Search results for: "Dhamma"

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  2. A Matter of Life & Death
     … When people talk, they talk about things that are necessary, things related to the Dhamma, so they don’t disturb one another’s concentration. It’s a place far away from the hustle and bustle of the world, where you have the time and space to watch your mind. But a place conducive to meditation doesn’t always mean it’s comfortable. Sometimes it … 
  3. The Limits of Old Kamma
     … The Dhamma is not for people who want to be told they just have to accept the way things are, and that’ll be totally fine. The Dhamma doesn’t stop right there, because the present moment is not always a wonderful moment. It can be pretty miserable. Ask the victims of torture, of natural disasters. But even in extremely miserable situations, the same … 
  4. Goodwill Is Respect
     … As the Buddha said, you nourish the Dhamma by committing yourself to it and then reflecting on it. In other words, you do what’s required. The Buddha says you observe the precepts, so you observe the precepts and you try really sincerely to do it well. Try to get the mind concentrated. You don’t just brush it off, saying, “Gee, thinking about … 
  5. Commit & Reflect
     … He says that the Dhamma is to be gained through two things: commitment and reflection. You commit yourself to the practice and then you watch. In other words, you don’t simply watch whatever is going to come up in the mind. You watch the mind as it’s actually trying to give rise to skillful qualities and abandon unskillful ones. Of course, the … 
  6. Nobody’s Servant
     … When we take refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, as a first step we’re taking refuge in the example they set. That’s one of the reasons why we chant those chants about the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha every night, to remind ourselves of that example. For instance, the example of the Buddha: someone who through his own … 
  7. Learning from Sensual Desire
     … After all, the Buddha said, “All things—all dhammas—are rooted in desire.” All dhammas: That would exclude nibbana—taking it as the end of dhammas—but everything else, skillful and unskillful, comes from desire. We have this mass of desires and thoughts and intentions that we’ve got to train, so we use the whole citta—the whole mind, the whole heart—to … 
  8. Staying True
     … Truth is not a quality of a statement so much as is a quality of the heart and mind, and this is particularly true with the truth of the Dhamma. We talk about the Dhamma as being words, the things the Buddha taught, but the real truth of the Dhamma comes when you’re being true.
  9. Generating Desire
     … The word here is dhammas, and that can mean both good and bad phenomena. Everything you experience, he said, is rooted in desire someplace. After all, when you see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and think about things, you’re not simply a passive recipient. You’re out there looking for things to sense, looking for pleasures, looking for some satisfaction. That active side is … 
  10. Things Aren’t as They Should Be
     … This is why there’s that strange passage at the end of the sutta where the King Ajātasattu comes to see the Buddha, and the Buddha gives him one of the longest and most detailed Dhamma talks in the whole Canon. At the end, all the king can think about is that he wished he hadn’t killed his father. He leaves, and the … 
  11. The Pain of Conviction
     … You can be exposed to any amount of Dhamma, and yet if there’s no sense that there’s anything wrong in your current state of becoming—the current you in your current sense of the world—you’re not going to hear the Dhamma at all. Or what you hear is something else. I’ve had it happen again and again, people coming … 
  12. Potentials for Energy
     … In each case, he’ll talk about a potential within the body or in the mind—dhammas, he calls them—that can act as a foundation for that particular factor for awakening. In some cases, he’s explicit about what those dhammas might be, but in others he’s very vague. For instance, with rapture: He says there’s a potential for rapture, but … 
  13. All-around Eye
     … When the Buddha gave instructions to Mahāpajāpati Gotami, he talked about eight ways in which you can test the Dhamma – what’s Dhamma and what’s not Dhamma, what’s Vinaya and what’s not Vinaya – and it’s an all-around way of looking at things. It’s a good way of protecting yourself on all sides. There are basically three categories. One … 
  14. The Thinking Cure
     … This is why we have Dhamma talks. If thinking weren’t involved in the practice, if your views weren’t important in the practice, Dhamma talks wouldn’t serve any function. You’d have to teach by example by not saying anything at all. But meditation doesn’t work that way. You have to learn how to think in the right way as you … 
  15. A Meditator’s Environment
     … So moderate your intake, moderate your conversation, and you’ll have more time for your inner conversation—at the same time that you’re making your inner conversation really directed toward your genuine concerns, directed toward the Dhamma. The final quality is trying to develop right view. This is where it’s important to listen to Dhamma talks, to read, to straighten out your … 
  16. There’s Work to Be Done
     … And then what are you going to depend on? But as the Buddha said, the Dhamma does have an essence, a sara. Release is the essence. There is something that is unchanging that we can find, as we dig down into the mind. But it’s going to require digging through a lot of changing things and building the path. This is the work … 
  17. The Goldsmith
     … Remember what the Buddha said about nourishing the Dhamma. You start out with commitment, but then you also have to reflect. If you just work, work, work at the Dhamma without looking at the results, you wear yourself out. You have no sense of what’s just right. When the Buddha calls the path a middle way, it’s not only middle, but it … 
  18. Wise About Mistakes
     … Of course, with the possibility of going to that good destination, you can continue to practice the Dhamma. One of the results of practicing the Dhamma to a high level is that the results of your past bad actions get weakened and weakened, and have less of an impact on the heart and mind. Think of the case of Angulimala. He had killed a … 
  19. Learning How to Talk to Yourself
     … There are the suttas, which are dialogues in which the Buddha’s answering questions, giving Dhamma talks, engaging with other people. He gives basic Dhamma concepts, defines them and illustrates them with analogies, images. He also gives instructions on how you should talk to yourself and what images you should hold in mind. In other words, he’s showing you how you can engage … 
  20. Strong Through Admirable Friendship
     … They get so that they don’t want to hear the Dhamma at all, because the various things they have to do to get and maintain power go against the Dhamma. So, the more they pursue power, the further and further they get away, and the more they make themselves blind and deaf to the Dhamma. There are lots of people like that out … 
  21. The Mirror Inside
    There’s a passage where the Buddha says, “Let an observant person come who is honest and no deceiver, and I’ll teach that person the Dhamma.” It’s interesting that those are the qualities he looked for in a student. They have to do with your ability to observe yourself. You observe your actions, and you report them truly as to whether they … 
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