Search results for: middle way

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  2. Listen Well
     … At first they were disinclined to listen to him because he had given up on his austerities, and they thought austerities were the way. But he taught them, no, there was a middle way that doesn’t involve self-torture, and it doesn’t involve indulgence in sensuality. But to say that it’s between the two is not quite right. It’s off … 
  3. Our Sense of Self
     … It’s the way it’s been ever since I was born, so it’s the way it’s going to be until I die.” But the Buddha didn’t think in that way. As with so many other things, he saw a sense of self as something we do. We want pleasure, we want to avoid pain, and so we try to get … 
  4. Practicing All the Time
     … That way your practice becomes timeless. Or as he would say, make your practice samma. The word means “right” but it also means “just right,” and it also means you want to do it all the time. “Just right” doesn’t mean a middling right. It means whatever is appropriate for the task. Sometimes if really strong anger comes up in the mind, you … 
  5. Even Shame Can Be Skillful
     … Stay with it all the way in, all the way out, and notice what feels comfortable. As the Buddha says, you try to make yourself sensitive to the whole body and then try to breathe in a way that gives rise to feelings of ease. So that’s what you experiment with as you meditate—sometimes feelings of ease, sometimes feelings of more energy … 
  6. Visakha Puja
     … Then he went off and practiced austerities for six years, until he was ready to admit that that, too, wasn’t the way out. Eventually he found a way that worked: the middle way, which essentially is composed of three things—virtue, concentration, and discernment. The symbolism of our circumambulation right now relates to that. The incense relates to virtue. There’s a saying … 
  7. Purity
     … are ways that you can get more and more skilled at this. There are gradations of purity. It’s like cleaning out a house that’s been abandoned for a long time, and all kinds of animals and cocaine addicts have moved in. First you clean out the big stuff. Once the big stuff is out, then you clean out the middle-sized stuff … 
  8. Book search result icon Frames of Reference Foreword: About the Author
     … Otherwise, he’d drive you out, even in the middle of the Rains Retreat. Even then, you’d just have to take it and try to use your powers of observation. ‘In other matters, such as sitting and walking meditation, he trained me in every way, to my complete satisfaction. But I was able to keep up with him at best only about 60 … 
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  9. A Safe Haven Through Alertness
     … It becomes a way of occupying the whole body with a sense of well-being. This is important because you need a safe place. You want to be able to put wheels on this home and make it mobile. That way, it’s not only while you’re sitting here with your eyes closed, but when you get up there’s still a sense … 
  10. The Skill of Not Suffering
     … It’s like lying on your back out in the middle of a big field. If you look up in the sky and there’s nothing on the ground that you can compare things to, you look at the clouds you don’t know what they’re doing. Which clouds are staying still, which clouds are moving, you can’t really tell, because there … 
  11. The World of the Noble Truths
     … They are a way of looking at the world but they play a role in a path of action—determining how you’re going to act. For most thinkers, the underlying structures start with first principles and then argue from those first principles to build a structure, like building a building based on a foundation. But the image the Buddha gives is of a … 
  12. Book search result icon Poems of the Elders Thig 14 Subhā & the Libertine
     … Resembling a ball of sealing wax, set in a hollow, with a bubble in the middle and bathed with tears, eye secretions are born there too: The parts of the eye are rolled all together in various ways.’ Plucking out her lovely eye, with mind unattached she felt no regret. ‘Here, take this eye. It’s yours.’ Straightaway she gave it to him. Straightaway … 
  13. Intelligence of the Heart
     … That’s something that’s good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good in the end—something that’s intelligent all the way through.
  14. The Wisdom of Self-regulation
     … This is why the Buddha talks about the path as being a middle way where the voices in your mind, the imperatives that you tell yourself, are wise and they’re just right. They get the results you want. That’s how you know that things are balanced and that you really are following the middle way. You tell the mind to settle down … 
  15. Alone at Death, but Not Lonely
     … what’s causing us to act in ways in the present moment that are causing suffering now and on into the future. After all, it’s our intentions that shape our life. Where do intentions happen? They happen right here, right now. All too often, they’re relegated down to the middle-level bureaucracy in the mind. It’s as if you were the … 
  16. Smoothing It
     … There are people who say that because the Buddha said that the middle way is a middle way between self-torture and self-indulgence, you shouldn’t try to inflict any pain on yourself at all. But that’s ignoring huge parts of the Canon where the Buddha says it’s really going to depend on the individuals how much pain they have to … 
  17. Three Levels of Evaluation
     … Say there’s a sense of ease and wellbeing in the middle of the chest: How do you maintain that ease and wellbeing? What way do you breathe? How do you adjust your breath so as to maintain that sense all way through the in-breath, all the way through the out? Once you can do that, how do you let that sense of … 
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  18. Faith in the Buddha’s Awakening
     … Remember that famous passage where King Pasenadi comes to see the Buddha in the middle of the day, and the Buddha asks him: “Where are you coming from in the middle of the day?” The king is very frank, unusually frank for a politician. He says, “I’ve been spending my time obsessed with the things that people obsessed with power are usually obsessed … 
  19. Remembering Luang Loong
     … As the Buddha said, this road is good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end. It’s good all along the way. It’s a good path to be on. So we can take encouragement from the people who’ve been on the path ahead of us, and we want to give good examples to the people who come behind … 
  20. Book search result icon Food for Thought Food for the Mind
     … In the same way, intelligent people who want the inner quality of dispassion have to take the discernment that comes from concentration and use it to evaluate sights, sounds, smells, tastes, etc., so that these things can serve a purpose and not do them any harm. Whoever eats an entire fish—bones, scales, fins, feces, and all—is sure to choke to death on … 
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  21. Pleasure on the Path
    When the Buddha first described his path, he called it a middle way between two extremes: indulgence in sensual pleasures on the one hand, and self-affliction on the other. This has led a lot of people to think that the path is kind of a neutral mind state, not all that pleasant, but not all that painful. That’s not the case. An … 
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