Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. The Karma of Meditation
     … That’s what the Buddha calls the duty with regard to suffering: to comprehend it. Primarily he’s focusing on the suffering of stress in the mind. But to comprehend that, you have to consider how the mind conceives of, say, pain in the body. How does it conceive unpleasant emotions in a way that makes it suffer even more? For most of us … 
  3. Delight in the Dhamma
    You may have noticed a phrase in the sutta we chanted just now—“The cause of suffering is craving accompanied by passion and delight”—which makes it sound as if all delight is bad, which sounds pretty discouraging. Does the Buddha want us to have a totally equanimous blank emotional state? The answer is, “No.” He actually recommends six kinds of delight on the … 
  4. Gratitude to Things
     … Which means that our lives depend on suffering, not only our own, but also that of other beings. This contemplation spurs you even further to try to find a way out. What is the escape from this burdensome process? How can we find a happiness that doesn’t depend on other people’s suffering, other beings’ suffering? So when you think of the goodness … 
  5. The Steadiness of Your Gaze
     … It’s got to figure out why it’s causing suffering, exactly where it’s causing suffering. The Buddha emphasized the issue of karma and intention, so we look to see: What intentions are there in the mind that make us suffer? Why don’t we see them? Why do we feel that those choices are so necessary that we even forget they’re … 
  6. To Depend on Yourself
     … Once you have right view about actions and right view about suffering, then the natural resolve is going to be, “Let’s put an end to that suffering. Let’s learn how to be more skillful.” But right resolve itself is what basically shapes right view. After all, the Buddha was speaking about ways of putting an end to suffering, and two of the … 
  7. The Buddha’s Compassion
     … Then the Buddha concluded by saying, “It’s only stress that I teach and the ending of stress.” Or if you translate dukkha as “suffering”: “It’s only suffering that I teach and the ending of suffering.” Some people take that to say, “Well, in that case, all the teachings we have about devas and nagas and other levels of being are probably not … 
  8. Goodwill as Restraint
     … And thinking that someone deserves to suffer is not a right view of any kind at all. The whole purpose of the teaching is that although people are suffering, they don’t have to suffer. In other words, the Buddha’s saying they don’t deserve to suffer. Even though they’ve done bad in the past, that doesn’t mean that they deserve … 
  9. Intelligent Equanimity
     … You can have compassion for them and they still don’t get released from their suffering. You can have appreciation for their happiness, but they abuse it. They abuse their power, they abuse their wealth. You begin to realize that there’s only so much you can do, not only for other people but also for yourself. That’s where the reflection on karma … 
  10. Knowledge over Fear
     … And although we live in a world where there is aging, illness, and death, and there are people doing unskillful things, still you can prepare yourself so that you can deal with those things and not have to suffer. You can age but not suffer from aging. You can grow ill not suffer from the illness. You can even die and not suffer from … 
  11. Seclusion
     … Ajaan Fuang once said that you need the equanimity of jhana so that the attitudes of goodwill, compassion, and appreciation don’t cause you suffering. You look around and you can see that there are lots of people you feel goodwill for but they’re not happy; people you feel compassion for and you can’t help them out of their suffering. There seem … 
  12. Large-hearted Equanimity
     … You want the good feeling of exercising your compassion, so it requires that there be somebody else there who’s suffering? It’s better to find happiness in something that doesn’t require anybody to suffer at all, so that when you do offer help, it’s not coming from a neurotic place or out of a desire to have more influence over the … 
  13. Questioning Everything
     … Because it’s in seeing the causal connections that you begin to realize, “Okay, my craving, my clinging right now are causing this suffering. If I stop the craving and clinging, the suffering stops.” That was the lesson he wanted each of us to learn and to observe for ourselves. That’s the real gift of the Dhamma: not so much teaching the Dhamma … 
  14. Something Good to Cling to
     … How is all this causing unnecessary stress and suffering? That’s the focal point of the Buddha’s teachings right there. His message for us is that the reason we suffer is not so much from other people, it’s from what we do. Other people may be really bad, but if the mind is well-trained, it doesn’t have to suffer from … 
  15. An Environment for Practice
     … suffering and the end of suffering. And where is it happening? Right here, right now, in the movements of your mind, in the processes in the mind. So you have to learn to look at what you’re thinking about, not in terms of the content, but how you’re doing the thinking: “What are the motivations? What are the qualities that create suffering … 
  16. Skills of the Dhamma Wheel
     … Stress or suffering, he said, is something that you have to comprehend. To comprehend means to know it so thoroughly that you develop dispassion for it. We usually don’t think that we’re passionate for stress and suffering, but we really are. The things we generally are passionate about carry a lot of stress with them, but we just choose to ignore that … 
  17. Like a River Full of Water
     … You think of how the suffering of others doesn’t benefit you in any way, so why would you wish suffering on others? If you see other people suffering, the automatic development of goodwill is that it turns into compassion. If there’s something can do to help those people, you try to help them. If you see that people are already happy, goodwill … 
  18. Ready for the Truth
     … All too often, when we think about suffering, we think that we’re suffering because of this situation outside or that person outside. The Buddha wants you to see that it’s not those outside things making you suffer. You’re using those outside things to make yourself suffer, through your clinging, through your craving. He wants to point your attention here. You’re … 
  19. Clinging-Aggregates in Context
     … Does that mean that there’s nobody there to be unbound? Is it a total wipe out? When the Buddha was asked that kind of question, he kept saying that all he taught was suffering and the end of suffering—the point being that there are questions he didn’t answer, that were not worth answering. But the question about what do you do … 
  20. Over the Pass
    When the Buddha set out the four noble truths, he made it very clear that the purpose of the path was to attack the problem of suffering at its cause. In other words, you don’t attack the suffering, you attack the craving. And the attack has two forms: One is developing, and the other is abandoning, restraining. It’s interesting that in the … 
  21. A Blameless Happiness
     … The problem is that many of the things we do in our search for happiness actually cause suffering. This is the big problem in life. This was the problem that the Buddha wanted to solve. It took him a while to figure out how to solve it. There was a period when he actually thought the best way to find true well-being was … 
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