Search results for: "Dhamma"

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  2. Skills to Make a Difference
     … The world without the Dhamma and the world with the Dhamma are two very different worlds**. We’re lucky we have the Dhamma available, so that we can make a good difference, too.**
  3. Shame Yes, Guilt No
     … So as you keep listening to that voice of remorse, and it sounds like the voice of the Dhamma, remind yourself there are things that sound like the Dhamma but are not Dhamma at all. This is one of them. When you make a mistake, the Buddha said to recognize it as a mistake and to make up your mind that you’re not … 
  4. Persistence
     … He’ll talk to you about benefits in terms of the Dhamma.” So they went. Sona listened to the Dhamma and was inspired. So he asked permission of his parents to ordain. They gave it. One night, he was doing walking meditation, but because his feet were so tender, they started to bleed, yet he wasn’t getting his mind into concentration. So he … 
  5. Noble & True
     … It was at a Sunday evening with a Dhamma group up in Irvine. In the course of the Dhamma discussion, I mentioned the word dignity. She came up afterwards and said that all these years she’d been in America… She had learned the word “dignity” in her English classes in Russia, but she never heard an American person use it. That’s a … 
  6. To Keep You Going
     … learning how to adapt your ways of thinking and acting and speaking so that they fit in with the standards of the Buddha, instead of insisting that you want to change the Dhamma to suit your own ways. Now, there are ways that the Dhamma can be expanded. The great ajaans, for instance, don’t just quote texts at you. They have their own … 
  7. Lessons for New Monks
     … that if you really want to know the Dhamma, you have to be a virtuous person. I mean, there are people who can know about the Dhamma without being virtuous—we see this all around us—but to really gain the concentration and discernment that allow you to see how the Dhamma applies in your life, in your mind, in your behavior requires that … 
  8. An Auspicious Birth
     … We talk of the first kind of birth being auspicious when you’re born into a family that’s got material comforts and you have an opportunity to meet with the Dhamma. But it’s really made auspicious by this other kind of birth, the momentary attachment, because not all attachment is bad. There are good attachments to the aggregates, as when you latch … 
  9. The Seven Treasures
     … listening, reading, learning what you can from the wisdom of the past, so that you don’t have to keep reinventing the Dhamma wheel all the time. As the Buddha once said, listening to the Dhamma gives all kinds of benefits. Things you didn’t understand before, you begin to understand. Things you never heard of before, you hear. Things you may have heard … 
  10. Look after Your Mind with Ease
     … First there’s the Dhamma as a governing principle. You reflect on what a good Dhamma this is, how it’s hard to find an honest Dhamma like this, and why it’d be a shame to wander away from it. In this case, you use a sense of inspiration to keep you going. This governing principle is based on a sense of appreciation … 
  11. A Sense of Yourself
     … So learn the Dhamma. Try to remember it. And if you find yourself weak in this area, it’s an area where you’ve got plenty to explore. The fourth quality is generosity. How hard do you find it to part with your things? How hard do you find it to give of your time or your energy to other people when they ask … 
  12. A Flammable Mind
     … A traditional simile for the Dhamma is that it’s water to put out fires of the mind. And what are the fires of the mind? Passion, aversion, delusion. They’re like the fire element in dry grass just ready to light up as soon as there’s the slightest bit of spark to get it going. This is what we have to watch … 
  13. A Good Purpose in Life
     … Even when we come to the Dhamma, we think of it as something to consume. We want certain experiences. But the consumer life is a pretty meaningless one. As Ajaan Suwat often liked to point out, those pleasures you consumed last week: Where are they now? They’re gone. You keep looking for new ones and new ones and new ones. There’s never … 
  14. Dispassion Isn’t Oatmeal
     … In fact, he says the highest dhamma, whether fabricated or unfabricated, is dispassion. Ajaan Lee talks about how the moment of dispassion — when fabricated and unfabricated dhammas fall away from each other — is the highest possible experience. Yet it just doesn’t sound attractive to a lot of us. We think that life without passion would be oatmeal without any flavoring. But that’s … 
  15. The Hedgefox
     … When we first study the Dhamma, it’s like learning to be a fox: There are four noble truths, five aggregates, five hindrances, five strengths, seven factors for awakening, eight factors in the noble path, fifteen defilements, a hundred and eight different kinds of craving. Seems like an awful lot to know. If you just stay with the words and the concepts, it’s … 
  16. Faith as a Virtue
     … At the moment, it’s not yet knowledge, because to have real knowledge about the Buddha and the Dhamma, as he said, requires that you gain full awakening. But in the meantime, we can decide that this is a good path to follow and that he’s a good person to trust. Having faith in the path requires that we take on some pre … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. A Strong Post
    When there’s a Dhamma talk while you’re meditating, give most of your attention to the meditation. Let the Dhamma talk be in the background. It’s like a fence. If you leave the breath, you run into the Dhamma talk, and that reminds you to go back to the breath. If anything in the talk is relevant to your meditation, it’ll … 
  21. 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 … 
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