Search results for: "Dhamma"

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  2. Customs of the Noble Ones
     … Ajaan Maha Boowa made that comment in one of his Dhamma talks, saying, “Even though there may be things that the Buddha didn’t say, but if you try them out and they get good results, they’re Dhamma, just as much as anything that he did say.” This way, you get to learn how to read your desires. Because if your desires are … 
  3. The Real Thing
     … The Dhamma’s proclaiming itself day-in, day-out, and yet we’re ordinarliy turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to it. When we talk about ignorance: Ignorance is not just a passive thing. Sometimes it’s an active ignoring, focusing on the things we want to see and denying the things we don’t want to see. We’ve got to … 
  4. Stay
     … In other words, you could be listening to the crickets right now, or you could be listening to the Dhamma talk. And the Dhamma talk is pointing you where? It’s pointing you into the body. As for the verbal field, try to devote it to the body as you feel it from within. Direct your thoughts in that direction. If you’re going … 
  5. The Power of Truth
     … They stuck fast to what they knew of the Dhamma and the Vinaya, and even that they tested. This is a principle that Ajaan Mun trained in all of his students: one was the confidence that they could actually do the practice and figure out what was genuine Dhamma from what’s not, and two, that it depended on their own truthfulness, their own … 
  6. The Little Things
     … I don’t know how many Dhamma talks in Thailand where the ajaans keep saying, “Don’t underestimate yourself. Don’t underestimate your potential. We all have the potential for the practice.” Ajaan Mun used to give lots of Dhamma talks and most of his students were sons of peasants. They’d been told all their lives, “You’re at the bottom of the … 
  7. Even Common Animals Can Be Trained
     … They may have been skills useful for some purposes, but when you’re practicing the Dhamma, they get in the way. Your mind is luminous enough to realize that the Dhamma is worth it: It’s worth practicing; it’s worth the sacrifices that are needed; it’s worth the restraint that’s needed—because so much of the training is restraint: Generosity is … 
  8. The Politics of Arising & Passing Away
     … The best that you can do, if you find that you can’t finish the work in this lifetime, is to make the dedication that you want to come back to a place where you will meet with the Dhamma and be motivated to practice it. Let the other chips fall where they may. But make sure you’ve got these ones—the desire … 
  9. Distinctions That Make a Difference
     … The same principle applies in learning the Dhamma. The Buddha makes distinctions between things that we don’t ordinarily see as distinct; we tend to glom them all together. A thought, a perception, a feeling, our awareness of these things all tend to be one glob, and we hang onto all of them. But if we want to understand them—understand *why *we’re … 
  10. A Haven for Inner Wealth
    When we take refuge in the Buddha, and the Dhamma, and the Sangha, what are we trying to protect? We’re trying to protect our well-being. We take refuge in them because they give good examples of how to give rise to well-being and how to protect it. So where does that well-being come from? As the Buddha said, there are … 
  11. The Buddha’s Qualities
     … We chant about the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha to remind ourselves of the values behind the practice. Some people have characterized Buddhism as a religion no need for faith. Well, there is an element of faith, an element of belief, believing that the Buddha was awakened. The implication there is that he did it through his own efforts, and he did it … 
  12. Surveying the World
     … You look at the remainder of his life and you can see that it was full of difficulties in trying to get the Dhamma and Vinaya established. Here he had been working so hard to find something of real value, and he was offering it for free, but there were a lot of people who wouldn’t take it. Not only that, they would … 
  13. A Post for the Mind
     … At what point will you decide that you’ve had enough? When you side with the Dhamma, it offers you a way out. When you see the Dhamma as your friend, and you see it as a source of genuine nourishment, that’s half the battle right there.
  14. More Buddhist Engineering
     … The principle of practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma is crucial. It’s not just a matter of following what the Buddha had to say. It’s wanting to take the practice all the way to the attainment of disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, release. You have to start asking the questions that will take you there. So desire underlies the whole path. We … 
  15. Relationships
     … What are the beginnings? Well, there’s one passage where the Buddha says, “Give me someone who’s honest, who’s no deceiver, and I will teach that person the Dhamma.” So the first quality you’ll need as you practice the Dhamma is honesty. This means not only being honest with other people, but even more importantly, being honest with yourself. When difficult … 
  16. The Path to Stream Entry
     … Think of the time when Sāriputta the wanderer had gained the Dhamma eye—which is another term for stream-entry—after hearing a very short teaching from Ven. Assaji. He goes back and sees his friend Moggallāna, who was also a wanderer at the time. Moggallāna sees him and says, “Your complexion is bright. Your faculties are bright. Could it be that you’ve … 
  17. Invest in the Breath
     … All he could do was teach her the Dhamma. So she took along a friend, an older woman in her eighties who was a retired doctor. Every evening, they would go and listen to a Dhamma talk from Ajaan Maha Boowa and record it. Then after the woman with cancer died, the older friend came up with the idea of taking all those tapes … 
  18. The Buddha’s Last Word
     … He’d listen to a Dhamma talk by Ajaan Mun and he’d trip over a couple of phrases— couldn’t make heads or tails of them—and so he’d go and think about them for three days. Then he’d go and ask Ajaan Mun, “This point you made the other night in the Dhamma talk. I’ve been thinking about it … 
  19. Getting Your Head Around the Goal
     … There’d be no point in having Dhamma talks like this if that weren’t the case. Then there’s the discernment that comes from thinking things through, and then the discernment that comes from developing. A lot of times, our problem is we want to think things through beforehand in the hope that the more we analyze the issue, the more we read … 
  20. Respect, Confidence, & Patience
    Ajaan Suwat often would begin his Dhamma talks by saying that we should approach the practice with an attitude of respect, an attitude of confidence. Now the respect and the confidence go both ways: respect for the path and respect for ourselves; confidence in the path, confidence in ourselves. Because, after all, what is the basic message of the Buddha’s teachings? It’s … 
  21. Talking to Yourself
     … One time, I was getting ready to give my very first Dhamma talk. And even though it wasn’t going to be my own Dhamma talk—I was going to be reading Ajaan Lee—I still felt a little nervous about it. He said, “Imagine you have a sword in your hand, and if there’s anybody in the room who doesn’t like … 
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