Search results for: "Dhamma"

  1. Page 65
  2. Taking a Stance
     … One of the Pali terms for a concentrated mind, “vihara dhamma,” means just that: a home for the mind, a place where you feel safe, where you feel solidly protected, not only from things outside but also from all the issues that come bubbling up from inside as well. Because the biggest problems in life are not the events from outside, but in how … 
  3. The Size of Your Eyes
     … She was transcribing a Dhamma talk in which I had mentioned “hate radio,” and she put a big question mark next to it. Apparently, that’s an American phenomenon. But the basic truth is true all over the world that when we look, it’s not always innocent; when we listen, it’s not always innocent. Sometimes we’re looking for trouble. Sometimes we … 
  4. Looking for Essence in the Wilderness
     … As the Buddha said, the essence of all experiences, or the essence of all actions—he uses the word dhamma, which seems to have a special sense as your experiences or actions—is release. You find pleasure here staying, being out in the wild. The conditions have been ideal for the past week, and yet you can’t make them stay that way. I … 
  5. The Need for Stillness
     … All of what they call the noble dhammas—virtue, concentration, discernment, and release—are all related to stillness in this way. Virtue is a way of stilling your actions, the things that you used to do without thinking. Suddenly you realize: “I can’t do that anymore.” You begin to see that those actions you’ve learned to stop doing really do cause suffering … 
  6. Allies
     … You can think about the Dhamma, the Sangha. Of if you have doubts about yourself, think about the good things you’ve done in the past. That gets you in the right state of mind to meditate. You’re building on the good you’ve already done. You’re building on the good you trust in other people. The same principle works in the … 
  7. Abandoning Effluents (1)
     … The entire Dhamma comes out of the last custom, which is to learn how to delight in developing and delight in abandoning: delight in developing skillful qualities, delight in abandoning unskillful qualities, and tracking down more and more the subtleties of what may seem to be skillful to begin with, but may have some lack of skill lurking inside. When you’re focused on … 
  8. Friendship Leading to Seclusion
     … He ordained them and he had them stay with their teachers for a while so that they could pick up the teacher’s habits, pick up the teacher’s way of looking at things, pick up some knowledge about the Buddha’s teachings, both the Dhamma and the Vinaya, to provide the student with good friends inside. So try to figure out who your … 
  9. Passion for Nostalgia
     … This is why the Buddha has you delight in the Dhamma, to delight in developing skillful qualities and taking unskillful qualities apart. It’s a fascinating project. Rather than being fascinated by your nostalgic memories of the past, be fascinated by what the mind is doing, and how it deceives itself right now. If you can develop a passion and delight for that, that … 
  10. Shaping Your Life
     … This is why the Buddha said that his one requirement for someone to practice the Dhamma with was that the person be honest and open: in other words, someone who admits mistakes readily. Because it’s the only that you’re going to learn, both from other people who you talk to about your mistakes and from watching cause and effect in your own … 
  11. Surveying the World
     … But there are people who will benefit from the Dhamma. So it’s up to us to decide which category we’re going to be in, and to take to heart the lessons he learned. With every survey of the world before his awakening, his focus had to come back into the present moment each time. So ask yourself: Do you have that arrow … 
  12. Goodwill Starts with Gratitude
     … You can think also about the Buddha and be grateful for all that time he spent establishing the Dhamma. After he gained awakening there were all kinds of things he could have done—he had no debts to anybody at that point—but he decided it would be good to spend the rest of his life setting out the religion so that it would … 
  13. One Thing Clear Through
     … But the Dhamma is one thing clear through.” He didn’t say what that one thing was. But the act of giving is a good candidate. So as you sit here with your eyes closed, remind yourself this is not just for you. Although it is for you, in a way, it’s also for others. It’s a goodness that breaks down barriers … 
  14. The Energy You Broadcast
     … But when you’re practicing the Dhamma, you don’t let yourself get pushed around. You set your mind on a goal: true happiness. You want that intention, that resolve, to stay in place. And you want it to inform the way in which you engage with the senses. Like what you’re doing right now when you’re meditating: You set up the … 
  15. A Point of Balance
     … The Buddha said that when people hear that he teaches the Dhamma for the end of becoming, they can react in one of two ways. Either they’re under the sway of the first two kinds of craving, so they don’t want to hear what he has to say because it sounds like a block to what they’re just about to get … 
  16. The Energy in the Body
     … You look at his Dhamma talks for the remainder of his life, and you can see that he was constantly experimenting with different ways of understanding the breath, of playing with the breath energy. He talked about the breath energy coming up the spine; the breath energy coming up the front of the body; the in-and-out breath; the subtle breath, which are … 
  17. Clinging
     … Are they the shoulds of the Dhamma or the shoulds of the defilements? You want to look into that. Place some question marks next to them, especially if they’re causing you to suffer. Now, there is some stress of being on the path. You’ve got to learn how to distinguish the necessary stress of the path from all the unnecessary stress that … 
  18. Be Observant
     … The Buddha’s first topic in his very first Dhamma talk was stress and suffering. And it may seem strange. Here we are, looking for happiness, and yet we start with that chant on aging, illness, and death, separation. But it’s not really strange. There are actually two ways of looking for happiness. One is to pretend that there isn’t any suffering … 
  19. Heightening the Mind
     … It’s part of the day-to-day work of practicing the Dhamma. We all come to the practice hoping that some day some really great experiences are going to hit us while we’re meditating. Well, they’re not going to hit unless you do the day-to-day practice. This is why the Buddha insisted that there are four noble truths, not … 
  20. Peace vs. Clinging
     … As the Buddha said, when we practice, we don’t reject any sukha, pleasure, ease, that’s in line with the Dhamma. In other words, any pleasure that’s conducive for the mind to settle it down, that’s conducive for the mind’s being virtuous, developing all the good qualities it needs, is perfectly harmless. It’s okay. It’s when the pleasure … 
  21. Noble Contentment, Noble Discontent
    There’s a passage where the Buddha extolls contentment as one of the basic values of the Dhamma practice. But then there’s another one where he says it was because he didn’t allow himself to stay content with his skillful qualities that he was able to attain awakening. This means we have to figure out: Where does contentment apply, and where does … 
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