Search results for: "Dhamma"

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  2. Furnishing Your Home for the Mind
     … In fact one of the Pali terms of for meditation is *vihara-dhamma: *the place where the mind makes its home. How do you make a home out of the breath? Well, the same way you make a house into a home. You bring in some furniture that you like, you decorate the walls, you paint it the color you like. You put some … 
  3. Noble Standards
     … I visited a Dhamma center recently where some of the students were complaining that their teachers were constantly pulling the Buddha down to their level. For instance, the teachers were talking about how the reports of the knowledges the Buddha gained on the night of his awakening don’t really sound possible. Maybe it was just a case of lucid dreaming, and we know … 
  4. Time Well Spent
     … You sit here talking to yourself, and it’s hard enough trying to just talk to yourself about the breath, talk to yourself about getting the mind to be with the breath, but if a lot of other topics have been brought up during the course of the day that are not related to the Dhamma, they’re going to ricochet around inside your … 
  5. Survival Dhamma
    “Heedfulness is the path to the deathless. Heedlessness, the path to death. The heedful do not die. The heedless as if already dead.” That’s one of the more famous verses in the Dhammapada and it’s the Buddha’s advice on survival. On one level, it sounds pretty ordinary. Any kind of survival— wilderness survival, survival in a city—requires that you be … 
  6. May I Look After Myself with Ease
     … This is one of the reasons why we practice the Dhamma. As we practice the Dhamma, it’s like providing food, clothing, shelter, and medicine for the mind. The practice of the precepts is like clothes for the mind. The function of clothing is to protect us from the vagaries of the climate but also to cover up, as the Buddha said, the parts … 
  7. Volunteer Spirit
     … He never tried to say, “You should be a Buddhist,” or, “Once you’re a Buddhist you’re obligated to do x, y, or z.” He left it up to each person to take what he or she found in the Dhamma that was useful and to apply it in his or her life. Sometimes you hear people berating people who sit and meditate … 
  8. Random Word Generators
     … When I was in Thailand during my first year was at Wat Asokaram, and they had a whole series of monks on a rotating roster to get up and give the Dhamma talks. And out of the fourteen monks who were giving Dhamma talks, maybe two could actually give good ones. The rest were more of a background irritation in the meditation than anything … 
  9. Discernment
     … This is what the Dhamma does. It gives us a new frame from which to look at things. This is why Dhamma talks are not just here for information. They’re here to help you look at things in a whole new way, applying the four noble truths to your experience. That’s the framework the Buddha gives you. It’s not only the … 
  10. Injustice
     … Practicing the Dhamma doesn’t mean becoming a doormat, or becoming totally oblivious to the problems of the world. Practicing the Dhamma means trying to develop a skillful attitude toward them. Meanwhile, your emotional feeding habits have to be taken away from the world and focused more on skillful qualities of the mind inside. When you’re feeding well inside, then your actions outside … 
  11. Sensuality Is a Fetter
     … This is where the way of the Dhamma parts ways with the way of the world. As the Buddha said, our freedom lies not in that area, but in learning how to put it aside—how to renounce all that fantasizing and find a happiness that really is infinite. This is the direction we’re going as we train the mind. We’re looking … 
  12. Transparent Becoming
     … As long as it worked, it was Dhamma. This is the attitude you should bring to the present moment. Some people say, “You want to practice concentration? Well, try not to have craving, try not to be attached.” But you’ve got to have craving; you’ve got to be attached if you’re going to have that focal point where the mind is … 
  13. Controlling
     … For example, when the Dhamma talks about things depending on causes and conditions, a lot of people think that it means waiting for the causes and conditions outside to be okay on their own, and then falling in line with them. But when the Buddha outlines causes and conditions, say, in dependent co-arising, the primary causes are all in the mind. They’re … 
  14. One Thing Clear Through
     … As Luang Pu Dune put it, “The Dhamma is one thing clear through.” Or as Ajaan Maha Boowa once said, one of the realizations that comes when you hit Awakening is that everything is the same teaching, starting from generosity and gratitude, all the way up through Awakening. There are different levels of subtlety, but it’s all the same principle. And you could … 
  15. Dhamma for Laypeople
    There are two stories in the Canon that provide an interesting contrast. The first is one in which Anathapindika is on his deathbed. Sariputta and Ananda go to visit him, and Sariputta teaches him how to not be attached to anything at all, giving him a long, very thorough list of things to let go of. And he gets to the last item in … 
  16. Consistently on the Path
     … Practice the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma and not in accordance with your mood—or in accordance with convenience. There are times when it’s going to require some sacrifices. So learn to see the sacrifices as noble and as something you enjoy doing—that you enjoy gaining in nobility. Because when the Buddha talks about generating desire, it’s not grudgingly. You … 
  17. Abandoning Effluents (3)
     … The commentators say that this one phrase covers everything in the Dhamma. In fact, these two activities go so well together that you could actually say that the destroying is actually part of the developing—it’s there in the persistence—and the two of them together cover all of the factors of the noble eightfold path. The destroying includes right resolve and all … 
  18. Adult Dhamma
    Adult Dhamma September 28, 2006 The Buddha treated his students like adults. If he had wanted to, he could have told them about all the amazing and wonderful things that he had learned during his awakening, and that they should simply obey him without question. But instead, he taught them how to question, how to think for themselves, how to gain awakening themselves. Even … 
  19. Getting the Most Out of the Present
     … Each of us will have to develop a sense of priorities as to what really needs to be done and how to make the most of a Dhamma lesson—how to make a Dhamma profit out of it, you might say. Sounds a little materialistic, but then the Buddha himself used the word “noble wealth” and used images of wealth with regard to qualities … 
  20. A Handful of Leaves
     … Then, toward the end of his life, he called the monks together and taught them the seven sets of dhammas that are wings to awakening. Those can be taken as the truths that everybody needs to know as well. Beyond that, it’s a matter of what kind of person you are. There was another time when a horse trainer came to see the … 
  21. Appreciating Goodness
     … With this horrible destruction of life, given that human life is so hard to come by, what would you do?” And the king says, “What else could I do but right conduct, Dhamma conduct, meritorious deeds, skillful deeds?” In other words, the king sees that when life is going to be destroyed like this, you have to find something that gets past the destruction … 
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