Search results for: "Dhamma"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. Healthy Conceit
     … As Ajaan Lee said, one of the big problems with meditators, especially who’ve read a lot of Dhamma, is that they mistake high-level Dhamma for low-level and low-level for high- level. There are lessons to be learned from the simple process of untangling yourself from distraction and learning how to anticipate and head off distractions. Those are key for overcoming … 
  11. Choices
     … You can focus on the breath, or you can focus on some other Dhamma theme: contemplation of the body, goodwill, recollection of the Buddha. Or you can focus on something else entirely. Nobody knows what you’re thinking about right now. You’re free to think about anything, but which choice would be the wisest? That’s a question you always want to ask … 
  12. Freedom & Security
     … This is what the Dhamma provides. This way, the melodies going through your head are not commercial jingles. They’re words of the Dhamma, to remind you of what’s true and has been true for more than 2,500 years. These are true principles that hold across time: that you have a higher capability in life, which frees you from the traditions and … 
  13. Balanced Breathing
     … This is where the message of the world and the message of the Dhamma part ways. The message of the Dhamma is that what you’re doing right now is very important. It’s the most important thing you can pay attention to right now. It’s what you’re responsible for. It’s what’s going to have an effect on your life … 
  14. Reflections
     … the Dhamma they were teaching. He had to reflect on it: Was it in line with what he already knew of the Dhamma? If not, he should let it go. If it was, that still wasn’t a guarantee that it was right. He’d have to test it. Of course, to test it meant that he had to be a reliable examiner. That … 
  15. Culture Shock
    Culture Shock June 16, 2004 When you come to practice the Dhamma, there are a lot of times when you experience culture shock. It’s not a question of going from a Western culture to an Asian culture. It’s going from a culture of ordinary people with defilements — Asian or Western — to the culture of the Noble Ones. Their culture involves a radically … 
  16. The Luminous Mind
     … We don’t listen to the Dhamma. Or even when we do, we don’t take it seriously. So these are the things that keep the darkness going: inappropriate attention and lack of noble friends. Even though the mind has the potential where it can know and be aware, these other factors influence it, which is why we need to train the mind in … 
  17. A Cure for the Sluggish Mind
     … You can think of the Dhamma: that we have this opportunity to practice an excellent Dhamma—it doesn’t come along all the time. You can think about how much you love yourself: It was because you loved yourself that you got on this path to begin with. Why would you want to stray off? You can think about all the ajaans and other … 
  18. A Becoming Critic
     … As he said, you know that something is genuine Dhamma when it leads to dispassion. And dispassion is actually the highest of all dhammas. How did the Buddha know this? He stepped back. He stepped out of his becomings and looked at how they were constructed, the same way that a film critic tries to decide, “How did they put this movie together?” So … 
  19. Honesty
     … All three of these things are absolute, rock-solid, basic qualities that are needed in the practice of the Dhamma. Being a true person is very closely connected with being truthful about what you say and how you think about yourself. So truth is not just a quality of words; it’s a quality of the person. The big problem in our lives is … 
  20. Warrior Knowledge
     … This is when it gets really tricky, for often the voices of defilement can disguise themselves as the voice of the Dhamma. You’ve got to watch out for that. When you’re not quite sure whether what the mind is saying is true or false, skillful or unskillful, just go back to being an observer. Look at the thinking in the mind simply … 
  21. Wild Horses
     … Finally, there’s the fear that comes from what the Buddha describes as not knowing the true Dhamma. In other words, you don’t really know what’s going to happen after you die: Where are you going to go? Will you be annihilated? Will you be forced to go someplace you don’t want to go? You really don’t know. There’s … 
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