Search results for: "Fabrication"

  1. The Missing Fabrication
    When you look at the Buddha’s instructions on breath meditation, one of the first things you may notice is the role played by fabrication. In the first tetrad, the Buddha talks about calming bodily fabrication, which is the in-and-out breath. In the second tetrad, he talks about becoming sensitive to mental fabrication—feelings and perceptions—and then calming those, too. The … 
  2. Maintained by Fabrication
     … It gives us an idea of what’s possible, what works in the world, how it works in the world, what kind of happiness we can attain through our fabrication. And it turns out we can arrive at something unfabricated. That’s what makes this so special. Everything else in the world is fabricated and goes to fabrications: fabrications creating more fabrications, creating more … 
  3. The Path is Fabricated
     … The path has to be fabricated. And even the more subtle types of fabrication on the path do count as fabrication. The sense of the observer watching all this: That’s a fabrication. Before you can really let go of fabrication, you have to learn how to do it in very subtle ways, so that you can catch the subtleties of fabrication. Otherwise, you … 
  4. Exploring Fabrication
    Exploring Fabrication August 29, 2011 The Buddha once told the monks that they should practice breath meditation, and one of the monks said, “I already do practice breath meditation.” So the Buddha asked him, “What kind of breath meditation do you practice?” The monk replied, “I focus on the breath, let go of any hankering after the past, any hankering after the future. I … 
  5. Recollection of Hell
    Recollection of Hell February 9, 2010 We’re sitting here fabricating, putting together a sense of the body, putting together feelings, perceptions, more fabrications, even putting together our consciousness of these things. It’s something we do all the time. And the things we put together are not totally mind-made. The raw materials come from our past actions. Sometimes those materials are good … 
  6. Totally Secure
     … And watch out for when the mind starts leaving the breath, starts fabricating other thoughts, other worlds, fabricating the past, fabricating the future. This is one of the things the mind is really good at, fabrication. The Pali word is *sankhara. *The problem with this fabrication is that it creates a lot of suffering for the mind. This is not to say that sankhara … 
  7. Working with Fabrication
    When the Buddha lists the various conditions that lead to suffering, he starts out with the way ignorance conditions our fabrications. It sounds pretty abstract, but it’s actually a very useful tool for understanding what we’re doing and how we can step back from the way we ordinarily create suffering. We can learn how to fabricate in ways that are actually more … 
  8. Unfabricated Happiness
     … The way you fabricate your experience, if you do it in ignorance, already primes you to suffer from that experience, regardless of the input from the senses. If you fabricate with knowledge, that fabrication and everything following from it will become a path to the end of suffering. The more sensitive you become as you fabricate a good path here—in other words, a … 
  9. The Evening News
     … How are we shaping things right now? The Buddha recommends that when we want to understand what’s going on, we have to look at things in terms of fabrication. What are our intentions? And what are we creating right now? For the most part, we’re not looking for fabrication as a process, we’re looking at fabricated things: seeing them as things … 
  10. How the Breath Helps You to Die Well
     … After all, based on ignorance there’s fabrication. And then based on fabrication, there’s consciousness. So the consciousness that goes on to the next lifetime is shaped by fabrications. If you don’t understand these fabrications, you’ll have no control over where it’s going to go. Focusing on the breath also focuses directly on these fabrications so that, at the very … 
  11. Fabricating with Awareness
    Fabricating with Awareness August 10, 2012 When the Buddha explains the causes of suffering, he starts with ignorance, and from ignorance he goes on to fabrication. In other words, it’s because we fabricate out of ignorance: That’s why we suffer. Everything else follows from that. Now, the cure is to replace the ignorance with knowledge, knowledge in terms of the four noble … 
  12. Strengthening Discernment
    Strengthening Discernment January 11, 2012 The standard definition of discernment is the comprehension of fabrications, or sankharas, and you try to comprehend fabrications in terms of the four noble truths: seeing, on the one hand, how some fabrications cause suffering and actually constitute suffering—suffering itself is a fabrication—and on the other, how you can turn some of these fabrications into the path … 
  13. Things as They’ve Come to Be
     … That’s a process of fabrication. It’s not the case that fabrications lie on top of pristine things as they are. Fabrication is how those things have come into being in the first place. So once the mind is settled down you want to look at the fabricating that goes on in the mind to see how the things you experience contain a … 
  14. Artillery All Around
    Artillery All Around August 16, 2011 The mind is such an old hand at fabrication that it doesn’t really notice all the fabrication it’s doing all the time. You sit here watching the breath and you think it’s just awareness with the breath, pure and simple. But the type of awareness you bring is already fabricated, and the breath itself is … 
  15. Attention with an Agenda
     … How should you fabricate the present moment in such a way so that you can see fabrications clearly? The main issue of fabrication is establishing mindfulness and getting the mind into concentration. So there’s an agenda—because there’s another dimension to those three kinds of fabrication. The Buddha says in a larger framework that bodily fabrication applies to any bodily action that … 
  16. The Dead Snake Around Your Neck
    The Dead Snake Around Your Neck June 23, 2018 We’ve talked a lot in the past about how the three types of fabrication—bodily, verbal, and mental—play a role in shaping our experience. Recently, though, I read a weird piece by a scholar saying that these three kinds of fabrication apply only to meditation, as if they didn’t apply to the … 
  17. WYSIWYG
     … Remember that the breath is a kind of fabrication, and we’re here to learn about how the mind fabricates its experience. So this is a prime example. It’s the most blatant of the various fabrications. Verbal fabrication is subtler; mental fabrication, subtler still. Breath is right here, coming in and going out. And if you pay attention, you begin to realize that … 
  18. Tranquility & Insight Through Jhāna
     … But, as you practice concentration, you also learn a lot about fabrication. It’s a hands-on kind of experience. You don’t sit there watching fabrications passively; you use fabrications to get the mind to settle in. Think of the three kinds of fabrication. There’s the breath—that’s bodily fabrication. Okay, you’re focused on the breath. Then there’s verbal … 
  19. Into the Cave with the Tiger
     … So, you’ve got all the forms of fabrication right there. Breath is bodily fabrication. Thinking and evaluating: That’s verbal fabrication. And feelings—feelings of pleasure or pain or neither pleasure nor pain—and perceptions, the images you hold in mind: Those are mental fabrication. We’re trying to do these activities with knowledge so that we can understand that the present moment … 
  20. Work with It
     … That, too, is a fabrication, but it’s a fabrication on your side. So when we work with defilements, we’ve got these three frameworks that we can keep in mind: the basic distinction between those that go away when you look at them and those that require that you exert a fabrication, which involves all three fabrications. Then there are the five ways … 
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