Search results for: "Dhamma"

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  2. Look After Yourself with Ease
     … The Dhamma is for people who see that they’re causing their own suffering and want to learn the skills to stop doing that. As the Buddha said, to act for your own benefit, one, you try to overcome your passion, aversion, and delusion; and, two, you observe the precepts. It’s interesting: We tend to think of the precepts as ways of protecting … 
  3. Attachment to Views
     … Remember the four noble dhammas? Noble virtue, noble concentration, noble discernment, and noble release. The first three are for the sake of the last. The release is the essence of the teaching. It’s the core, the heartwood of the teaching. That’s where this is all aimed. Everything else is right or wrong as it helps in that direction. This is why when … 
  4. Breathing through Daily Life
     … So while you’re here, you don’t have to listen to the Dhamma talk — just listen to your breath. What kind of breathing feels good right now? Use your imagination. Say, “Well, how about breathing like that? How about breathing like this?” and then see what happens. This way you get to know the breath in ways you might not have otherwise. If … 
  5. Skills to Take Home
     … Your mind can stay with the Dhamma.” Although it may be disconcerting at first to have that sense of separation, you find that it is for the sake of your own true health, your own true happiness. Just as when you’re meditating and a thought comes up and you say: “Well, is that so? Is that so?” you can ask the same thing … 
  6. Trust Your Desire for Happiness
     … There’s a classic statement about the Dhamma, that it’s adi-kalyanam majjhe-kalyanam pariyosana-kalyanam: good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end. The Buddha never asked you to do anything mean or spiteful or ignoble. The path builds on good qualities and it leads to good results. So even if you don’t go all the way … 
  7. What Am I Becoming?
     … So try to become timeless in the way you hold on to the path, so that regardless of which day of the year the question is asked—“What am I becoming right now?”—the answer is, “I’m becoming a Dhamma practitioner. I’m becoming a person on the path who stays on the path.” Ajaan Lee has a nice passage about how most … 
  8. Up for the Challenge
     … I’m not going to let myself be fooled by the defilements ever again.” Think of Ajaan Mun’s very last Dhamma talk, where he compares the practice to going into battle, where different aspects of the practice correspond to different aspects of battles: Discernment is the weapons. Concentration is the food. Then, there’s the soldier. The soldier is the determination not to … 
  9. Make the Most of What You’ve Got
     … After all, the path itself is a kind of fabrication—the ultimate fabricated dhamma, the Buddha said. It can take you to something unfabricated, which means it doesn’t create the goal, but it takes you there. Just like the road to the ocean doesn’t create the ocean, but if you follow it, you get there. You don’t pick up the road … 
  10. Choiceful Awareness
     … There’s a Dhamma talk where Ajaan Lee mentions that you don’t want to spread the moving energy around. He’s talking about this second stage, where there’s just a sense of fullness, stillness, lightness, pleasure. Sometimes, paradoxically, the fullness feels empty, but there’s a sense that it feels really good. You allow it to spread around. Let it spread through … 
  11. Discernment Through Right Effort
     … It’s possible to read Dhamma books and then not do anything with the knowledge. But that’s not what the knowledge is meant for. It’s meant to be put to use to bring about true happiness. If you don’t put it to use in that way, that’s a sign of lack of intelligence. You can also see it as a … 
  12. Like a River Full of Water
    When Ajaan Suwat gave Dhamma talks during the meditation, he’d usually start out by saying to approach the meditation with an attitude of respect, an attitude of confidence, because we’re doing something important here. We’re not just sitting here breathing. We’re training the mind to find true happiness. And that’s an activity you want to respect. To begin with … 
  13. Admirable in the Beginning, Middle, & End
     … There are so many people who say that the Dhamma is pessimistic because it focuses on suffering, but that’s not the case at all. The whole point is that you can put an end to suffering, which is very optimistic. It gives you hope: There’s a way out, and it’s within your power to get there. If somebody else were making … 
  14. Fully Absorbed
     … In fact, you don’t even have to listen to this Dhamma talk. It’s here as a fence, so that if the mind leaves the breath, it runs into the fence and turns back. Remember the quality of jhana. The word *jhayati, *which is the verb related to the word jhana, has two meanings. One, it means to do jhana. Two, it means … 
  15. Negotiating with the Committee
     … We talked today about that Dhamma wheel out front, the one that has too many spokes. Well, the one inside here has the right number: twelve spokes. Each of the four noble truths has its duty, which you have to master as a skill. You want to learn how to comprehend stress, to abandon its cause, to realize its cessation, and to develop the … 
  16. Discernment Performs
     … Even Dhamma teachings can be misused. There’s that famous image of the snake. You want a snake—maybe you have some use for its venom—and so you have to catch it. But if you catch the snake by the tail, it’s going to come around and bite you. You have to catch it by the neck and then, even though it … 
  17. The Treasure of Equanimity
     … Then there’s learning, learning the Dhamma, as it applies to your life, so that you can remember it and use it when situations call for it. There’s generosity. The act of giving a gift broadens the mind, makes the mind more expansive, as you take into consideration the needs of other people and try to help those needs. And finally discernment: the … 
  18. Luminous
     … But as the Buddha said, the Dhamma is nourished by committing yourself to it and then reflecting. This luminous quality of the mind is what allows you to reflect. That’s another passage that’s controversial. It turns out that that passage about the luminous mind is found only in the Pali Canon. None of the other early versions of the Canon have it … 
  19. Healing Awareness
     … Get on good terms with it, and it’ll teach the mind a lot of things it needs to know—because the breath, as Ajaan Lee said in one of his Dhamma talks, is a mirror for the mind. It responds very quickly to what the mind is doing. So it’s a good topic for becoming sensitive to what your awareness is like … 
  20. The Skill of Patience
     … Many of them had gained awakening simply by listening to one Dhamma talk, and now he was going to send them out to teach to spread the word. So he reviewed some of the basic principles, and he started with patient endurance. This, of course, is a skill that we’ve lost in our modern culture. I was reading the other day that for … 
  21. Patience & Urgency
     … We like to think ideally that we’re all great Dhamma warriors, and with any issue that comes up, we should be brave and handle it. But as any skilled warrior knows, you can’t take on any enemy at any time. You have to choose your battles. You have to be prepared. An important lesson that many of our leaders tend to forget … 
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