Search results for: "Wisdom"
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- 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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