Search results for: "Dhamma"

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  2. The Power of Choice
     … When the Buddha’s inviting you to practice the Dhamma, he’s inviting you to be more conscious of your choices so that you can make more intelligent ones, to stop focusing on things that you can’t change and to focus on the things that you can. Like right now, you have the choice to focus on just about anything at all. No … 
  3. What’s Relative, What’s Constant
     … I was listening to a Dhamma talk the other day in which someone was saying, “Consciousness has to be unconditioned. After all, how could one conditioned thing know another conditioned thing?” Well, that’s what actually happens: Knowing something is a conditioned process. The only thing that’s unconditioned is consciousness without surface, and that has no objects at all. All other consciousness is … 
  4. Staying Normal
     … One of the reflections for the monks says, “Days and nights fly past, fly past, what am I doing right now?” If the Buddha were to ask you this question right now, how would you answer? If you were able to answer, “I’m developing mindfulness, concentration, and discernment,” or what they call the four noble dhammas—virtue, concentration, discernment, and release—that would … 
  5. Into Position
     … But it was because he was bold in his aspirations that we actually have the Dhamma now. So the Buddha teaches us not only how to be here in the present moment, but also how to look at our lives in light of the fact that our actions shape our experience in this lifetime and the influence can go on into future lifetimes. And … 
  6. Concentration Work
     … After all, with those two principles of finding the Dhamma—you commit yourself to getting the mind still, and then you reflect: Is it still as it could be? Any potential for unstillness in there?—when you keep alert like this, then there’s the prospect for something special. The Buddha talks about different levels of equanimity. He divides them in different ways in … 
  7. Elephant Training
     … This is one of the reasons why we read, one of the reasons why we have Dhamma talks: to remind you that there are other ways of doing things, of conceiving things. The range of possibilities open to you is more than you might have thought up on your own. These are some of the benefits that come from training the mind. The image … 
  8. Here to Learn
     … In the meantime, we’ll gain a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong, but even for those who gain the Dhamma eye—in other words, those who gain stream-entry—there are still certain things they don’t understand about the duties. They’ve got the basic framework down. They have an idea of what’s on course and what’s … 
  9. Building a Home for the Mind
    The texts often talk about concentration as being a home for the mind—*vihāra-dhamma: *the place where the mind can settle in. Before you can settle in, though, you have to build a house. As Ajaan Lee said, the work in building this house is in the directed thought and evaluation. You find a topic that you like to think about, and then … 
  10. Joy in Getting It Right
     … As his students said, he made himself totally Dhamma. And he didn’t do that by not trying to be good, not trying to get it right. It was by trying to get it right that he could put himself in a position where he could finally let go of right and wrong safely, because he’d mastered things. He’d brought his mind … 
  11. The Ivory Intersection
     … One of the sad things in the way Dhamma is often taught—and this is not just here in America, sometimes you see it in Asia as well—is the downgrading of concentration, saying that concentration is a side path, a distraction, that it takes too long and is too hard for people who live busy lives. That wasn’t how the Buddha taught … 
  12. The Riddle Tree
     … like recollecting the Buddha, recollecting the Dhamma, the Sangha, contemplating of the body, developing thoughts of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, or equanimity. It’s really a personal matter which of these is going to work for you. There’s no one-size-fits-all kind of meditation. Breath meditation comes the closest to a universal object because, after all, we all have a breath … 
  13. Developing the Path
     … As the Buddha said, the Dhamma is nourished by committing yourself—in other words, truthfully practicing it as best as you can, as honestly as you can—and then by reflecting: What are the actual results you’re getting? It’s in the reflection that you learn. You can actually see: You did this, you got these results. When you’ve been trained in … 
  14. Use Your Defilements
     … Back at the beginning of the 20th century, a new set of Dhamma textbooks was published in Thailand for all the monks to study. The first textbook defined virtue as control over your words and deeds. No mention of the mind. This was brought to Ajaan Mun’s attention. He commented that what’s missing is the most important aspect of virtue, which is … 
  15. A Concentration Diet
    A Concentration Diet October 9, 2019 There’s a series of questions and answers that the Buddha used to teach the Dhamma to young novices. It starts with: “What is one?” “What is two?” “What is three?” and it goes all the way up to, “What is ten?” For example, “What is four?” The four noble truths. “What is five?” The five aggregates. “Eight … 
  16. Cut, Cut, Cut
     … Come next week to hear a Dhamma talk, and it will be about staying with the breath. Be right with what’s present in front of you, and don’t let things get complicated. That’s something we’re very good at—we let things get very complicated in our minds. That’s one of the meanings of papañca. We can add all kinds … 
  17. Playing by the Buddha’s Rules
     … One of the customs in Thailand is that when somebody dies, a book is often printed to be distributed at the funeral, either a Dhamma book or a book about some topic that the dead person liked when he or she was alive. The hut where I stayed had a whole pile of these. Almost always, there’d be a little biography at the … 
  18. Admirable Friendship, Inside & Out
     … the Dhamma eye that sees that “Whatever is subject to origination is all subject to cessation.” This doesn’t mean that whatever arises passes away. “Origination” usually refers to causes that come from within the mind. Cessation comes from dispassion. You learn how to train yourself to look at things in such a way that gives rise to dispassion. Then from the dispassion comes … 
  19. Letting Go
     … I’ll keep practicing the Dhamma.” And her refrain, over and over again, is that it’s bad to be worried at the point of death. Because after all, the mind will start latching on to its worries and then gets reborn in one of those halfway houses, those states where you’re obsessed about something and can’t let it go. In other … 
  20. Encouragement
     … But that’s not the way the Dhamma actually is. There’s a definite goal: nibbana. And as the Buddha said, it’s the highest happiness. I was reading recently a letter from someone who was teaching in India at a college that the Indians were trying to make as Western as possible. So they posted all sorts of encouraging 19th-century Western-style … 
  21. Infinite Good Humor
     … He’s talking to a king who had asked him, “Why did you ordain?” And Ratthapala gives these four Dhamma summaries. The first one is: The world is swept away; it does not endure. The king says, “What do you mean?” Ratthapala illustrates this principle with some questions about aging. He asks the king, “When you were young, were you strong?” The king says … 
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