Search results for: "Dhamma"

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  2. The Right Time at the Right Place
     … One of the reasons we have those chants at the beginning of the meditation—about the parts of the body; sometimes we reflect on aging, illness, and death; sometimes we go through the Dhamma summaries: The world is swept away. It does not endure. It offers no shelter. There’s no one in charge. It has nothing of its own. One has to pass … 
  3. Clinging to Karmic Diarrhea
     … But if you see that living at your ease is not bad for the mind, okay the Buddha says, don’t reject any pleasure that accords with the Dhamma. And how do you know? You’ve got to learn how to pass judgment. This is one of the things we’re doing as we’re getting the mind to settle down: We’re learning … 
  4. Happily on the Path
     … So, what can you do in line with the Dhamma that would provide delight? Learn how to think positively about the goodness that comes with being generous and virtuous, getting the mind still, having some control over your thoughts, and then seeing the things that have eluded you for a long time. That’s what discernment is all about. We all want happiness. Everything … 
  5. Your Secret Foundation
     … You turn it into the Dhamma. And the spot where the transformation takes place is right here at your breath. If you didn’t do it with this breath, you’ve always got the chance to the next breath, and then the next, and then the next. The breath is very forgiving in that way. When you start seeing the breath as a process … 
  6. Break Things Down
     … Sariputta about what it means to fathom the Dhamma. Sariputta is quiet for a while. Then the Buddha asks him, “Have you seen that ‘this has come to be’?” That’s when Sariputta launches into quite a long discourse on seeing things as they’ve come to be—as individual events in the mind, individual habits, individual qualities in the mind. You see that … 
  7. The Challenge
     … That way, you build up your confidence both in yourself and in the Dhamma. It’s a gradual path. There are sudden insights that can come, but a lot of the path is just sticking with it, sticking with it, developing your patience. The stronger your patience, the better your concentration is going to be. The more experience you have with the path, the … 
  8. Directing & Not Directing the Mind
     … You can think about the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, or any other inspiring them. Think about the principle of karma— about why the mind needs to be trained. Or you can work with the breath itself, changing the way you breathe, changing the place where you focus, trying to use different concepts of the breath to see what creates a sensation of … 
  9. The Committee of the Mind
     … There was one Dhamma teacher I heard one time saying, “I don’t know about the end of suffering, but I’ve learned that suffering is manageable.” She called that the third-and-a-half noble truth, which is rating it too high. It’s not even half of a truth, and not at all noble. The Buddha wasn’t here just for pain … 
  10. To Know the Unconditioned
     … That’s why the very first verse in the Dhammapada says, “The mind is the forerunner of all things. *Mano-pubbaṅgamā **dhammā. Mano-seṭṭhā *mano-mayā. All phenomena are excelled by the mind. They’re made by the mind.” The problem is, our ordinary consciousness is something that’s fabricated, something we fabricate, and everything fabricated has to be stressful. That’s the nature … 
  11. The Value of Effort
     … Why not go for it? You read the great ajaans talking about how amazing the Dhamma is when you come across it. Ajaan MahaBoowa has a fine passage where he says that if you could actually take nibbana out and show it to everybody, nobody would want anything else. That’s what everybody would go for. But it’s not something that can be … 
  12. A Happiness Based Inside
     … This is why the Buddha said that honesty is the basic prerequisite for practicing the Dhamma: not only being honest with other people, but especially being honest with yourself—about what the mind is doing, where it’s trying to base its happiness, and the results it actually gets. This is why a good solid concentration practice requires both tranquility and insight, because neither … 
  13. Control from Within
     … We can reflect on the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha—the example they’ve set. We can reflect on our own goodness, the times in the past when we chose to do the right thing. We were generous when we didn’t have to be. Or we held by our principles when we didn’t have to. We made the right choice: That … 
  14. Inner Refuge
     … We depend on the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha to some extent as examples: This is how happiness is found, this is how people have found it in the past and other people are finding it in the present moment. But for genuine refuge, we have to take the qualities that they develop—mindfulness, alertness, concentration, discernment—and build them up inside. That … 
  15. A Home & a Mobile Home
    One of the standard terms for concentration is *vihara-dhamma, *which can be translated as “a home for the mind.” As you focus on the breath, you want to get the mind so that it feels at home here, in a home that’s solidly built and a good place to stay. Otherwise, the mind goes roaming out looking for scraps outside to give … 
  16. To Be Sure
     … Instead of looking inside and saying, “There still must be something wrong in what I’m doing,” you decide that there’s something wrong with the Dhamma. So this quality of the mind that’s so unreliable is really scary. You can make up your mind to do a lot of good because you want to help the world. But if the mind switches … 
  17. Discernment All Along
     … He often compares it to a manual skill, and that falls in line with the Buddha’s observation that you learn the Dhamma through commitment and reflection. For instance, Ajaan Lee says you can take silver, you melt it, and you can make it into different things. As you get better and better, your handicraft becomes more and more something you can use for … 
  18. Protest Your Virtue & Right View
     … They don’t want to hear the Dhamma. They don’t want to hear the Vinaya. In that way, the pursuit of power can actually close off the path. So the Buddha’s basically saying you have power within you to put an end to suffering if you understand the workings of your own mind. This is why we meditate. You could sit here … 
  19. Be Precise
     … Ajaan Suwat gave a Dhamma talk on how you should regard anything that comes to disturb your concentration as stress, as suffering, even though it may not seem all that onerous or heavy. That’s how the perfection of concentration leads to discernment, moving it into the four noble truths. But you don’t have to think in terms of the four noble truths … 
  20. Clear of Defilement
     … This is why the Buddha taught the Dhamma, the practice, in clusters of qualities. There’s no place where he said just one quality will take care of everything. Even when he talks about mindfulness as being the one quality that’s always skillful, it has to be used in conjunction with other qualities—alertness, discernment, right effort—if it’s going to be … 
  21. The Craft of the Heart
     … One of the most affecting passages in Ajaan Maha Boowa’s Dhamma talks is when he tells of how, when Ajaan Mun passed away, he felt totally lost. Here was the teacher he’d gone to many, many times for help. Now the teacher was gone. But as he sat and reflected on it for a while, he began to realize, “What about the … 
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