Search results for: "Dhamma"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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.
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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