Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. Friends with Pain
     … That chant we had just now, “Those who don’t discern suffering”: You think, “Who in the world doesn’t discern suffering?” We know it, we experience it, but we don’t discern it. That’s the problem. We don’t really look into it. The first thing that happens when pain comes is that we think, “How do you get rid of it … 
  3. A Concentration Diet
     … But even then, as long as the mind is in the position where it has to eat, it’s going to suffer. As the Buddha said, suffering is the five clinging-aggregates, and the word for clinging—upadana—can also mean to take sustenance, to feed. When you’re in a position where you have to feed on things, no matter how good they … 
  4. Three Perceptions
    Three Perceptions August 21, 2007 Almost any book on Buddhism will tell you that the three characteristics — the characteristic of inconstancy, the characteristic of stress or suffering, and the characteristic of not-self — were one of the Buddha’s most central teachings. The strange thing, though, is that when you look in the Pali Canon, the word for “three characteristics,” ti-lakkhana,doesn’t … 
  5. Dealing with Pain
     … Here we are, trying to gain release from suffering, so why are we putting ourselves through pain? Well, even though the word for pain and suffering and stress is the same in Pali—it’s dukkha—the Buddha focused on one particular type of dukkha: not physical pain, mental pain. And the mental pain is caused by our own actions. We hold on to … 
  6. Dispassion Isn’t Depression
     … You already have the skills or lack of skills that are going to determine, when you get the raw materials, what you’re going to do with them and how much suffering or lack of suffering you’ll experience. So here, as part of the path, we’re developing better skills. We’re becoming more sensitive to how we fabricate things. We fabricate them … 
  7. The End of Karma
     … There are places where he said it’s a dimension that’s beyond description, beyond the limits of what words can convey, but he does talk about it to the extent of helping you see that it is very positive, and it’s a place that really is the end of all suffering. And it doesn’t end suffering by snuffing you out. It … 
  8. Visakha Puja
     … He found an end to suffering. He found the deathless here. His breath is the same as your breath—the difference, of course, is the difference in the mind. Tonight is Visakha Puja. It’s the night on which we commemorate three important events in the Buddha’s life, three important events in the history of the world. The first was his birth, which … 
  9. The Bowl of Oil
     … The Buddha taught a very pessimistic doctrine, all about suffering—nihilism.” Of course, the real issue was that the Westerners didn’t understand what the Buddha taught, and it was the Asians over there who did. The Buddha’s teachings are very happy. They offer a way of understanding life so that you can put an end to suffering, and it works. They see … 
  10. A Post by the Ocean
     … It can help eliminate a lot of suffering even before you come to the end of suffering. And that’s quite an accomplishment right there.
  11. The World Is Swept Away
     … This illustrates the second of the three characteristics, the stress and suffering that come along with change — in other words, the natural change of the body. When you’re in pain, you have to suffer it on your own. Then the third characteristic, of not-self: “The world has nothing of its own; one has to pass on leaving everything behind.” The king has … 
  12. The Buddha’s Tools
     … They keep coming back to suffering and more suffering and more suffering. It’s not a case of laying the blame on anybody. There’s a lot of blame in one-lifetime stories, but when there are thousands of lifetimes, many, many thousands of lifetimes, the whole question of who harmed whom, and who was most outrageous in their harm, loses meaning. What meaning … 
  13. Possessiveness
     … Harmfulness would be the attitude that you don’t really care whether people suffer or not. You mistreat them not out of ill-will, but simply out of callousness, thinking that they don’t matter or that your own suffering from your own unskillful karma wouldn’t matter. You have to tame these attitudes: Develop thoughts of compassion instead, so that you can get … 
  14. Looking for Happiness Inside
     … Shortly before he died— he’d been in a bad automobile accident and suffered brain damage—he was commenting that his mind was sending him a lot of strange perceptions, his brain wasn’t functioning properly. But at least he had the mindfulness to know that it was strange and not to fall for whatever the brain was sending him. He stopped for a … 
  15. Determined to Be Undefeated by Death
     … Now as I often say, when you meditate, you’re preparing how to grow ill, how to age, and how to die without suffering. And that will require the same kind of determination. As we live, we live dependent on strength of body and strength of mind. But strength of body is going to deteriorate, and it does it without asking permission, and it … 
  16. What’s Getting in the Way
     … What would that be like? What would it be like to really see, as the Buddha says, that the best way to think about suffering is to see it as the act of clinging to the five aggregates. By defining suffering in this way, he’s giving you a handle on how to understand it, how to take it apart. Yet even just these … 
  17. Looking Inward
     … But if we turn around and look inside, we find that we can deal with the issue of why we’re suffering, and deal with it successfully, because it comes from our own lack of skill. Our experience of the present moment is actually composed of three things: input from past actions; our own present actions, our own present intentions; and then, finally, the … 
  18. Wisdom, Compassion, Purity
     … being able to use that concentration to see what’s going on in the mind—where you’re causing yourself unnecessary suffering; what you’re doing that’s getting in the way of finding the happiness whose potential lies within. The Buddha wasn’t operating from the position that we’re all basically good or that we’re all basically bad. As you notice … 
  19. Work & Play
     … To begin with, it gives you a good place to stay so you can actually watch suffering and stress. Our duty with regard to the suffering and stress is to comprehend it. If you feel threatened by it, you’re not going to be able to stay with it long enough to comprehend it. There will always be the wish either to push it … 
  20. Insight Is a Judgment Call
     … We’re holding on to things that are making us suffer. How do we get released from them? We don’t wait for them to let us go. We learn to let them go. And we do that by passing judgment on what we’re doing as to whether it’s worth doing or not. The Buddha illustrates this with the analogy of a … 
  21. Discernment on the Path
     … He said he taught suffering and the end of suffering, or stress and the end of stress. We want to comprehend the reality of the suffering so that we can develop the path that leads to the end of stress. The teachings are all aimed at that course of action. Those are the things you want to look for as you meditate: What are … 
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