Search results for: virtue

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  2. The Duty to Be Positive
     … That’s why recollection of your generosity and recollection of your virtue are both really important parts of the path. They’re not there to make you simply feel that you’re good enough as you already are. They’re there to give you the energy you need to pick up your duties and carry on. As the Buddha said, death can come at … 
  3. Knowing Your Intentions
     … the goodness of generosity, the goodness of virtue, and the goodness of meditation. The word meditation literally means to develop. You’re developing good qualities in the mind. You do this first by focusing on the breath. Take a couple of good, long, deep in- and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing. Try to stay with the sensation of the breath all … 
  4. Book search result icon Lost & Found The Line of Fire
     … Take virtue, for instance. Virtue is not just a matter of following the precepts, it’s a quality of mind that’s solid in its intentions. You make up your mind that you’re going to avoid evil and then you just stick with that intention. That’s the essence of virtue. The word sila in Pali is related to the word sela, which … 
  5. In a World of Crooked Wheels
     … loss in terms of relatives, loss in terms of your health, loss in terms of your wealth, loss in terms of right view, loss in terms of virtue. He says that with the first three—wealth, health, relatives—loss isn’t all that serious. It sounds heartless. How can you say that loss of your relatives is not serious? Loss of your wealth and … 
  6. A Made Up Mind
     … Where there’s no virtue, you can think about things and develop virtue. In other words, you think about the value of these things, these good qualities of the mind, and then you can bring them into being and see that they really are worthwhile. This kind of independent goodness is something you want to develop as much as you can. Because if you … 
  7. Going Out of Your Way
     … The first is basically a matter of virtue; the second, a matter of generosity. And it’s interesting to note that when the Buddha teaches, he brings generosity up first. When he explains mundane right view, it starts with: “There is what is given.” In other words, the times we go out of our way to be helpful to other people, generous with other … 
  8. Book search result icon Come & See Entering for the Rains
     … On the lowest level, there’s generosity, virtue, and meditation. The Buddha taught these as daily practices: the lower level of virtue, the medium level of virtue, the refined level of virtue. The lower level is the five precepts. The medium level is the eight or ten precepts. The refined level is the 227 training rules for the monks. In the 227 training rules … 
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  9. The Elephant Hunter
     … This is what the Buddha is asking you to do all the way along the line—you take responsibility, which is why conviction is a virtue and not just a wager. He says that if you take on the teaching that your actions give results and that the results go beyond just this lifetime, you’ll be more responsible for your actions. That’s … 
  10. Page search result icon The Dhamma Eye : Text & Context
     … In the words of the Canon, your virtues are now pleasing to the noble ones: unbroken, untorn, and conducive to concentration. The noble ones are also pleased because your virtues are not grasped at and you yourself are not made of virtue, meaning that you don’t take hold of your virtues to create a sense of conceit or self around them. You embody … 
  11. Book search result icon Selves & Not-self A Healthy Sense of Self
     … generosity, virtue, and the development of goodwill. Each of these practices fosters a healthy sense of self. When the Buddha teaches generosity, he emphasizes the fact that you’re free to give. In fact when a king once asked him, “Who should I give things to?” the king expected that the Buddha would say, “Give to me and my disciples.” Instead the Buddha said … 
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  12. Book search result icon On the Path The Stream to Unbinding
     … Being heedful, he achieves consummation in virtue. He is gratified with that consummation in virtue, but his resolve is not fulfilled. Because of that consummation in virtue he does not exalt himself or disparage others. He is not intoxicated with that consummation in virtue, not heedless about it, and does not fall into heedlessness. Being heedful, he achieves consummation in concentration. He is gratified … 
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  13. The Meaning of Happiness
     … generosity, virtue, and meditation. And those three activities cover pretty much all the goodness in the world. The acts that give meaning to our lives come under these three headings. Generosity means not only giving material things, but also giving your time, giving your energy, giving forgiveness, giving help in all kinds of ways. It’s in the act of giving that a lot … 
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  14. Appreciating Merit
    There’s that chant we have at the end of every chanting session: “Through the power of all the Buddhas, all the Dhamma, all the Sangha, may you forever be well.” What is that power? Where does it come from? The Buddha gained his power from his generosity, his virtue, and his meditation, developing concentration, developing discernment all the way to nibbana. As did … 
  15. Friends Inside
     … People who have virtue: They try not to harm others, they try not to harm themselves. That’s a good example for you. And then those who have wisdom and discernment: In other words, they understand what’s important in life and what’s not, what has long-term value and what has only short-term value. If you hang around with friends like … 
  16. The Noble Eightfold Path to the Deathless
     … Then there’s loss of right view and loss of virtue: Those are major. That’s an area where the stream enterer is secure. He or she will never lose right view and virtue, which is why the stream enterer’s rebirths from that point on never fall below the human. But for those of us who haven’t fully reached the stream, for … 
  17. Clearing a Space
     … You’d start out with virtue, and when your virtue is perfected you could focus on concentration, and then when concentration is perfected you could focus on discernment. It would all be very nice and systematic. The problem is that the mind is not systematic. It’s chaotic. Now, we all know that chaos has its patterns, but the patterns are very complex. That … 
  18. Refuge
     … You’ve got to keep in mind that the establishing of mindfulness is based on, as the Buddha said, right view and strong virtue. This is why we take the precepts every week: to remind you that virtue is your foundation. When you focus on the mind, you want the mind to be honest, you want the mind to be sincere, you want it … 
  19. Skillful Goodwill
     … generosity, virtue, and meditation. And even with all three of those, you have to be very careful. It is possible sometimes to be generous in a way that harms yourself or harms others. There are ways of observing the precepts that can be harmful if you’re not careful. And there are ways of going off-track with the meditation, so you have to … 
  20. Happily on the Path
     … This is one of the reasons why the practice begins with generosity and virtue. When the Buddha would explain the four noble truths to lay people, he wouldn’t jump right into the four truths. He’d start out with what was called a graduated discourse, or step-by-step discourse, and the first two topics in that discourse were generosity and virtue. Notice … 
  21. The Taste Is Release
     … So we go back and work on our virtue so that our concentration will have great fruit and great benefit. The Buddha is not saying that you can’t get the mind concentrated without virtue, but the kind of concentration you’d get that way would be pretty dishonest. It’d be built on disassociation, denial. When you sit down and get quiet with … 
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