Search results for: "Dhamma"
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- Advice for a New Monk… You don’t have to listen to the Dhamma talk. Just focus on the sensation of the breathing. Allow the breathing to be comfortable. Think of good breath energy filling every cell of your body as you breathe in, bad breath energy flowing out as you breathe out, so that the breath is nourishing and cleansing. This way both body and mind will benefit …
- Stern Kindness… They don’t want to hear the Dhamma. So it’s a snowballing effect. The more you harm other people, the more you get into a world of unreality. But even if you’re a relatively moral ruler, you’ve still got those problems of aging, illness, and death, which correspond to the Buddha’s teachings on inconstancy, stress, and not-self. When the …
- Intent… I’ve got my work that I have to attend to.” And the Buddha said, “You can still meditate.” In Mahanama’s case, he recommended some of the recollections, such as recollection of the Buddha or Dhamma. You can get the mind into good concentration that way, but the same principle also applies to the breath. It’s something you can meditate on all …
- A Sense of Direction… You can recollect the Dhamma, you can recollect the Buddha, the Sangha. You can recollect the good that you’ve done in being generous, observing the precepts. If that doesn’t help, you can try thinking of any of the chants you’ve memorized. Run those through your mind. Or visualize a bright light in front of you. If that doesn’t work, get …
- Filling in the Buddha’s Outline… He’s not leaving you to keep re-inventing the Dhamma wheel all the time, but he does expect you to use your powers of discernment, your powers of observation. Otherwise, if everything were all laid out—insert tab A into slot B, where everything is precut and all you have to do is assemble it—it’d be a foolproof practice, but you …
- Right View… How do you know which is which? Well, you have to look for yourself at your own actions, but the Buddha’s not forcing you to reinvent the Dhamma wheel. He gives you some guidance. When Ven. Sariputta talked about skillful and unskillful actions, he started out with some very basic do’s and don’ts. Killing, he says, is unskillful. Stealing, illicit sex …
- Dedicating Goodness, Spreading Goodwill… And every year when they did the commemoration, they’d invite a senior monk, either a one from Bangkok or an ajaan from the forest tradition, to give the final Dhamma talk that closed the ceremonies. And that year it was going to be a senior monk from Bangkok. The time came for the talk and he wasn’t there. A phone call came …
- How Much Concentration Is Enough?… That’s when all your doubts about the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha are gone. The Buddha really did teach something that’s timeless. He knew what he was talking about, and it wasn’t a teaching that depended on his culture or his time. The teaching really does have something of essence, something of solid value here. But it requires that you …
- Three Levels of Effort… Another term for meditation is vihara dhamma. It means literally a home—the qualities of mind that you can take as your home—and if your home’s not comfortable, you’re not going to want to stay there. So you move in and figure out: What do you want in this house? Where do you want light? Where do you want your sofa …
- Self-starting… I was translating one of his Dhamma talks recently. As you know, Ajaan Chah is usually characterized as having one teaching: Let go. Well, there’s a lot more to Ajaan Chah than you might suspect. There’s a monk who’s come to see him and talks about how much he wants to get his mind to calm down. Ajaan Chah doesn’t …
- The First Noble Truth… Make it a larger voice in your decisions as to when to meditate, when to read the Dhamma, when to turn off the TV, when to turn off the Internet—in other words, when to do the things that you know are actually good for you. Try to develop that sense of self as much as you can. There will come a point further …
- Complexities of the Mind… Ajaan Mun, in his last Dhamma talk, made the comparison. He says all the other aspects of the practice are like food and other supplies for a soldier in battle, but discernment is what actually does the work. We’re trying to develop our discernment. It takes time. And the development of discernment and the development of concentration have to go hand-in-hand …
- A Pure Happiness… The word “dhamma,” which is often used to describe what you experience, can mean “action”; it can mean “event.” And you notice after a while that the big abstractions that threaten to overwhelm you actually come down to just little movements in your mind: little actions, little events. A little bit of distraction, a little bit of greed, a little bit of sleepiness, whatever …
- Equanimity Isn’t Nibbana… Does it need to be gladdened? Does it need to be steadied? Does it need to be released from anything it’s holding on to? How do you breathe in a way that helps accomplish that? How do you play with your perception of the breath, your perception of your feelings, in order to accomplish that? What other topics—like the Buddha, Dhamma, and …
- Customs of the Noble Ones… They really are against the Dhamma, really against the principle of finding true happiness inside. So you want to take the standards of the noble ones as your guide, because those are the only ones that are reliable. The standards of the world change, and it’s all pretty arbitrary which direction they’re going to change and when. But the standards of the …
- On the Path of the Breath… You can think about the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha. All of these are valid topics of meditation. They’re there to inspire the mind, to gladden the heart. You can think about the good times you’ve been generous in the past, when you didn’t really have to share something but you felt moved to share. Or of the times you could …
- Thinking About Rebirth… And the Buddha applies this to the teachings on the what he calls the lokadhammas, the dhammas of the world. There’s gain, loss, status, loss of status, praise, criticism, pleasure, and pain. These things come to you in the course of this life, but they’re not really yours. So you want to learn to define yourself around what real use you can …
- Guardian Meditations… That’s the kind of person who taught this Dhamma. Not someone who was running a retreat center and needed to bring in cash, and who was willing to say anything to attract clientele, but someone acting totally out of pure motives, pure compassion. So that’s the kind of practice we’re practicing as we follow his path. And it’s ennobling for …
- Equanimity… As the Buddha said, of all fabricated dhammas, this is the highest: the noble eightfold path. It’s fabricated in the sense that it’s something you have to put together. So when you reflect on the nature of the world, reflect on your relationship with other beings, and you realize the limitations on what you can do for the world, that’s when …
- The Buddha’s Wisdom… Ajaan Lee gave a Dhamma talk one time in which he pointed out how each of the five factors of jhāna counteracts a specific hindrance. It’s the only talk I can find in all of his teachings where he tried to make that connection. The nun who was taking notes on the talk could remember only two of them. Maybe he sensed that …
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