Search results for: "Nibbana"
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- Even Animals Can Be Trained… There’s no nibbana raft or nibbana yacht to come and pick you up to take you there. You have to make a raft out of things you can find on this side of the river—the twigs and branches, which stand for the aggregates—and you hold on to the raft as you paddle your way across. Then, when you get the other …
- The Raft… The raft is something you have to put together yourself; you can’t wait for the nibbāna yacht to come from the other side to pick you up and take you over. You make a raft from the things you have right here: all the different fabrications in the body and mind. You’ve got the breath. That’s a part of the body …
- Remembering Ajaan Lee… that ultimately in nibbana even right view gets put aside. Nibbana doesn’t need right view or wrong view; it goes beyond the views. This is something a lot of people tend to forget. They think that the Buddha taught right view as the view of the enlightened mind. Well, the enlightened mind is something way beyond right view. There’s that story in …
- The Fourth Frame of Reference… As Ajaan Mun once said, nibbana carries no duty for the mind at all. Each of the four noble truths entails a duty, but nibbana is something beyond the four noble truths, something outside of the framework of the four frames of reference and their attendant duties. It’s not an activity in any way. So it’s helpful to look at this fourth …
- The Strength to See… We’d rather get swept straight to nibbana in waves of bliss. But it doesn’t work that way. If you’re going to get beyond suffering, you have to understand what it is, why it is, and how the mind creates it. This requires that we sit and look very steadily at two things we don’t like to look at: physical suffering …
- The Best News in the World… looking for. This is the event that we commemorate: that night when he gained those three knowledges and then found total release. There are many names for the deathless. Nibbana is the best known. Nibbana means the extinguishing of a fire. To understand that image, you have to understand how they saw fire back in those days. There was a belief that there was …
- Death Is Normal… This is one of the reasons why the Buddha chose nibbana as the name for the goal. Fires, in those times, were believed to be an expression of the fire element which, when it was provoked, would latch on to its fuel and then flame up, agitated and hot. But when it could let go of its fuel, then the fire would go out …
- Murderers, Vipers, & Floods, Oh My!… The raft stands for the noble eightfold path, and the far shore, of course, stands for nibbana. The near shore stands for self-identity. Everything you identify with is there. The five aggregates and the four elements, the sense spheres, everything that’s you or yours: That’s all on the near shore, and you create your self-identity out of that. But notice …
- Audacious & Undaunted… The tradition is that the Buddha was born on the full moon in May; thirty-five years after that, he gained awakening on the full moon in May; and forty-five years after that, he passed away in total nibbana on the full moon in May. So we’re celebrating three events at once. What we did just now is called amisa puja. We …
- Anumodana… And although the ultimate happiness, nibbana, doesn’t depend on other people, the path is nourished by the goodwill for other people, by empathetic joy for other people. We can help one another along the path in this way. So as you go through the brahmaviharas, take good note of empathetic joy. And as you go through the day and the monks give the …
- Factors for Awakening… seeing the awakening factors as a map of the enlightened mind. Many people think, “Well, all you need to do is arrive at equanimity and there you are: nibbana.” But that’s not the case. Nibbana is not the ultimate equanimity. It’s the ultimate happiness. Equanimity is part of the path. You gain equanimity toward all the things that are not important in …
- Stay Principled… Notice, the path doesn’t cause the end of suffering—or doesn’t cause nibbāna, let’s put it that way. Nibbana is something that’s totally uncaused, but the path leads you there. The basic elements in the path are virtue, concentration, and discernment. These are things you want to develop. You just don’t sit back and watch them come and go …
- Unparadoxical Happiness… As Ajaan Lee once said, the affairs of the world are hard because they require so much effort to maintain, but nibbāna is easy because it doesn’t require any effort at all. Once you get there, it’s there, period. You don’t have to maintain it. There’s nothing you have to do for it at all. Ajaan Mun even said that …
- Gaining the Dhamma Eye… They’re sure to reach nibbāna. Whatever rebirth they may still need to experience before then will be no lower than the human. These are the people who’ve seen the deathless through what they call “gaining the Dhamma eye.” Everyone else, the Buddha said, is uncertain. And being uncertain like this is not a good place to be. There’s no guarantee of …
- Discipline Is a Choice… There’s a path that leads to nibbana. Most of us jump around from one path to another. It’s as if we have a little helicopter that picks us up and puts us on one path. Then it picks us up again and puts us on another path. That helicopter is something we’ve got to watch out for, because it requires that …
- Questioning the Hindrances… As Ajaan Lee once said, monks can sit and meditate until they die buried in heaps of yellow robes and still not reach nibbana. Lay people can sit and meditate until their backs are all bent over and still not reach nibbana—if they’re not observant. You take the technique, develop it, and you use it as an opportunity to catch the mind …
- A Sense of Entitlement… At that time the Thai Buddhist hierarchy had decided that the way to nibbana was closed. Nobody seemed to be going that way — that was the official line. They even had made a survey of meditation temples to prove it. And Ajaan Mun had to prove single-handedly that it wasn’t true, so you can imagine what he was up against — not only …
- Going Out of Your Way… As the Buddha said, if you’re stingy with material things, stingy with the Dhamma, there’s no way you’re going to get into the jhanas—and no way, of course, you’re going to get into nibbana. So it’s good to reflect: How often do you go out of your way for other people? Of the forms of goodness, it’s …
- More than Ordinary Heedfulness… As for nibbana, it has no body and it’s the ultimate happiness. So turn around and look at your attachment to the body and ask yourself, “Is this something I really want to hold on to?” When you realize that you could actually be freed from the limitations of the body, then you’re more likely to follow the path that would free …
- Working with Nature… After all, the mind that’s just left to its own devices is not going to get to nibbana. Sometimes it may, by a fluke, get into concentration, but if you’re not paying careful attention, you’ll fluke out of it as well. So it’s a combination of knowing what to do and what not to do. The things to do are …
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