Search results for: "Dhamma"

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  2. Choosing Freedom
     … You can think about the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha. You can think about your own generosity. You can think about your own virtue. Maybe your virtue isn’t perfect, but there have been times when you’ve been good. You’ve done the honorable thing; you’ve acted on your principles. You could think thoughts of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity. Extend those … 
  3. Stay
    One of the basic principles of the Dhamma is, in Pali, Attā hi attano nātho. In English, it’s, “The self is its own mainstay.” In other words, you have to learn how to depend on yourself. One of the most disconcerting things in life is looking at yourself and seeing how undependable you can be, not only with regard to other people but … 
  4. Happy to Be Here
     … Whereas the pleasure that comes from the Dhamma is not like that. When you’ve done something good, you can think about it later and every time you think about it, it’s still good. When you’re thinking in this way, you realize that you have to really want to get involved in sensuality in order to stick with it. So why bother … 
  5. Indecision
     … So many of the Buddha’s lists of ways of explaining the Dhamma start with generosity. The three forms of merit or inner worth start with generosity. The talk that he would give to get people ready to hear the four noble truths starts with generosity. Here in the West when we learn about Buddhism, one of the first things we learn is the … 
  6. The Ennobling Path
     … Years back when I first came back to the States, I was giving a Dhamma talk one night, and there was a Russian emigrée in the group. And I had mentioned the topic of dignity in the talk. After the talk, she came up to me and she said, “You know, I’ve been in America all these years now. I learned the word … 
  7. The Dead Snake Around Your Neck
     … Once you can get your mind on the side of the Dhamma in this way, that’s half the battle right there. Because there’s a large part of the mind that says, “I don’t want to give up my lust or my anger or whatever. These have been my defenses. These have been my ways of finding entertainment in the past.” Again … 
  8. Training the Mind to Train the Mind
     … This is why, when you read the Dhamma talks of the Thai ajaans, a huge percentage of them are basically pep talks so that the listeners will stay motivated to be ardent in developing their minds, with a strong sense that the actions coming from the mind really do matter, and that it’s a good use of their time to learn how to … 
  9. Accepting the Way Things Function
     … After all, if the Dhamma were just, “Change happens and you have to accept it,” there wouldn’t be much in the Buddha’s teachings. And there wouldn’t be much worth in the Buddha’s teachings, either. So many people in his time were saying that human choice doesn’t make that much of a difference. But, as he said, if you believe … 
  10. Respect for Happiness
     … One of the Buddha’s terms for the mind when it settles down with the breath in the present moment is vihara dhamma, “a home for the mind.” A lot of us live like homeless people. The mind doesn’t have a place where it can find shelter, where it can feel safe. So you wander around, and you put up with all kinds … 
  11. Questioning & Conviction
     … So the knowledge of the Dhamma that you start out with is not really knowledge. It’s a conviction, a belief—an untested hypothesis that you’re going to test. But you decide it’s worth testing. It’s like being a scientist. There are lots of different hypotheses or theories a scientist could test, but the scientist has to focus on testing the … 
  12. Doing the Right Thing
     … This is good to know so that you don’t have to keep reinventing the Dhamma wheel every time you try to make a choice. You don’t kill; you don’t steal; you don’t have illicit sex; you don’t lie; you don’t take intoxicants. Period. Those are the big fences the Buddha puts around us to protect us. Then to … 
  13. A Warrior’s Strengths
     … You don’t have to keep reinventing the Dhamma wheel all the time. But as for the particulars, those you have learn on your own. And you have to be willing to learn in this way, because that’s where your discernment develops. Discernment comes in seeing cause and effect, and if you don’t see it on your own, the discernment never comes … 
  14. Wide-open Awareness
     … The pattern of light from the candle flame shining on your eyelids, the sounds in the background, the sounds of the Dhamma talk: Just leave those in the background. You don’t have to shut them off, but you don’t want to shift your focus to them, either. Keep your focus right here on the breath. You can choose any spot in the … 
  15. Becoming
     … You may have noticed as we were chanting the Sutta on Setting the Wheel of Dhamma in Motion just now: The craving that leads to further becoming is the craving that leads to suffering as well. The senior monk was reasoning from this point, saying that we should be trying to abandon states of becoming and birth, and yet here we are creating them … 
  16. Look at Yourself
     … Sometimes here at the monastery the unpleasantness seems even more blatant than outside because after all we’re all here to practice the Dhamma and yet we see how other people are not up to our standards. Sometimes it’s easier to deal with people who are out in the business world because you know they’re not necessarily there out of good motives … 
  17. Balancing Tranquility & Insight
     … And then finally the dhammas or mental qualities is the fourth. In each case, you’re sensitizing yourself to some aspect of fabrication. In the first tetrad, the fabrication is the in-and-out breath itself. You sensitize yourself to when the breath is short, when it’s relatively long. The text only says that much, but what you’re actually doing is learning … 
  18. Stop Squirming
     … When the Buddha gave his summary of the Dhamma to that meeting of 1,250 monks before sending them out to teach, the first thing he talked about was endurance, patience. That’s because these are the qualities of mind that allow us to comprehend stress, to see what it really is, to the point where we actually see what we’re doing that … 
  19. Dwellings
     … How could the Buddha be so ignorant? How could he really be Buddha if he would do something like that? He’d asked many different Dhamma teachers and had never gotten a satisfactory explanation. So he wanted to ask Ajaan Suwat. We arranged a meeting for him one afternoon at about four. Ajaan Suwat was sitting where I’m sitting right now; I was … 
  20. Reflections on Kamma
     … How could he boil down the essence of the teachings so that his son could understand it, put it into practice, and also have a lesson that would serve him well into his adulthood? So when all the concepts of the Dhamma start seeming to proliferate out of control, it’s good to come back to the basic principles—both for your own practice … 
  21. The Buddha’s Questions
     … When you feel confident that this is the sort of person you can trust, then you listen to that person’s Dhamma. One of the first questions he has you ask of a teacher is: “What is skillful and what is unskillful?” Then, when you’ve learned that from the teacher, you go off and practice on your own, but you keep on asking … 
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