Search results for: "Nibbana"
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- Determined to Make a Difference… I keep running into people who say, “How can nibbāna be permanent? After all, if something is permanent, it’s self, right? And there’s no self.” Or they believe that to say nibbana is permanent is a kind of eternalism. The Buddha never taught that way. He never talked about an eternal self—the idea of an eternal self he classed as an …
- Investing in Noble Wealth… Then you look at all the other areas where you might expend effort and ask yourself, “Can they really compare?” Part of the problem, of course, is that the Buddha couldn’t bring out nibbana to show it to everybody. Ajaan Maha Boowa has said that if he could, nothing else in the world would ever have any takers. Everybody would be going for …
- Rooted in Desire… The only thing that’s not rooted in desire is nibbāna, unbinding. But the path that gets you there is rooted in desire. As the Buddha said, it’s fabricated. From what? From the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, perceptions and feelings. So, you’re right here at the basics. And as you get to know these basics in the …
- Skills to Make a Difference… Even though nibbāna is not a dualism, it really is not the same thing as saṁsāra. Saṁsāra is a process by which we create suffering again and again and again. We keep on going, going, going, creating new worlds and then moving into them, causing suffering for ourselves and for others. Nibbāna is the ending of that process. Those are two very different things …
- Analyzing Suffering… In other words, you take all aggregates, regardless, as means to an end, an end that is not aggregates, i.e., the end, which is nibbana. This is a subtle, but a very important, shift. You take all this process of holding on to the aggregates and you hold on to them in a new way, not with the obsessiveness of clinging, but you …
- To Delight in the Path… The other aspect of nibbana that the Buddha has you delight in is the fact that it’s what he calls non-objectification. It’s a technical term. The Pali term for objectification, papañca, sometimes is translated as “proliferating thoughts,” but the Buddha doesn’t talk about papañca in terms of how many thoughts arise. It’s the type of thoughts that are the …
- Right Inner Speech… You can’t use nibbana in order to practice the path, because nibbana’s not something you can use. It’s something totally outside of cause and effect. So what does that leave? It leaves the five khandhas. So you learn how to make use of them. You take these khandhas, which ordinarily we cling to, and you turn them into a path. In …
- Working Hypotheses… Now there’s a lot more to total release, total nibbana, than just the fact that it’s a deathless happiness, but that’s the aspect he explained to get people on the path. He took something we’re doing all the time—shaping our experience—and asked, “What if you tried to shape it in the most skillful way possible? What would that …
- A Questioning Attitude… You can get very good at maintaining a state of equanimity, and of course you can really get attached to that equanimity to the point where you get people nowadays saying that equanimity is nibbana. For some reason this issue has come up quite a lot in the past two months. There was even a Dhamma teacher who went over to Burma a couple …
- Twigs & Branches… If it’s all about anything, it’s all about nibbana. As for everything else, you use distinctions between what helps you get to nibbana and what gets in the way. So you have to fabricate the thinking. Fabricate those value judgments that will help you make distinctions and decide: “Is this heading in the right direction, or is it heading in the wrong …
- Smoothing It… The last two things you delight in are aspects of nibbana. One is that it’s unafflicted and it causes no affliction to anybody. Nobody is harmed—you’re not harmed; you don’t harm anybody else. Think of all the various pleasures in life that cause harm, like the fact that we have to eat. All of our needs for the basic requisites …
- The Prison Break… As Ajaan Fuang once said, if we could take nibbana by storm, everyone would have gone there a long time ago. It’s because it’s delicate work that we haven’t gotten there yet. So learn how to take some delight in the delicate work. This is why the Buddha taught so much about the path in detail. He didn’t teach much …
- Endurance & Restraint… That’s expressed in the next line in the summary, which was about nibbana. Nibbana is the ultimate goal; patient endurance is the ultimate means to that goal. Think about that. We sometimes think that by putting up with difficult situations we’re being weak and unassertive. But here the Buddha is saying that that skill is connected with something really high: the total …
- Circumspection… Instead of talking about the wonders of oneness, emptiness, or nibbana, he tells you how to get to nibbana, to true happiness. He focuses on very particular things. His thinking was strategic. He saw that you can’t attack the problem of suffering straight on. You attack it through its causes: That’s strategic thinking. Sometimes even his way of attacking the causes is …
- Strength of Conviction… This could be taken as a destination, something that would not change. “The permanent” is one of the epithets for nibbana. “Nibbana” itself is an epithet—it means “unbinding.” Others are “harbor,” “refuge,” “security,” “the unaging,” “the undying.” That’s what we have faith in. As long as you haven’t touched that, it’s good to remind yourself: This is a possibility. Take …
- Not-self as a Raft… And his answer was, “Nibbana is nibbana.” He said that if you label it as self or not-self, you’re—in his terms—putting shit all over something that’s really pure. There’s no sense of self there, but even the perception of not-self, that’s part of the path. It’s not part of the attainment. He said it’s …
- The Skill of Letting Go… Some people actually think that it’s nibbana. It seems like cessation. Based on this experience, they say, “There is no self,” because they don’t sense anything there at all. But it’s just blanking out. The Buddha didn’t teach the Big Sleep, he taught awakening—which is something entirely different. So, it’s important that you understand the skill of letting …
- The Truth of Transcendence… So her conclusion was that release, too, is caused; therefore, she said, nibbana is also a conditioned phenomenon—it comes and goes—and she claimed to be able to dip into nibbana whenever she wanted to, with the mature realization that it wasn’t going to last. She presented this as if it were good news. Again this is missing the whole image of …
- Loss… In part of the dialogue, the deva says, “Why are you giving up what’s immediately available for something that’s unsure?” And the monk says, “I actually gave up something that was unsure for something that’s immediately available.” In other words, the pleasures of the senses are unsure, whereas nibbana, when you find it, is right here. And it’s not going …
- The Uses of Concentration… When you do, you’re right in the presence of nibbana.
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