Search results for: "Greed"
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- No Dharma Without Karma… You’re not totally driven by your defilements, by greed, anger, or delusion. You have some moments of clarity and large-heartedness, you can act on them, and it makes a difference. So generosity teaches you two important lessons about the Dharma. One is that you can’t learn about the Dharma without giving. As the Buddha once said, there’s no way you …
- A Good Path to Be On… You overcame your own greed, your own stinginess, your own narrow-mindedness. You gave a gift. It’s refreshing. It opens up the mind. It’s like opening windows in a narrow, stagnant house to let some fresh air in. The way the Buddha taught karma is that we have choices in the present moment. There are influences coming in from our past actions …
- Determined to be Happy… But especially meditation—getting the mind under control so that your greed, aversion, and delusion don’t take over: That’s a gift, not only to yourself, but to the people around you. So when you think about the goals you want to aim at, it’s good to think about looking for a harmless goal, a happiness that’s harmless. As for the …
- Initiative… As long as your efforts are in line with right effort, right livelihood, and all the other right factors of the path, then really devoting yourself to that is not greed. It’s initiative, energy. That’s the first principle for happiness. The second principle is that whatever you’ve gained, you look after it. You maintain your wealth well. Whatever you have, you …
- The Buddha Teaches a Yakkha… You ask yourself, “What would be the long-term consequences of following this particular idea?” This is especially important with defilements like greed, aversion, and delusion. You have to stop and ask yourself, “If I act on these emotions, what will the results be?” And you have to learn how to hold yourself in check when you see that the results would be bad …
- You Should Heed These Shoulds… What does comprehension mean? It means that you understand suffering to the point of having no more greed, aversion, and delusion around it. Craving, the second noble truth, is to be abandoned. How do you abandon it? First, you have to figure out where your craving is focused. Suppose you think you have a craving for a person. But is it really focused on …
- Help Others, Help Yourself… Your greed, aversion, and delusion don’t go prowling around the neighborhood, disturbing the neighbors. Other people benefit, too, from your practice. But in that sutta, the Buddha isn’t talking just about how helping yourself helps others. He also talks about how helping others helps you. Unfortunately, there’s no image to illustrate the principle, which is why that part of the sutta …
- A Promise to Yourself… Make up your mind that you’re going to stay here and watch over it. “Putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world”: Anything that comes in to pull you away from the breath right now, you’ve got to say No, No, No. Sometimes you have to give yourself reasons. As you can imagine, discernment is also a promise you make …
- A World Apart… The other is putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world—in other words, all your emotions about the world outside, or any other worlds that are not related to the breath in and of itself. It may seem like you’re turning your back on that world, but you’re actually being very responsible, because the shape of your mind is …
- Intelligent Restraint… terms of their causation, and their causation is almost always in the heart. In your mind. This is why he uses the word *effluent. *Things come flowing out of the mind. Greed goes flowing out of the mind and it finds something to land on outside. Sometimes it goes flowing out and you’re not really quite sure what you want to be greedy …
- Issues of Control… You’re ardent, you’re alert, and you’re mindful, and you put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. So you stay focused on the breath. Any other thoughts that would get in the way of the breath, you put them aside. And for the time being, thoughts of jhāna might count as thoughts related to the world because all too …
- Death Is Normal… It takes us off into greed, into aversion, into delusion—all kinds of places where we really don’t want to go. So we need the ability to step out. You jump out when you realize it’s not a good car to be in and the driver’s not trustworthy. This is how you jump out safely: You just jump back to the …
- Today Is Better than Yesterday… In the same way, your mindfulness and concentration working together enable your discernment to pierce through all the flimsy arguments that greed, aversion, and delusion will churn out. It’s in this way that, regardless of how good yesterday’s meditation was, today’s meditation is going to be better. Not only because it’s today’s meditation, the one that you can actually …
- Adjust the Flame… That’s one of the reasons why, when the Buddha gives instructions on mindfulness practice, he says to put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. Because wherever there’s a world, there’s a state of becoming. At first, you’re putting aside concern for worlds outside, and you actually want to stay in this world, the world of your body …
- Evident Inequality… The Buddha explained that he was victorious over his greed, victorious over his stinginess. When the king saw that the man didn’t even have an over-robe to wear anymore, he gave him a large amount of wealth to the man. The man gave it all to the Buddha. The king doubled the amount of wealth, and the man gave that to the …
- The Pleasure of Concentration… The Buddha speaks of the pleasure of concentration as a way of pulling yourself away from your sensual desires, your lust, your greed: the things that create trouble in the world. Wherever you go looking for something, somebody else has already laid claimed to it, which means you have to fight other people to gain those pleasures. And when that pleasure comes, it just …
- Good Fences… If it gives rise to greed, if it gives rise to fear, you’re looking at it wrong. After all, if arahants were looking at it, they wouldn’t feel these things. And they’re the ones who are looking at things in the right way. So you have to realize that there’s something wrong. You also realize that you can hold yourself …
- Meditators at Work… Then you can get into the issue of when you have a vagrant thought, what happened to the breath? How does the breath relate to the types of thoughts that come up into the mind? Some ways of breathing tend to aggravate anger and irritation; other ways of breathing tend to aggravate greed or fear. How can you tell when you’re slipping into …
- Strengthening Concentration… Why is it that greed, aversion, and delusion can still have power over the mind even when you’ve learned so much about their drawbacks? What’s still their gratification? What can you do to wean yourself off that? Can you teach yourself new ways of feeding? This is up to your own ingenuity. But that’s how you strengthen your concentration. You come …
- The Dhamma Protects… Buddha’s not saying that you simply put up with everything. Again, there are things in the mind, he says, that you don’t want to just sit there and watch. Greed comes, aversion comes, lust, jealousy, fear: You don’t just sit there and watch them overcome the mind. If you can’t figure them out, you watch them for a while—but …
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