Search results for: "Dhamma"

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  2. Your Desire to Practice
     … When you stay with a teacher, you have to steal the Dhamma from him. You’ve got to observe what he does, what he wants, and try to figure out why he does those things or wants those things. It goes down to even little details about cleaning his hut. For a long time, Ajaan Fuang wouldn’t let me into his room. I … 
  3. The Four Noble Truths
     … It’s called Setting the Wheel of Dhamma in Motion. The wheel there was the passage where the Buddha talked about each of the four noble truths and about the knowledge he gained about the four noble truths in the course of his awakening. If you notice, there were three steps of knowledge for each truth. First there was the knowledge of the truth … 
  4. Solo Practice
     … In other words, does it work in leading to a sense of calm, to an ability to see things clearly? Whatever passes that pragmatic test, that’s Dhamma. And your notion of what it means to pass, what it means to work: That’s going to develop over time as your standards get higher and higher. Ajaan Fuang used to use the word, “be … 
  5. Learning from Labor
     … Remember how the Buddha said that the Dhamma is nourished: The Dhamma grows because of commitment and reflection. You commit yourself to the path and then you reflect on what you’re doing. That’s where the learning comes. As when you’re doing concentration: You try to learn which ways of breathing feel good for the body. I’ve had people ask me … 
  6. The Safety of Dualities
     … The act of trying to be clear about what is Dhamma and what is not Dhamma, what is skillful and what is not, is basic to the whole practice. And it’s basic to keeping you safe.
  7. Four Bases of Success
    Toward the end of his life, the Buddha gave a list of the seven most important teachings that he wanted his monastic and lay followers to continue to practice in order to keep the Dhamma alive. On the list were the four bases of success. Nowadays, though, you hardly hear any reference to the bases of success at all. This may be due to … 
  8. Compunction & Awe
     … Limitless is the Dhamma. Limitless is the Sangha. There is a limit to the creepy-crawly things. That’s our out. This is our inspiration. Sometimes saṁvega is confused with dispassion. Dispassion is the sense that you’ve been feeding off of your fabrications, willing to put in the effort to construct them, because you have a passion for the pleasures they provide. But … 
  9. Not Resolved on Self
     … If you come to the practice of the Dhamma with that kind of resolve, either negative or positive, the issue of self becomes a really big deal. When we hear about the teachings on not-self, if you’re already positively attached to yourself, it’s going to sound very negative. If you’re already negatively attached to yourself, it’s going to encourage … 
  10. Escape Routes in the Present
    Tradition tells us the Buddha gave a Dhamma talk one time during his first year of teaching. One thousand two hundred and fifty arahants all met spontaneously on the afternoon of the full moon in February. We don’t have any record of the talk but we do have a record of the verses that summarized it at the end. The very first line … 
  11. Right View as Tool
     … They want to hear either that the problem is somebody else’s problem or else somebody else is going to solve it, and you can’t force the Dhamma on people like that. But if you see that the problem is within you, the cause is within you, and you want some guidance on how to deal with that problem, get rid of those … 
  12. Believe in Your Actions
     … A while back I was listening to a Dhamma teacher say that she’d suddenly realized that when she sat down to meditate she really ought to have some idea of what she was doing. In other words, there had to be a purpose in the meditation, a plan. She had been coming from a school of thought where meditation was supposed to be … 
  13. Home Schooling Your Inner Children
     … If you want to listen to a Dhamma talk while you meditate, that’s perfectly fine, so that you don’t feel that you’re so alone. But you don’t have to give your full attention to the Dhamma talk. In fact, the more attention you give to the breath, the better. In this way, you learn how to deal with all those … 
  14. Nourishing & Interesting
     … As the Buddha said, *mano-pubbangamā dhammā, mano-seṭṭhā, mano-mayā: *“Phenomena have the mind is their forerunner.” The mind is what’s creating things. Like right now: The processes of fabrication are taking the raw material coming from your past actions and shaping them into your experience of the present moment. One of the things you learn as you get deeper and deeper … 
  15. Opening Your World
     … Think about the chant we had just now about the four Dhamma summaries: The world is swept away, it does not endure; it offers no shelter, there’s no one is charge; it has nothing of its own. Why do we keep coming back for these things? Because of the craving. We’re a slave to cravings. We keep going back to things that … 
  16. Your Breath, Your Territory
     … And take advantage of what you can learn about this area of your awareness while you’re still strong enough, while you’re still alert enough, while you can still hear and see, so that you can take in messages and Dhamma lessons from outside. It’s not always going to be the case that you can communicate with the world outside. I have … 
  17. Take Good Aim
     … He set out the Dhamma to show people how they can put an end to their own suffering. He created a monastic order so that this skill could be taught from generation to generation as a living apprenticeship. He did a lot of work to show us: This is what human beings can do. So it’s good that we keep that in mind … 
  18. Strength from Within
     … Ajaan Lee, when he was giving a Dhamma talk to one of his students who was on her deathbed, reminded her that strength of the body and strength of the mind keep us going, but ultimately we have to depend on strength of the mind. When he talked about conviction, he said it really comes down to the precepts. If you really are convinced … 
  19. Capture Your Imagination
     … You may have noticed this when reading Ajaan Lee’s instructions for meditation, especially in his Dhamma talks. In Keeping the Breath in Mind, he gives you some basic principles, but in his Dhamma talks he plays with all kinds of other ways of playing with the breath, ways of conceiving the breath energy in the body: breath energy that spins around; breath energy … 
  20. Bigger than the World
     … Ajaan Lee makes the distinction between being with the Dhamma and being with the world. Any thoughts where you can recognize, “This is me at this point in time, in this location, with this world with its past, with its possible future”: Those are all thoughts of the world. You want to replace them with thoughts of the Dhamma: in other words, thoughts of … 
  21. Alone & Together
     … So we need to depend on Dhamma talks; we need to depend on Dhamma readings; we have to find some seclusion—time to get away, because we’re constantly bombarded. We have no time to know ourselves, no time to see exactly where our problems are, because we’re dealing so much with other people’s problems. This is why one of the tricks … 
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