Search results for: "Discernment"

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  2. Catch It in the Act
    One of the basic tenets in the Buddha’s teaching is the principle that discernment nurtured by concentration has great rewards, great benefits. When we hear that, we think we have to get a lot of concentration and only then can we work on discernment or wisdom. But that’s not the case. All the basic elements of the path—virtue, concentration, and discernment … 
  3. The Mind Like Water
     … So we’re trying to figure out how we can get together those factors for exertion and use them to support discernment. As you’ll notice out of the five—conviction, good health, honesty, persistence, and discernment itself—four of them are actually aspects of discernment. This connects with the fact that in the practice of mindfulness, ardency is the discernment factor. So discernment … 
  4. Capable
     … When your wisdom and discernment are independent in this way, that’s when you have full capability within yourself. No matter where you go, you’re safe, you’re fine. Ajaan Lee, in a discussion of the seven noble treasures, once said that of the seven, the most important is discernment. He explained, “If you have discernment, the other ones are there in the … 
  5. Turtle Meditation
     … One of the basic principles is that following the precepts helps your concentration, and your concentration helps strengthen your discernment. But the influences go in the other way as well. The more discernment you bring to your concentration, the stronger it’s going to be. The more concentration and discernment you bring to your precepts, the less harmful your actions are going to be … 
  6. A Home for the Mind
     … The chant we had just now, about discerning suffering, sounds a little strange. You might think, “Of course we discern suffering. I can tell when I’m suffering.” Well, it’s one thing to be aware of suffering, and it’s another to discern it. To discern it means you understand it: what it is, where it’s coming from, what you can do … 
  7. Whole-body Consciousness
    When the Buddha lays out his steps for breath meditation, he starts with two steps in which you simply discern what’s there: You discern short breathing; you discern long breathing. From that point on, you train. In other words, you induce certain states as you breathe in, as you breathe out. The first training is to be aware of the whole body as … 
  8. A Questioning Attitude
     … This is particularly true if we think that we’ve found a technique that’s going to guarantee discernment. For example, the idea that simply by developing mindfulness, being perfectly equanimous, noting whatever comes up, is automatically going to guarantee discernment: You can get very good at maintaining a state of equanimity, and of course you can really get attached to that equanimity to … 
  9. Skillful Papañca
     … As means, he says, don’t neglect discernment, guard the truth, be devoted to relinquishment, and train only for calm. Here he’s talking to your sense of your self as an agent. These are the things you do. When you don’t neglect discernment, you’re thinking about “What would be for my long-term welfare and happiness?” When the choice comes between … 
  10. A Sense of Yourself
     … All of these things keep coming back to discernment: realizing what’s important in life and also learning how to motivate yourself, learning how to use your discernment to take something that seems hard and make it easier. Ajaan Lee’s teachings on the breath are a really good example of this. He had a lot of illnesses in his life and he learned … 
  11. Determined on Goodwill
     … What it means is that you have to learn how to use your discernment. In fact, in one of the canonical descriptions of *adhitthana *or determination, discernment comes first. You use your discernment both in your choice of the goal you want to attain and in the means by which you’re going to go about it—how you can get there—which means … 
  12. Factors for Stream Entry
    There’s a passage where the Buddha describes three ways of gaining discernment. You gain discernment through listening, through thinking, and through meditating. I saw a TV show recently, a French TV show on the Dhamma, and they spent the entire fifteen minutes just getting those three points across. But the important factor is that not just any kind of listening or any thinking … 
  13. Unlimited Compassion, Limited Resources
     … So you need a combination of concentration and discernment. The discernment is what allows you to see which of those attitudes is appropriate for which cases. The concentration gives you the strength, the wisdom gives you the insight into your own motivations about why you might want to help somebody else, whether you can really trust those motivations or not. The combination of concentration … 
  14. Instructions for a New Monk
     … That idea really impairs your ability to develop discernment, which is the fruit of concentration. The same with discernment: You can have some discernment without strong concentration. You can read the books and can apply the teachings to your life and gain some benefit from that. But it’s all very limited. Because there are many levels in the mind, and many levels of … 
  15. You Can Do Better
     … One is conviction; the other is discernment. These are the things that pull your practice along. It’s easy to see how conviction would play that role. Belief that the teachings are true pulls you to practice. It’s interesting that discernment is also pulling you to practice. It’s the power that gets the whole thing going. In other words, you think about … 
  16. A Slave to Craving
     … It can’t compare with results that come from learning how to develop the mind in concentration and discernment. You see through your attachments, your misguided ideas, realizing that you can’t base true happiness on things that are inconstant, stressful, and not self. Then finally: The mind, when fostered with discernment, is released from all its effluents, in other words, all the things … 
  17. The Middleness of the Path
     … This is a lot of what the training in discernment is about: working from the blatant layers to the more subtle ones by trying to stay on the path. The Buddha called it a middle way, and getting that sense of middleness, or balance, is a lot of our training in discernment. If you’ve ever looked at a balance, you see that the … 
  18. Beyond Gratitude
     … the potential for virtue, the potential for concentration, the potential for discernment. They’re all here in one form or another. So you start out by depending on whatever virtue you have, whatever concentration, whatever discernment you do have already. Then learn how to make it grow so that it’s all-around. Ajaan Chah says that Ajaan Mun used to talk about making … 
  19. Vows
     … That’s part of the discernment that forms this factor in determination. Sometimes we’re taught not to have goals in the meditation. Usually that’s on meditation retreats. You’re in a high-pressure environment, you have a limited amount of time, and so you push, push, push. Without any discernment you can do yourself harm. So in a short-term setting like … 
  20. King Asoka’s Vow
     … Think about Ajaan Lee’s comment that if you have discernment, then all you need is a machete and you can set yourself up in life. He was referring to the different noble treasures, pointing out that of the noble treasures, discernment is most important. So your mindfulness, to be really useful, does require discernment. It’s the same with alertness. Alertness is not … 
  21. Protecting the Mind from Itself
     … And when your concentration is perfect, then you work on discernment. But the Buddha himself never taught that way. And it’s a very basic principle in the forest tradition that you use your concentration and your discernment to develop your precepts; you use your discernment to develop your concentration. In this way, all three trainings help one another along. And all three of … 
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