Search results for: "Dhamma"

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  2. Customs of the Noble Ones
     … He said that during that time there were two Dhamma themes that Ajaan Mun liked to teach more than anything else. One was practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma, and the other was the customs of the noble ones. We tend to think of the forest tradition as being very Thai or very Lao. But Ajaan Mun was accused of not following … 
  3. Good Fundamentals
     … The Buddha himself said that he didn’t approve of any changes in his Dhamma. He had learned a skill, he wanted to pass that skill on, and he did everything he could to make sure that it was passed on intact. This is why he left not only a body of teachings but also an order of monastics trained to question one another … 
  4. Choosing Sides
     … Just today, I was reading an old translation of an Ajaan Chah Dhamma talk, trying to decide whether it deserved to be translated anew. Things were going along well for a couple of pages. Then all of a sudden, there was a passage where, in the original, Ajaan Chah talks about how important it is to understand the truth about dukkha, stress or suffering … 
  5. Heedfulness All the Way Through
    All dhammas, the Buddha said, come from desire. All skillful dhammas come from heedfulness. Heedfulness is the desire to be safe, not to fall into danger. It’s based on a realization that your actions will make the difference. So there’s a bit of discernment in there, together with some goodwill for yourself. Then, based on heedfulness, the whole rest of the path … 
  6. Get Real
     … You don’t have to listen to the Dhamma talk. As I’ve said many times before, the Dhamma talk is here as a fence. If you leave the breath, you run into the fence. Go back to the breath. Don’t let the talk interfere with your breathing. Allow the body to relax. Ajaan Suwat once noted that there’s a paradox in … 
  7. Days Fly Past
     … Ajaan Phut, in one of his Dhamma talks, described his time studying with Ajaan Sao. When people came to study meditation with Ajaan Sao, he’d teach them buddho as the object of meditation. If they wanted to know what it meant, he would say, “Don’t ask. Just go ahead and do it.” If they wanted to know what was going to happen … 
  8. The Stairway Up
     … It was originally supposed to be a short Dhamma talk, but it went on and on and on until midnight. The king was in the audience, lots of people were in the audience, and they were wondering why the Dhamma talk was going on for so long. Finally around midnight the man stood up shouting, “Victory! Victory!” He had overcome his stinginess. He was … 
  9. Keeping Your Values Alive
     … Whereas the message of the Dhamma is that what you’re doing right here, right now: That’s what’s important. So you’ve got to learn how to filter out any influences that would pull you away from this point. Try strengthening your appropriate attention. Try to be very articulate in the questions you bring to your practice, to your daily life. What … 
  10. The Truth of Perceptions
     … Another strange comment I read one time was that there’s no one true version of the Dhamma because everything you describe is like a map, and all maps distort. So how can any version of the Dhamma be the true Dhamma? Well, the answer is, look more carefully at maps. There are accurate maps and there are inaccurate maps. And there are different … 
  11. Borrowed Goods
     … His friends were making fun of him—they found out that he was practicing the Dhamma, and they weren’t. They had said to him, “So, the Dhamma says that your body’s not-self. Why won’t you let us hit it?”—and he didn’t know how to respond. And Ajaan Lee said to tell them, “Look, it’s borrowed goods. I … 
  12. Food Insecurity
     … Given that human life is so hard to come by, what would you do?” And Pasenadi had the good sense to say, “What else could I do but Dhamma practice, skillful practice?” That’s where your true security lies. Even though you’re still feeding as you’re on the path, you’re feeding on something that’s a lot more secure, so even … 
  13. Against Your Type
     … He treats them because they were in the standard Dhamma textbooks that had been disseminated all over Thailand by that time, and which in turn were based on the commentaries. In fact, one of his reasons for writing The Craft of the Heart was to take a lot of the teachings from the Dhamma textbooks and treat them from the point of view of … 
  14. Cosmic Scale, Human Scale
     … As the Buddha said, the amount of suffering left to beings who haven’t gained the Dhamma eye is like all the dirt in the Earth. The amount of suffering left to those who have gained the Dhamma eye is just like the dirt under your fingernail. How much dirt do you want to deal with? Here’s your chance to cut your sufferings … 
  15. Fighting Spirit
     … It’s a shame that we see that so much of these wrong teachings in modern Dhamma. A Buddhist magazine years back ran a whole issue on the connection between Dhamma and science. The feature article basically said that science teaches determinism and so does the Dhamma: You just learn to accept, accept, accept that things are the way they are, and that’s … 
  16. Better to Give than to Consume
     … One of my favorite New Yorkercartoons shows a couple sitting in a living room, talking to some friends, and the husband is saying, “Of course, it’s had its ups and downs, but by and large Margaret and I have found the consumer experience to be a rewarding one.” That’s the attitude many of us bring when we come to the Dhamma. We … 
  17. A Rare Gift
    When you’re meditating at the same time there’s a Dhamma talk, 99.5% of your attention should be with the breath and only half a percent with the Dhamma talk itself. The sound is here to act as a fence. If you find yourself losing touch with the breath, the sound of the talk is here to remind you to come back … 
  18. A Genius about Your own Mind
     … There are a lot of people, even people nowadays teaching the Dhamma, who shy away from that. Conviction in his awakening also means that there are things that human beings can know about karma, about rebirth, about the path to a deathless happiness and what it involves. And I’ve encountered Dhamma teachers who’d rather say, “Well, the Buddha just had opinions about … 
  19. A Safe Harbor
     … They talk about the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha as refuge, refuge both in the sense of giving us examples of how to find refuge for ourselves, and in becoming qualities in our mind. There’s the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha on the internal level, the qualities they stand for. Like the ones we’re developing right now: mindfulness, alertness, ardency … 
  20. Reflecting on the Requisites
     … You can reflect on this story and get some good Dhamma lessons in all kinds of directions. One direction is thinking about sensual pleasures. Where are yesterday’s sensual pleasures? Where are all the good tastes you had in yesterday’s food? They’re gone. And what did you do in order to get those tastes? What kind of karma are you still carrying … 
  21. A Total Training
     … This is one of the reasons why in the forest tradition there’s not that much emphasis placed on learning a lot about the Dhamma, reading a lot of Dhamma books, because the mind can get lost in all those theories. You want to read enough so that you understand what’s going on and then actually create the genuine qualities in your mind … 
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