Search results for: "Form"

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  2. The Buddha’s Shoulds
     … In some cases, it was in the form of the rules, like the rules in the Vinaya. In other cases, there were more general principles about how certain actions lead to happiness, and other actions lead to long-term suffering. Based on that, you can decide; he gives you principles for deciding. And he attacked any teaching that would not provide you with those … 
  3. Values
     … to find a true happiness, to develop all the good qualities of mind that at the moment you have only in a rudimentary form, or potential form, to try to actualize them. In other words, it’s not a matter of pretending to be something that you aren’t, but simply realizing that you do have a potential to make something more of yourself … 
  4. Family Ties
     … Now in some forms of Buddhism, they take that as a reflection for developing goodwill and compassion for everybody. But in the original teaching, the Buddha used it for another purpose entirely. He said thinking about that should give rise to a desire to gain release. In other words, enough of all this! I’ve been working on a translation of the Udana, which … 
  5. One Person
     … You see satellite pictures of hurricanes forming off the coast of Africa and then moving up across the Atlantic, sometimes hitting land, sometimes staying over the ocean. Those winds off the coast of Africa: Are they the same molecules as the winds, say, off the coast of Florida? Well, no. But there’s a pattern that moves and changes and can do a lot … 
  6. Gratitude to Things
     … There’s suffering involved in all of our material possessions in one form or another. So this spurs you even further: Can you get the mind to a point where it doesn’t have to come back and use material things again, again and again? The simple fact of our being born means that we come in with a huge gaping hole: the need … 
  7. A Gift of Well-Being
     … It helps you realize that there are forms of happiness in this world that are not zero-sum games—i.e., you gain, somebody else loses, or they gain and you lose. This is something where both sides gain. It’s the same with virtue. When you abstain from unskillful behavior, it’s a gift. You can make the promise to yourself and keep … 
  8. Character
     … The perfection of renunciation, when you learn to give up certain pleasures for more solid pleasures, more solid forms of well-being: This is going to be really helpful in the duty of abandoning the cause for suffering. We crave the things we like, so to abandon our craving, we need to have experience in saying No to some of our favorite pleasures outside … 
  9. Observe Yourself in Action
     … How does a becoming form? Even before there’s a sense of I or me doing this in a particular world, there will be events in the mind. When we talk about them, they seem abstract because we’re so used to talking in terms of becoming, but they’re really pretty simple and immediate. There are events in the mind, and you can … 
  10. As Days & Nights Fly Past
     … Some forms of exercise that used to strengthen the body actually become bad for it. So you have to be very careful, while at the same time realizing that your true wealth lies in the mind. Are you stashing wealth into the mind? Or are you squandering your mental wealth and replacing it with sand and broken feathers? Are you trading candy for gold … 
  11. Karma for Freedom
     … They can form a path to the end of suffering. So, this is karma for freedom. Try to have that image in mind every time you hear the word “karma,” because in the Buddha’s teaching, that’s what it is.
  12. Little Things
     … But then as the creeper grows bigger and bigger, it finally forms a canopy over the whole tree, pulls down the major limbs, and destroys the tree. That’s when the deva realized why her friends were so concerned. This is one of the reasons why you have to be careful about little things, because sometimes they’re seeds that can grow. At the … 
  13. The Power of Your Actions
     … There’s the form of the body, and that’s an activity in the sense that you have to consciously keep reminding yourself that there is a body here—because as the breath gets really comfortable, it begins to blur out. The sense of where the body begins, where it ends, where the surface is—that begins to disappear. But for the time being … 
  14. Ugly Body, Happy Mind
     … The gladness of liberation is the best form of gladness there is.
  15. Training the Committee
     … He had qualities that all of us have in potential form in our mind. He had them in a potential form to begin with, but he was able to develop them through three qualities he mentioned: ardency, resolution, and heedfulness. The heedfulness is the knowledge that what we do really does make a difference in our lives, so we have to be careful in … 
  16. Making an Effort
     … It’s simply that some forms of effort are things we’re more used to, more habitual, so they seem easier. When you train the mind to be still for a while, though, and then look at the effort that goes into ordinary, everyday pleasures, you see there’s an awful lot of effort, and the rewards are pretty slim. The kind of happiness … 
  17. Concentration & Renunciation
     … the discernment to see what kind of perceptions you’re applying to the pain, in your relationship to the pain, that are aggravating it, that are actually forming a bridge from the physical pain into the mind, where they turn it into a mental pain and make it more than it has to be. So the meditation is here to help you not be … 
  18. Respect for the Training
    There’s a chant we often recite about the forms of respect that bring you into the presence of nibbana. One of them is respect for the training. The training is very basic—virtue, concentration, discernment—and in some cases it’s so basic we tend to overlook it. We want to go to the higher Dhamma, things that are more abstract that seem … 
  19. The Walls of Ignorance
     … We tend to think of ignorance, or avijja, in very abstract terms — not knowing the four noble truths, not knowing dependent co-arising, not knowing the Deathless — but you can’t chip away at those forms of ignorance until you’ve chipped away at the more blatant, immediate ones: the mind’s habit of disassociating, of leaving gaps in its inner conversation. Say you … 
  20. The Noble Search Makes Us Human
     … And that search comes in two forms. One is what he calls the ignoble search: You look for happiness, you look for an escape from pain and suffering, in things that will age, grow ill, and die, or that will be affected by your own aging, illness and death. And then there’s the noble search, in which you search for something that is … 
  21. Taking an Active Role
     … It’s not that you’re presented with the present moment fully formed and then you react to it. Instead, it’s as if you’ve got lots of potential present moments, and you choose among them. So even though there may be the potential for pain in a particular part of the body, you don’t have to exacerbate the pain. You don … 
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