Search results for: "Dhamma"
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- Respect for Heedfulness… That’s why we pay so much respect to the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, so that we don’t have to keep reinventing the Dhamma Wheel. So, based on this principle of causality, there are three things we need to respect. First, the principle itself because reality’s not totally arbitrary. You can’t just make up things. You can’t decide …
- Don’t Believe Everything You Think… Have your conviction instead in the breath; have your conviction in the Dhamma. Make that kind of conviction as strong as you can, because that helps you get past all the perceptions in the mind that might pull you away from the practice or lead to unfortunate mental states that could get you worse and worse and worse. So use your breath to return …
- Cooking Food for the Mind… The instructions are there so that you don’t have to reinvent the Dhamma wheel every time you sit down to meditate. The instructions also come with directions on how a particular type of meditation is good for particular type of problem—i.e., treating food as medicine. Your basic diet here is the breath. Fortunately, the breath has lots of variations, and of …
- Good Heart, Good Mind… When the Buddha would give Dhamma talks, he wouldn’t simply instruct people. He would also urge, rouse, and encourage them. So when it seems as if getting the mind to stay with the breath is like putting a marble on the tip of a pin, you have to encourage yourself. He says it’s not that difficult, not that impossible. But it’s …
- For Your Benefit Here & Now… You put in time, you observe, and you apply lessons you’ve learned from the Dhamma you’ve heard. There’s a tendency in the forest tradition to take some of the Buddha’s basic teachings on everyday Dhamma, and see how they can be applied to the practice of meditation. One very basic teaching lists the recommendations the Buddha gave on how to …
- Undomesticated Happiness… We take refuge in him, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, but not in the sense that they’re going to do the work for us. In society, we expect people to be responsible for one another’s happiness. But as the Buddha pointed out, we can’t do that, because your happiness has to depend on your own skills. Other people’s happiness has …
- The Karma of Pain… You don’t want to just jump in and start analyzing things in terms of what you’ve read in books or heard in Dhamma talks, because you can get things really wrong that way. You have to be able to sit and let things settle down. When they settle down, they begin to separate out on their own. It’s like different chemicals …
- Stay with the Breath… You don’t even have to focus on the Dhamma talk. If there’s anything relevant to what you’re doing, it’ll come right into your awareness and you’ll notice it. You’ll hear it. If it’s not relevant to what you’re doing, it’s a distraction. So let it go. It may be useful for somebody else, or for …
- In the Mood… Look at Ajaan Lee’s Dhamma talks: When he defines the different levels of breathing in the body, he hardly ever repeats himself. There’s always something new, something different that he’s found from his meditation. We don’t have to memorize all his ways of analyzing the breath. We should give them a try, of course, but we should also look at …
- No Happiness without Restraint… Don’t forget that being an adult, practicing the Dhamma, requires restraint—both restraint in terms of what you take in and restraint in terms of what comes out in your actions—because if you live in a society where no one else is imposing restraints on you, you’ve got to impose them yourself. And again, this is for your happiness. If we …
- Appropriate Attention… We chanted the *Dhamma-cakka, the Dhamma Wheel, *the other night. You notice the part that’s the wheel, which is the heart of the sutta where the Buddha talks about knowing each truth and then knowing the duty with regard to the truth and then knowing that you’ve completed it. Appropriate attention is a matter of the first two levels of knowledge …
- It’s up to You… There are those cases in the Canon where the Buddha gives a Dhamma talk and some people follow along. They apply what’s called “appropriate attention.” They take what they learn from the talk and then they apply it to the issue of, “What am I doing right now that’s causing stress? What am I doing that I don’t have to do …
- Even Animals Can Be Trained… So when you hear people say that the Dhamma is all about letting go, yes, it’s about letting go, but there’re certain things you’ve got to hold on to, in order to let go properly. If you let go in the middle of the river, you get swept away. If you let go and you’re still on this side of …
- Breath, Tranquility, & Insight… Or there are cases where you’ve got to put the breath aside for the time being, and start thinking about perceptions and verbal fabrications that give you more energy in the practice, that make you happy to be here, such as thinking about the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha: how lucky we are that we have a teacher like the Buddha, how lucky …
- Justice vs. Skillfulness… There’s never a case in the Dhamma where good ends justify unskillful means. The means have to be good—in fact, everything is all means. After all, where would you put the ends? You settle one issue and there’s another issue. You settle that issue, then everyone dies, they get reborn, and things start up again. We don’t have the closure …
- Insight into Pain… The end of the story is in what the Buddha called the four noble dhammas: virtue, concentration, discernment, and release. These four noble dhammas give a more complete picture of what we’re about here. We’re here for release. You recognize discernment as being genuine discernment when it brings release. You see something you didn’t see before, you understand something you didn …
- Safety… That passage that we chanted just now, the four Dhamma summaries, came from a conversation between a monk and a king. The king had known the monk before he ordained. He came from a wealthy family, his health was good, and as far as the king was concerned, people would ordain only if they were sick or had lost their relatives or had lost …
- Remembering Ajaan Lee… As the Buddha once said, “Bring me someone who is observant and truthful, and I’ll teach that person the Dhamma.” But it’s not just being observant and truthful. You also need that element of ingenuity. When you face a problem in your meditation, the Buddha’s not going to be there to whisper in your ear to tell you what to do …
- Fear of Death… Either we’re attached to the body, we’re attached to sensual pleasures, we realize that we’ve done cruel and harmful things to other people, or we haven’t yet seen the true Dhamma, that there really is a deathless. A lot of our meditation is aimed at overcoming those four reasons for fear. For example, the realization that we’ve done cruel …
- Intelligent about Change… Ajaan Maha Boowa gave a long series of Dhamma talks for her benefit every evening. Finally the woman went back home, and ultimately died. Her friend the doctor was still around. And she got the tapes that the woman had made of all the talks. So the old doctor, even though her eyesight was going, tried to see, “Can I transcribe all the tapes …
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