Search results for: "Dhamma"

  1. Page 73
  2. Dethinking Thinking
     … Or you can try the perceptions he recommends in some of his Dhamma talks. He’s got a wide range of perceptions to suggest. He talks about breath sensations that go up, breath sensations that go down, those that spin in place, those that go back and forth. See if these perceptions help. You could think of the breath coming in the soles of … 
  3. Befriending the Breath
     … vihāra-dhamma, a quality that forms a home for the mind, a place where you feel that you can stay comfortably. It’s like having a true friend who will never let you down. In Thai they talk about your eating friends, the ones that you have a good time with, and then the friends who are willing to die for you, who will … 
  4. At Play
    Ajaan Lee has a lot of Dhamma talks where he portrays the practice as a development of skills, and he makes a lot of analogies with manual skills: sewing a pair of pants, weaving a basket, making clay tiles. We can take those images in, adopt that approach, but sometimes we can get too grim about it. We read books that say that to … 
  5. To Go Where You’ve Never Gone Before
     … When you see the deathless, that’s when, as the Buddha says, your conviction in the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha is verified. You’re beginning to see what you hadn’t seen before. There’s still more work to do, but at least you have a toehold. In the image in the Canon, you’ve crossed the river to the point where you’re … 
  6. Kill Your Anger
     … This is why we can do so much damage to ourselves when we’re angry—and why it’s so sad when you hear modern Dhamma teachers telling us that maybe it’s time for Buddhism to have a positive take on anger. Buddhism has done perfectly well without taking a positive take on anger for all these many centuries, thank you. And it … 
  7. Pain & Patience
     … He didn’t have a teacher—there was nobody to give him Dhamma talks. He had to explore everything on his own. And his exploration was this: He’d find that he was suffering from something and so he’d ask himself, “What am I doing that’s causing that suffering? And why do I do it? Why don’t I give it up … 
  8. What You’re Choosing to Do Right Now
     … I was looking a while back at a video of a Dhamma teacher saying that she had avoided the problems of aging by just staying with the breath in the present moment. And that was it. That solved the problem. Well, it doesn’t solve the problem; you’re just hiding out. That’s the wisdom of an ostrich. As long as your head … 
  9. The Duty to Be Positive
     … Fortunately, the young monk had been studying enough of the Dhamma to realize what Chao Khun Nor was saying: Each of the four noble truths has a duty, and thinking about thoughts that wear you down—about what’s wrong with you, things you’ve done in the past that you feel ashamed of—is not one of your duties. Those sort of thoughts … 
  10. Greed & Distress with Reference to the World
     … The question is, what’s the message? Is it in line with the Dhamma? If the being doesn’t have any message, well, just wish that being goodwill. That can be your message to yourself that there are beings out there who are suffering. Here you are meditating, getting all this merit. There may be somebody out there who sees it and would like … 
  11. Heedfulness
     … by time, what can you get out of the choices available to you? What can you get out of the strengths you still have? You may know about that collection of Dhamma talks that Ajaan Maha Boowa gave to the woman who had cancer. After the woman returned home and died, her friend, a doctor who’d been with her, suddenly found that she … 
  12. The Lightened Mind
     … The reason why he taught them when they were already arahants probably had to do with the fact that they had heard only one or two Dhamma talks from him and gained awakening. He wanted to fill them in on the details of what they should say if they were teaching people who were not nearly as advanced as they were. Of those 1 … 
  13. You’re Already Dead
     … There’s learning the Dhamma, which means not only listening but also thinking about it, questioning it. When the Buddha taught, he didn’t teach nice-sounding platitudes. He didn’t offer things for your reflection without being responsible about what he was saying. Everything he said had meaning. And he recommended that the monks question him if there was anything they didn’t … 
  14. Fear of Missing Out
     … He subscribed to a magazine that was put out by the scholarly monks called Dhammacaksu, “The Dhamma Eye,” which had sutta translations and articles on the meaning of the suttas. The magazine would arrive once a month. Ajaan Fuang said that when the magazine arrived, the evening sit that night was dedicated to Ajaan Lee’s reading the magazine out loud to everybody. So … 
  15. Seclusion Through Mindfulness
     … The people in the Buddha’s time who, on hearing the Dhamma, really appreciated it, had a sense that it cleared things up, helped them escape from the things that were tying them down. Of course, what was tying them down? Their own attitudes. So to seclude yourself from the things that tie you down: That’s the work of mindfulness—getting you ready … 
  16. Training Your Cynical Voices
     … You read about the people who disliked the Dhamma back in the time of the Buddha, argued with it, resisted it. And a lot of their resistance was the same sort of stuff you see now: They were materialists, they didn’t believe in the power of kamma, thought that going to nibbana was impossible or selfish. But were they the people who benefitted … 
  17. A Concentration Checklist
     … What part of the mind doesn’t want to look? So basically, the way to overcome boredom is to ask questions based on what you know of the Dhamma: what you’ve learned about what happens as the mind deals with its sensory experience. Ask yourself, “Can I see that happening right now?” Two other problems are mirror problems: too much effort, too little … 
  18. Virtue
     … As the Buddha once said, that’s a prerequisite for practicing the Dhamma on any level: that you be honest. So following the precepts creates the right environment for developing the mind further in meditation. It also develops some important skills, such as mindfulness, alertness, and persistence. You have to keep your precepts in mind, remembering that you’ve promised yourself not to lie … 
  19. Worries & Regrets
     … He said he’d be happy to discuss the Dhamma, but he didn’t want to give house-blessings. That was for us younger monks. There was one time when one of his students invited him to her home, and I went along. The student’s sister—who’d been meditating with another teacher—had some meditation questions. She started out by saying, “The … 
  20. Love Me, Love My Defilements
     … There’s a passage in one of Ajaan Maha Boowa’s Dhamma talks where he’s saying to the monks, “Suppose the Buddha were able to see your defilements. Don’t you think he’d be disgusted?” I’ve heard people react to that, saying that the Buddha wouldn’t be disgusted with us. The Buddha would love us; he would be compassionate toward … 
  21. The Broken Gong
     … This is one of the reasons why the Buddha taught the Dhamma to begin with. People were suffering and they didn’t see that they had any choice in the matter. They felt they just had to suffer, to put up with it as part of life. You hear this now, again and again, even in Buddhist circles: Aging is part of life, so … 
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