Search results for: "Dhamma"

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  2. Positive Capability
     … There’s a Dhamma talk in which Ajaan Maha Boowa defines vipassana as exploration. You’re trying to figure out: Why is the mind suffering? What is it doing to make itself suffer? How can it stop? This takes the four noble truths as questions. The Buddha points our attention in the right direction. We’re looking for the cause of suffering. We’re … 
  3. The Primacy of the Mind (1)
    The Primacy of the Mind (1) June 21, 2021 Mano-pubbangama dhamma, the mind is the forerunner of all phenomena: the first line in the Dhammapada. It’s well known, yet all too often when we come to meditation we forget it. We think that meditation is about simply accepting what comes in through the senses and going with the flow—in other words … 
  4. Evaluation
     … That’s what he told his son, Rahula, in his first Dhamma lesson that we have recorded of his lessons to his son. Look at your intentions. Look at your actions. And look at what happens as a result. Do your actions really lead to happiness or not? Learn to see these connections for yourself. Learn to evaluate them. So it’s ironic that … 
  5. How to Be Alone
     … Several years back when the book Into the Wild came out, I was struck by how much the protagonist had to reinvent the Dhamma wheel in figuring out how to live an authentic life, how to be alone facing the wilderness with just the company of his own mind. He didn’t have many good resources to draw on: a few books — a little … 
  6. A Position of Strength
     … If the mind tells you it has other things to think about, you can tell it, “not right now.” This is one of the reasons why we have a Dhamma talk, because the mind has so many ways of getting out of the meditation, and the Dhamma talk is meant to give you ideas for how you can say No to these things. First … 
  7. The Psychology of Virtue
    Back in the early years of the last century, the monks in Bangkok came out with a series of Dhamma and Vinaya textbooks that became the standard all over Thailand, and still are today. In the Dhamma textbook for the first level of the exams that these books were designed for, they defined virtue as “restraint of body and speech.” Someone brought this to … 
  8. Ready for Death
     … If we can crave a life where we can practice the Dhamma, that’s a good craving to have. But if you allow vagrant thoughts to come wandering in and pull your cravings away, who knows where you’re going to go? It’s like a tornado coming and sucking you up and depositing you someplace else that you didn’t expect or didn … 
  9. The Language of the Breath
     … But then you read some of his later Dhamma talks and you see that he sometimes switches everything around. For example, in Method Two, he talks about spreading the breath down the back: starting with the base of the skull, down the spine, and out the legs. But in one of his later Dhamma talks, he talks about the breath energy that comes up … 
  10. There Is This
     … Raṭṭhapāla told him the four Dhamma summaries he had learned from the Buddha. The world is swept away, it does not endure: a teaching on inconstancy, aging. The world offers no shelter, there’s no one in charge: The illustration there is of an illness where even a king can’t say, “Now that I’m ill, can someone among my courtiers take some … 
  11. How to Read Yourself
     … You can also use your conviction, thinking about the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha. In this case, the Buddha says, there are times when you to get the mind to stay with the breath but you run into a fever in the breath or a fever in your feelings, or a fever in the mind. In other words, the mind’s not willing … 
  12. Right Here, Right Now
     … This is why, when he was teaching the basic principles of the Dhamma in the Wings to Awakening, there’s very little expressed there in terms of views. Mostly it’s qualities of mind—the assumption being that if you really do develop these qualities in your mind, you can’t help but come to the same conclusions, see the same things the Buddha … 
  13. Mindful of Death
     … There are some things that you can learn from books, some things you can learn from Dhamma talks, but there’s an awful lot that has to be learned from your own practice—from your being honest and observant. And the Buddha recommends not only that you focus on the breath, but that you also bring in other themes when necessary. If you find … 
  14. Drowsiness
     … Or you can think about the Buddha—anything that helps keep the mind focused on a Dhamma topic that energizes you. These are the things you do in preparation. There are also things you can do when you find yourself drifting off in spite of your first efforts. This is where you have to be firmly on the side of not drifting off and … 
  15. Passion, Dispassion, Compassion
     … Passion for the Dhamma is a good thing. The desire to practice, the desire to attain the results of the practice: having a passion for these things is something the Buddha actually encouraged. But otherwise, raga is something you’ve got to watch out for, because it’s a major cause of suffering. That means that an important stage of the practice, an important … 
  16. Experimental Intelligence
     … That’s how you know what’s Dhamma and what’s not. You take all the Dhamma you hear and you test it in terms of cause and effect. You don’t take anything for granted just because you’ve heard that it’s so. Sometimes we hear that the basic Buddhist insight is into the three characteristics — inconstancy, stress, not-self — which doesn … 
  17. Your Main Foundation
     … So you’ve got dhammas, or mental qualities, there too. It’s hard to meditate without getting everything engaged like this. But when the breath is really still—this is one of the reasons we work with it so assiduously—when the breath is very still, then we can see things very clearly, what exactly is going on in the mind, and we can … 
  18. Expert’s Mind
     … This is why we depend on our tradition, so that we don’t have to reinvent the Dhamma wheel every time we sit down. Left to our own devices, we might not be able to live to the point where we’d figured out what really is skillful and what’s not. So we look at the skills that people of the past have … 
  19. Settling In
     … The Pali term for this is vihara dhamma, a quality of the present moment that can be a home for the mind. So as you settle down to meditate, think of it as moving into a house that you want to make into a home. What are the steps? The first thing is that you’ve got to start cleaning things out. This is … 
  20. At Home with the Breath
    One of the Buddha’s terms for concentration is vihāra-dhamma, a home for the mind. It’s like that definition of home in the Robert Frost poem: “Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.” The breath is the object; it’s the primary vihāra-dhamma. When the mind settles there, the breath has to take … 
  21. Single-minded Determination
     … Ajaan Mun in his last Dhamma talk referred to single-mindedness as being the essential element in the practice: the single-minded determination not to come back and let the defilements step all over you as before — the determination not to come back to suffering. But that determination is something that we have to develop over time. We don’t come into the practice … 
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