires a certain amount of wisdom—the realization that, okay, the pain is going to be there in the leg, but you don’t have to be there, too. You don’t have to put yourself in the line of fire. Work on the parts that you can make comfortable. This is a preliminary lesson in not-self. We usually think of the …
- A Sense of Yourself… You read the Dhamma and think about it so that you have a fund of wisdom to direct you. You often hear the forest ajaans saying to put your studies aside and just focus on what you’re doing. Well, what you’re doing is going to be guided by what you learned in the past. Sometimes, when an issue comes up in the …
- Advice for a New Monk… This doesn’t mean that you don’t deal with the problems that come up in life, simply that you learn how to deal with them in a way that’s motivated by mindfulness, alertness, wisdom, compassion, and discernment, rather than simply using them as chess pieces in the game of trying to get whatever pleasure you can get out of life, whether the …
- Nuts & Bolts… Basic, basic wisdom. The Buddha showed how you can follow those basic questions and take them all the way to awakening, where there’s no suffering, no limitation of any kind. So we hold on to the path to take us there. We deal with the nuts and bolts of how our minds lie to themselves—because that’s the message of the four …
- Furnishing Your Home for the Mind… So equanimity’s what brings wisdom into your goodwill. If you find that you’re having trouble staying with the breath, you can use goodwill as a way of reminding yourself that this is why you’re here: for your true happiness. It’s because you really do wish yourself well. This means that the meditation is not a burden that’s being placed …
- Days Fly Past… Someone once said that wisdom starts with the reflection on death, realizing that you don’t have all the time in the world. You can’t just do anything you want to. You’ve got to figure out what you are going to do with the small amount of time remaining to you. What is the best use of your life? And again, that …
- Kamma & Rebirth—A Handful of Leaves… good but you may not like; and you talk yourself out of doing the things that you may dislike but you know will be good for you in the long run. Wisdom for the Buddha is not abstract, it’s more strategic. Then, as he says, you’re developed in body and mind. “Developed in body” doesn’t mean that you go out and …
- Inner Strength, Inner Wealth… And finally there’s wisdom, discernment. It’s both a strength and a form of wealth. The Buddha talks about discernment in pragmatic terms. For example, you know there’s something that you like to do but is going to cause suffering down the line: You have the discernment to know how to talk yourself out of doing it. Or if there’s something …
- Ask the Right Questions… Work on developing wisdom in your own attitude. Just because someone else’s been unskillful is not an excuse for you to be unskillful, too—and it’s also not an excuse for you to get your mind all worked up. You’ve got to look after the quality of your mind, because the quality of your mind is what determines what you’re …
- More than Just Letting Go… As the Buddha said, it takes wisdom to see what is your business and what’s not your business. And how do you learn that? Through trial-and-error. But at the very least you remember that generosity is a part of the practice. If you don’t have a lot of material goods to give, you can give of your time, you can …
- Values… And your willingness to see what your true best interests are—that’s a lot of the wisdom of the practice. A while back I was reading a history of the 19th century that discussed one of the favorite types of literature back in those days: biographies of great people. People really enjoyed reading lives of great people. The typical story was that someone …
- Complexities of the Mind… This is probably why the Buddha said that Sāriputta trained people to be stream-enterers and that Moggallāna would train them to be arahants—which is interesting, because Sāriputta was the one who was known, primarily, for his wisdom. So the question is, why would he get people only to stream-entry, and then leave it to Moggallāna to get them to be arahants …
- Training the Committee… I think it was Plato who said that all wisdom begins with the thought of death. A lot of in Buddhist practice begins with the thought of death as well. After all, in the story of Prince Siddhartha, the Prince who later became the Buddha, it was reflecting on the facts of aging, illness, and death that convinced him he had to find a …
- The Power to Transcend Suffering… Make use of them.” When I first went over to Thailand, I was stuck on the word pañña—the Thai term, which is taken straight from the Pali term, and which the books define as wisdom. I’d come up against a problem in my meditation, and Ajaan Fuang would say, “Well, use your pañña.” And I’d say, “What pañña? I don’t …
- Guardian Meditations… So these four contemplations are guardian meditations to bring wisdom into your perception of things, the labels and ideas you bring to your experience. The more you develop them, then the better the set of associations, the better the set of narratives you bring to, say, just the fact you’re breathing, or the fact you’re seeing, hearing, tasting, or touching things in …
- Ups & Downs… Sometimes we get a sense that the Buddha’s wisdom is a bunch of lists and vocabulary lessons. We’ve got this list of faculties, that list of hindrances, and somehow you think if you learn all the lists, that’s it. But that’s not why the Buddha taught the lists. He wants you to use those lists to analyze what’s going …
- Anger… A lot of wisdom lies just in being able to step back and remember that fact. Look at the situation in terms of a larger framework, so that your thoughts aren’t focused with such narrow intensity on the person or the activity you don’t like. When they’re narrowly focused like that, the huge blind spots around them make us lose our …
- The Sublime Attitudes… The reflections on karma are also used as a basis for developing wisdom and insight. They form the background for all the teachings on discernment. The central insight of the Buddha’s Awakening was that pain and pleasure come from your actions. There are actions that bring pain, actions that bring pleasure, actions that bring both, and then special actions, that put an end …
- Skillful Effort… This is one of the reasons why there’s no clear distinction between concentration and discernment, or concentration and wisdom in the teachings of the forest masters. The skills you develop in the course of concentration practice are precisely the skills you’re going to need to turn around and look at pain, the tools you’re learning to master these processes of fabrication …
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