Search results for: "Dhamma"

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  2. The World of the Body
     … There’s a great passage in a collection of Ajaan Lee’s Dhamma talks. It’s not actually part of a Dhamma talk. It was a conversation recorded there. A guy comes to Ajaan Lee and says, “My friends have been harassing me. They know that I’m a practicing Buddhist and they say, ‘If this body of yours is not self, why won … 
  3. Bless Yourself
     … There’s conviction—conviction that the Buddha really was awakened, that he taught the Dhamma well, and that there have been people who’ve practiced the Dhamma well and gotten results. That thought gives you energy. Otherwise, you live in a world where no one has found the end of suffering, one in which the Buddha had just a few interesting ideas that might … 
  4. Wise About Pleasure
     … As he said, he doesn’t reject pleasure that’s in accordance with the Dhamma. For example, there’s the pleasure of living in a harmonious community, the pleasure of the wilderness. These pleasures are perfectly fine. The Pali Canon is one of the first bodies of literature that actually contains wilderness poetry. Prior to that, there were poems about the beauties of nature … 
  5. Issues of Control
     … The Buddha once said that the Dhamma is nourished through commitment and reflection. Commitment means that you really give yourself to it, but then you have to reflect on the results of your commitment. This is an important part of developing any skill. All too often, we’re impatient. We try to barge right in, bring some control, the body reacts in a negative … 
  6. The Bright Tunnel
     … No matter how much you tell it, no matter how much you explain, no matter how many Dhamma books you read or Dhamma talks you listen to, it’s still going to hold on because it feels someplace deep down that it has to. It’s afraid to let go. But when you finally train the mind to develop discernment and see through the … 
  7. A Healthy Ego
     … On the one hand, in terms of the shoulds, the passage we chanted from the Dhammacakka just now, which was the actual wheel of the Dhamma, talked about the four noble truths and the three levels of knowledge for each truth. In the time of the Buddha, a wheel was like a table nowadays, where you have different sets of variables that you run … 
  8. Forgiveness
     … The Buddha places a heavy emphasis on harmony within the Sangha but he never advises trying to achieve harmony at the expense of the Dhamma. If someone is advocating a position that’s really against the Dhamma, and you can’t get the person to change his or her mind, then that’s it. The Sangha expels the person. Or if the conflict is … 
  9. The Right Piece in the Right Puzzle
     … When we come to the Dhamma, it’s as if the Buddha gives us another map: a map to a world in which the end of suffering is possible. In some cases, the map comes with the pieces put together, but there seem to be other pieces that are missing. Or there are pieces in a pile there on the table, and we’re … 
  10. Seeing with the Body
     … The first experience of Awakening is the opening of the Dhamma Eye. Full Awakening comes with knowledge and vision of things as they have come to be. But there are also passages that describe this knowledge as something sensed not through the inner eye, but through the body. All the teachings about jhana are concerned with gaining a sense of ease and wellbeing from … 
  11. What’s Real
     … That’s why his Dhamma is a gift to the entire world of all beings, and it’s up to us to decide whether we want to put ourselves within the net of those “all beings” by choosing to put the Dhamma into practice.
  12. The Forerunner of All Things
     … We talk about the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha as being a treasure or a gem. In the old days, people believed that gems had a protective power. Well, if you develop the Buddha’s qualities, the Dhamma’s qualities, the Sangha’s qualities, they have a protective power. They protect you from doing things you’re later going to regret, and from doing things … 
  13. Worthy of Trust
     … What does that mean? We take the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha on one level as examples to follow; on another level, we internalize their virtues. We make the virtues of the Buddha our virtues, we build them into the mind. The virtues of the Dhamma become our virtues, we build them into the mind. The virtues of the noble Sangha: We become … 
  14. To Disturb Your Complacency
     … So much of the teaching of the Dhamma is in questions. I’ve been going through the suttas, collecting the different passages where the Buddha or his disciples give a teaching and the people listening to the teaching gain either the Dhamma eye—in other words, one of the lower levels of awakening—or they gain full awakening while listening. What’s striking is … 
  15. Delight in the Breath
     … On top of that, our desires can go in ways that are counter to the Dhamma. They get everything all confused. Let’s try to keep things simple. Just now we chanted the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, which is all about the four noble truths. It starts from a very basic question: Why is there pain? Why is there suffering? And is there a way to … 
  16. Matters of Life & Death
     … Have the determination that you want to go someplace where you can practice, where you can hear the Dhamma, and have an opportunity to practice the Dhamma. What this means is that you have to train the mind in how to navigate some very narrow passages. It’s like a ship that has to go through a very narrow strait. So you try to … 
  17. Friends Inside & Out
     … Two of them have to do with the Dhamma: knowing what the Dhamma is and what the meaning of the Dhamma is. That kind of thing can be passed along in words. But the five other qualities are things you can talk about in general terms but you can’t really pass the knowledge along in words. You have to watch your friend in … 
  18. Looking Inward
    We come to practice the Dhamma because we’ve seen that the real troubles in our lives don’t come from outside. They come from within: our own lack of skill in dealing with things. The world may give us bad things to deal with, but we can make something good out of them. If we sit around waiting for the world to be … 
  19. What Am I Becoming as Days & Nights Fly Past?
     … In the Buddha’s list of qualities that he taught to Gotami about what counts as Dhamma and what doesn’t count as Dhamma, some of the qualities have to do with the goal at which you’re aiming: You’re aiming at being unfettered, you’re aiming at dispassion. Some of them have to do with qualities that you develop within yourself, like … 
  20. Wandering On, Shooting Arrows
     … This is why the Buddha said that passion for the Dhamma is one of the things that leads to happiness. A question came up the other day, “What’s the difference between passion and will?” With passion, you’re feeding on your desire. With will, you have desires that things come out a certain way, and you want them to be a certain way … 
  21. Keep Your Spirits Up
     … It could be the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha; your own virtue, your own generosity; the fact that you have the qualities that would make a person a deva. Those are things you could think about, too. Think about that inspiring theme until the mind settles down, happy to be with that theme, and then see if you can transfer that sense of calm … 
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