Search results for: "Dhamma"

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  2. Renunciation
     … And particularly if you’ve really seen the true Dhamma, as the Buddha said, that totally ends your fear of death. You know that there’s something there that can be touched inside, that’s not subject to time or space. Because death happens in time and space, this thing is not touched by the death, or aging, or the illness, or the birth … 
  3. Single-minded
     … We take refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, but on the outside level, they’re just examples. They’re not the actual refuge. The true refuge comes from the qualities you build into the mind, that you develop in the mind. Those qualities require focus, they require your attention, they have to have top priority. In other words, you have to … 
  4. The Desire for Freedom
     … The Dhamma we have now comes from that kind of person. The Buddha didn’t teach simply the way to manage suffering. The third noble truth is the cessation of suffering—total. That’s what he was able to find, and he found it because he didn’t let himself rest content with anything less. His samvega was coupled with pasada—confidence that there … 
  5. Don’t Just Fatten Your Mind
     … As the Buddha said, he doesn’t deny that some sensual pleasures can be in accord with the Dhamma. But it’s an issue for each one of us to figure out which are okay for us and which are not. There are some general principles. The pleasures that come from going out into nature are relatively harmless, as are the pleasures of solitude … 
  6. Analysis of Qualities
     … Ajaan Fuang had a nice passage in one of his Dhamma talks where he said that if you have doubts about things, just ask yourself, “Is the breath coming in, is the breath going out, or is it still?”—something that’s right there. And if you can doubt this, he said, you’re going to doubt everything in life. So at least you … 
  7. What Makes Concentration Right
     … As he said, “Bring me someone who’s honest and observant, and I’ll teach that person the Dhamma.” To learn the path, you can hear what the Buddha has to say, you can read what the ajaans have to say, but to follow the path you have to learn how to observe your own mind, watch your own body in and of itself … 
  8. Rehab Work
     … The Buddha often compares his Dhamma to medicine. He’s a doctor. The medicine is not a chemical compound. It’s more like a rehab process. You’re rehabilitating your body. You’re rehabilitating your mind—because the mind has its diseases, too, you know: the diseases of greed, aversion, and delusion. We wound ourselves with things we do under the influence of these … 
  9. Representing the World to Itself
     … Here again, the Dhamma gives you some ideas of where you can look or how you can question your current perceptions. But it’s that willingness to try out something else: That’s how you grow. We start with something simple like this, like the breath. There are lots of different ways you can represent the breath to yourself, lots of different ways you … 
  10. A Clean Break at Death
     … What’s going to happen to you after death? The only way to really overcome that uncertainty is to gain the Dhamma eye, to practice to the point where you really see there is a deathless, that the Buddha was right. He wasn’t just talking about abstract ideas. There is a direct experience of the deathless, and you can experience it, too. Once … 
  11. Study & Practice
     … One is through listening to the voice of another person teaching the Dhamma. The other is through your own appropriate attention, i.e., looking at your actions and figuring out what’s working, what’s not. But even if the inspiration comes from the voice of another, the voice of another can’t do the work for you. You take what you learn and … 
  12. Mindful of Karma
    As you’re meditating here, don’t listen to the Dhamma talk. Let it be in the background. Your main duty is to focus on the breath, to stay with the breath. Drop all your other preoccupations, all your other worries and concerns. You’re taking advantage of the fact that you have choice in the present moment. You can choose to focus on … 
  13. Worldly Effort
     … Everybody comes to the Dhamma looking for a compromise, hoping that they can find the compromise. This idea wasn’t invented by Americans. It’s the way everybody comes. We all come with our attachments, we all come with our preconceived notions, hoping that we can hold on to this, hold on to that, so that we can have our cake and eat it … 
  14. Happy to Be Here
     … So be patient as you put the mind in a calm mood, with whatever Dhamma theme helps calm you down, and then bring that calm mind to the concentration. In doing this, you’re employing all the different kinds of fabrication the Buddha talked about. There’s the breath itself, with is bodily fabrication, and then there’s the way you talk to yourself … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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