Search results for: "Dhamma"
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- Mindfulness Gets Intimate… That’s why the Dhamma is a complete teaching. It’s not like an ostrich that says, ‘‘Okay, I’m going to pretend that death is not going to happen, or that it isn’t relevant to my life.” After all, the Buddha wasn’t an ostrich. He was said to have the all-around eye. And he took care of the problem of …
- Start Out Small… Ajaan Fuang once noted that we now have lots of books on meditation, lots of explanations, and in some ways it’s a help, but in other ways it’s a hindrance — a hindrance in that many of our perceptions and memories picked up from books and Dhamma talks clutter up the present moment. They actually get in the way of seeing what’s …
- Always Willing to Learn… The Buddha’s Dhamma talks, remember, were not just for giving information. They were also for urging, rousing, encouraging. Those are the verbs that were used: He was said to inform, urge, rouse, and encourage. One part information, three parts encouragement. You have to learn how to energize yourself. I remember years back, I had a friend in high school who went into ROTC …
- Observing the Mind at the Breath… If something is disturbing the mind, what can you do to undercut it? Sometimes working with the breath directly will help with that; sometimes you have to bring in other topics, like contemplation of the body, goodwill, any of the recollections—the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha; recollections of your own virtue, your own generosity, to give yourself a sense of self-worth; recollection …
- The Endurance of a Long-distance Runner“Patient endurance is the utmost austerity.” That’s the beginning of one of the Buddha’s famous Dhamma talks. Unfortunately, we don’t have the whole text of the talk, just the topics, so we don’t know exactly what he meant. But we can infer it from other passages in the Canon. Austerities back in those days were usually seen as means of …
- Sensitive to the Mind… This is where you think about the qualities of the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha, about how fortunate we are that this tradition has been maintained through all these years: the tradition of someone who really put his life on the line to find something that was more than the ordinary. Stop and think about how audacious the Buddha was: He aimed at nothing …
- Your Own Karma… recollection of the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha; your own past generosity, your own past virtue. You can recollect death when you’re getting lazy. Recollect the Buddha when you’re getting discouraged. Recollect the Sangha when you’re getting discouraged. Remember all the people who’ve trod this path in the past—people with lots more problems than you’re having right now …
- Clinging & Its Cure… Think of all those people who listen to a Dhamma talk by the Buddha and, at the end, they say, it’s magnificent, magnificent, like someone who’s carried a lamp into the dark, who’s turned upright things that were turned over. Just seeing things clearly explained in a way that makes sense and points to the fact that you can play a …
- Choices that Matter… I was listening to a Dhamma talk given recently by a monk in which he was talking about how when he was a young monk he suffered an accident. He realized that the worst thought that came to him as he was going through the accident was: He hoped nobody would see him doing the stupid move that caused the accident. And he observed …
- Ānāpānasati Day… The fourth tetrad has to do with mental qualities or dhammas. In this particular case, you breathe in and out focused on inconstancy. You breathe in and out focused on dispassion. You breathe in and out focused on cessation. And you breathe in and out focused on relinquishment. This is an expansion of the last step of the third tetrad, releasing the mind. Whatever …
- Do, Maintain, Use… As the Buddha said, you nourish the Dhamma by committing yourself to doing it and then reflecting on it. The more you can maintain the concentration, the deeper the reflection goes. So even though we tend to focus on the doing and the putting it to use, a lot of the work lies in the maintaining. As they say, genius is ten percent inspiration …
- The Kamma of Self & Not-self… But when you’re really honest with yourself, (and that’s the first prerequisite for the path; as the Buddha says, “Give me someone who’s honest, and I’ll teach that person the Dhamma,”) honestly looking at what you’re doing and what the results are, the point will have to come where you realize you’ve had enough. You’ve got to …
- The Water in Your Cup… Well, this doesn’t apply just to our opinions when we’re listening to the Dhamma. We go through the day with our cups full of water. Sometimes it is dirty water. In other words, we bring a lot of things to our encounters with other people, and simply our encounters with the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, tactile sensations, and what we bring often …
- The Karma of Perception… I’ve talked to Dhamma teachers who think that that’s actually a taste of awakening or the experience of awakening, but it’s just a perception. It’s a perception of space, and if you learn to hold it in mind, it requires good strong powers of concentration. This is why it’s developed after you’ve worked with the more blatant elements …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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