Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. A Victory that Matters
     … That’s your experience of suffering. We each suffer; however, we can’t feel another person’s suffering. We can sometimes sense that they’re suffering, although we can’t actually feel their pain. We only can feel ours. It’s the subjective experience. The Buddha points out that the suffering that really weighs down on the mind is not the suffering that comes … 
  3. Karma for Freedom
     … After all, the Buddha’s teachings are about how to free you from suffering. His teachings on karma are designed to free you from suffering. They explain how and why it can be done. If you had to suffer from the past, then Buddha wouldn’t be able to help you. It’s because you don’t have to suffer, and the fact that … 
  4. Duties
     … So the Buddha offers you these as tools for analyzing what’s going on when you’re suffering. Learning how to look at your suffering in these ways helps you to step back and depersonalize it, de-romanticize it. These tools, these categories, give you a handle for understanding these things. So it’s a good task trying to comprehend your suffering in those … 
  5. Mindful Judgment
     … And it starts with understanding what suffering is—as in the chant just now. It says we don’t discern suffering, which sounds kind of strange. After all, everybody knows that there’s suffering. It’s one of the most basic facts of being aware. Being a conscious agent, we’re bound to come into pain, suffering, mental suffering, physical pain. These things just … 
  6. Contentment
     … No matter how many conceptual edifices you build up, if suffering is still there, you haven’t solved the problem—because the Buddha said that there is the possibility of no more suffering. When he says he teaches suffering and the end of suffering, do you really believe in him? Some people say there’s a wisdom in learning how to accept the fact … 
  7. Factors for Stream Entry
     … Appropiate attention means basically looking at things in terms of the four noble truths, seeing how whatever teaching you’ve learned from the Dhamma applies to the problem of suffering in your life: Where are you suffering? And what are you doing to cause that suffering? Notice that’s the question: What are you doing? We don’t blame the suffering on things outside … 
  8. Suffering Starts Before Life
    That old belief that “life is suffering is the first noble truth” keeps coming back from the dead, even though people keep pointing out the fact that the Buddha never said that. If life is suffering, then what’s the cure going to be? Dying? Actually, the Buddha’s definition of suffering was more specific and much more helpful: Suffering is the five clinging … 
  9. Admirable Friendship
     … As for the cessation of suffering, we don’t really notice it at all because we’re all too busy going out creating new suffering all the time. So we have to change our ways. It’s because something in us is honest enough to see that we’re suffering and is willing to admit, “Yes, I’m at least part of the cause … 
  10. Relationships
     … The skillful part is whatever leads you away from suffering. So, say, when you have difficulties in a relationship, just look at what are the good parts and what are the bad parts. What are the skillful parts of your feelings about this other person, and what are the parts that cause suffering? And remember the Buddha’s analysis of suffering. Clinging to the … 
  11. In Context
     … The truth that suffering is clinging is something you should try to comprehend. Try to comprehend the suffering itself in the act of the clinging. The cause of suffering, craving, is something you should try to abandon. The cessation of suffering, which comes with the cessation of craving, is something you want to realize. And the path is something to develop. Those are the … 
  12. Right Learning
    The Buddha once said that all he taught was suffering and the end of suffering. The reason he taught suffering was so that he could show how to end it. So it all comes down to one thing: the end of suffering. It’s important to remember that every time we meditate. That’s the one thing we’re focusing on: putting an end … 
  13. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … All too often you hear people say, “The Buddha taught that life is suffering.” He never said that. He said something a lot more precise. He went through the different aspects of life that are suffering. Aging is suffering. Illness is suffering. Death is suffering. You can’t argue with that. Not getting what you want is suffering. Having to be with things you … 
  14. Always Willing to Learn
     … Stress or suffering is to be comprehended. In other words, you have to understand it to the point of dispassion: no passion, no aversion, no delusion around it. The Buddha defines suffering as clinging to the aggregates. The clinging there is desire and passion. When you comprehend that, you comprehend suffering. Then the cause of suffering is craving, which is also desire and passion … 
  15. Samvega for Samsara
     … The Buddha has you focus on the suffering in all this because he wants you to abandon your clinging for this sort of thing. He’s not saying that life is suffering, but he is saying that there is suffering in this process of wandering on, becoming a being. After all, arahants are alive yet they don’t suffer. It’s just that they … 
  16. Duties
     … It can see things a lot more clearly and understand what it’s doing inside that’s creating suffering for itself. After all, that’s the message of the four noble truths: There may be pains caused by the world outside—hurtful words, hurtful situations—but the real suffering that stabs at the mind is the suffering we add to things outside. The Buddha … 
  17. Prerequisites for the Practice
    There are two factors that the Buddha said are most helpful in putting an end to suffering: one external; one internal. The external factor is admirable friendship. The internal one is appropriate attention. And even though one is outside and the other is inside, they’re very closely connected. Admirable friendship means not only finding good people to be friends with, but also emulating … 
  18. You Can Do Better
     … The duty with regard to suffering itself, if you really want to put an end to it, is to comprehend it, to see how the desire and passion of clinging, focused on the aggregates, is what actually constitutes suffering. You want to comprehend that, because most of the times when we’re suffering, we’re not thinking in terms of, “Gee, I’m clinging … 
  19. The Brightness of Life
     … There’s the suffering and then there’s the activity that causes the suffering. There are the activities that form a path that would lead us to the end of suffering. Notice, the Buddha doesn’t talk about the “causes” of the end of suffering. He talks about a path going there. It’s an important distinction. You can’t cause the end of … 
  20. The Center of Your Life
     … We all want happiness but we suffer. In fact, many of the things we do to find happiness actually cause us to suffer. Not only do they cause us to suffer, they cause other people to suffer as well. It’s because we don’t understand why there’s suffering and what we’re doing to cause suffering: That’s why we’re not … 
  21. The Dhamma Eye
     … As for the suffering that comes, we tend to see it as an enemy. But the Buddha wants us to look at the suffering to comprehend it, to realize that we can learn from it. In other words, to that extent, the suffering is a friend. We can learn from these things if we look at our suffering simply as the way we cling … 
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