Search results for: "Dhamma"

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  2. Finding Your Own Balance
     … We come to the Dhamma and, on the one hand, yes, we are asked to have faith in the Buddha’s awakening, but we also have to realize that our understanding of what that means is pretty primitive. It comes out of ignorance. So we have to keep testing that understanding to see where the ignorance lies, where our faith may be misguided—misguided … 
  3. The Wall of Discernment
     … You need mindfulness as the gatekeeper, and right effort as the soldiers, knowledge of the Dhamma as their weapons, concentration as their food. Conviction is the foundation post. All of these things working together enable discernment to do its work to make sure that your fortress, and the protection it provides, can be complete.
  4. Chanting on Your Own
     … As you know, it’s a chant on the qualities of the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, relating them to the six properties, the six dhātu. I found that it really did help with the meditation. Thinking in terms of those properties was not part of my upbringing here in the West. It was one of the aspects of meditation instruction that was … 
  5. Make a Difference
     … Even if the TV is saying good things, helpful things—you’ve got talks of Dhamma going on— still, it’s making a lot of noise. This is when you put aside all the things that you’ve studied and learned. You just get the mind really, really still. This is a principle you see throughout the Forest Tradition. In Thailand, the monks who … 
  6. Work with It
     … Remember how the Buddha talked about the standards for what constitutes true Dhamma is that it leads to freedom—to being unfettered—and to dispassion. Now, that dispassion is something unfabricated. But to get there, you have to have an anticipation that it’s something really positive. This is part of the work of fabrication: the work of the way you talk to yourself … 
  7. The Sublime Attitudes
     … Ajaan Suwat once gave a Dhamma talk on this reflection, focusing on the difference between the anatta teaching and this one statement. Form, feeling, perceptions, thought-constructs, consciousness: These are not self. But we are the owners of our actions. “Think about that,” he said. In other words, don’t latch on to the results of your actions; latch on to the fact that … 
  8. Helping Yourself by Helping Others
     … If they think you’re weak, then they know nothing of the Dhamma”—because you have to remember that qualities like goodwill, patience, equanimity, and kindness are forms of strength. There’s that story where Lady Vedehika is famous for being kind, generous, and mild-mannered. And she has a slave woman, Kali. And Kali starts wondering, “Why does she have this good reputation … 
  9. Training the Whole Mind
     … In the practice of the Dhamma you’re looking after your own mind, attending to your own mind’s needs. It’s not so much that you’re learning about Buddhism. You’re learning about your own mind, looking after your own mind. That’s when the meditation really starts showing its value. It rearranges all the power balances in the mind so that … 
  10. Humility & Confidence
     … He didn’t simply make up the Dhamma and teach it to people because it sounded nice. It was through trial and effort that he had to shape his understanding of what actually worked. Then when he got results, he came out and taught what he had learned. As for the confidence, he believed that life wasn’t worth living unless you at least … 
  11. When You Hit a Plateau
     … For me, one of the most revelatory Dhamma books I ever read was the one where Ajaan MahaBoowa was giving talks to a woman who was dying of cancer. He talks about his own practice, dealing with pain. He starts talking about the different questions he asked about the pain and the things he observed in his mind. They were questions that I had … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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