Search results for: virtue
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- 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 get would be pretty dishonest. It’d be built on disassociation, denial. When you sit down and get quiet with the mind, memories …
- Greed for Outer & Inner Wealth… These are the qualities that underlie virtue, which is the fourth treasure. These four create a set: conviction, shame, compunction, virtue. They protect you from doing things that you would later regret, and that’s something really valuable. Years back, I heard a radio broadcast in which a veteran from Vietnam was talking about how he had very casually killed a young Vietnamese girl …
- Goodness… The Buddha talks about virtue as being a gift, in which you give safety to others. At the same time, you give a good example. The world needs good examples, because the media, which seem to be taking over everybody’s awareness of reality, trade in some pretty bad examples. Those are the ones that are easiest to find, say, on the Net. They …
- Sobering Up… As for qualities that would help, things like mindfulness, alertness—or as yesterday’s teaching to the new monks stressed again, and again, and again: virtue, concentration, and discernment—these are the things that will help you. Virtue is what keeps you honest. You take on a precept like no killing, no stealing, no illicit sex, no lying, no taking of intoxicants, and then …
- How to Motivate Yourself… generosity, virtue, development of goodwill for all beings. In which spots are you still lacking? Are there areas where you could be generous that you haven’t been in the past? This doesn’t mean you have to be generous only with material things. You can be generous with your time, generous with your forgiveness, generous with your knowledge, with your strength. In other …
- A Path of Aggregates… He would often prepare people by having them think about generosity, virtue, the rewards of virtue and generosity that can be found in heaven. But then the drawbacks: Even heavenly sensual pleasures have their drawbacks. Some of them can be quite severe. The Canon says that very few devas return to the human world after they pass away from the deva realm. Many of …
The Noble Eightfold Path: 13 Meditation Talks
An Overview of the Path
… For him, the prime virtue is the virtue of truthfulness. If you can’t admit to yourself that the things you say or do are causing harm, or the way you gain your livelihood is causing harm, there are going to be huge blind spots in your mind. So these factors of the path force the quality of honesty on you. If you want …Show one additional result in this book- The Management of Suffering… We usually hear about virtue in terms of the five precepts, but it’s also expressed in qualities of the heart, qualities of the character—things like contentment, the willingness to go out of your way to be helpful to other people, the willingness not to be burdensome. Those are all parts of virtue as well. The third quality you look for in an …
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The Skill of Release
The Treasures of the Dhamma
… When you abstain from evil in your words and deeds, they turn into the noble treasure of virtue. When this is the case, your treasures are within you. You haven’t deposited them with anyone else. Your generosity lies within you, your virtue—the virtue of restraint of the senses—lies in your eyes, your ears, your mouth. When your treasures are with you …Show 6 additional results in this book
- Your Goodness is Your Protection… And how do you keep yourself protected in a case like that? Through your virtue and generosity and your goodwill. The qualities that the Buddha calls treasures: your sense of conviction in the principle of kamma, your virtue, your compunction, your sense of shame, your knowledge of the Dhamma, your generosity, your discernment. These things are your protection. So we work on developing these …
- Attention to Intention… But with the happiness that comes from meditation, as with the happiness that comes from generosity and virtue, nobody loses. Everybody gains. So here you are, with a happiness that spreads its happiness around. It’s not just confined to you or a few people around you. It spreads its influence out into the world at large. This is something really worth sticking with …
- Indecision… Then he would move on to virtue. In some cases, he would explain virtue also as a gift. You’re giving a gift of universal safety when you observe the five precepts without exception. In other words, you don’t say, “Well, I’ll avoid killing in some cases, but there are other things I want to kill or cases where I think killing …
- Directly & Indirectly to the Breath… Three other topics the Buddha recommends are recollection of generosity, recollection of virtue, and recollection of the devas. In terms of the generosity and virtue, you think about times when you have been generous and have been virtuous, i.e., times you gave something not because you had to, or because it was the custom or because it was expected but simply because you …
- Survival Dhamma… But he did say that concentration bears great fruit if it’s fostered with virtue; wisdom bears great fruit if it’s fostered with concentration. Again, it is possible to have wisdom or discernment without strong concentration, but that sort of wisdom is very, very shallow. It doesn’t really dig down deep into the mind. It can be very easily erased—and very …
- Generosity & Gratitude… There’s no special virtue there. You don’t owe them any real debt, either because they were just material things or because what they did was totally predetermined. They had no choice in the matter. So when the Buddha was saying there is mother and father, he was saying that you’re not just the physical body, and your parents aren’t just …
- The Purpose of Empathetic Joy… He starts with generosity, giving, virtue, the virtue of restraint; and then the rewards of giving and virtue: the various heavenly realms that you can enjoy. That’s bright kamma. But then he talks about the drawbacks of sensuality. He calls them not only drawbacks, but also the degradation that sensuality involves. Here you are, just eating up the results of your old actions …
- Boosting Your Morale… You can think about the generosity you’ve practiced in the past, the virtue you’ve practiced in the past. And that gives you the energy you need to go back and do battle with your defilements. The defilements that tell you that “You’re a bad meditator.” The defilements that tell you, “You have no hope.” You can tell yourself, “Well, I do …
- Your Committee of Addicts… It’s important to understand that when the Buddha extols shame as a virtue, he’s talking about the shame that’s the opposite of shamelessness. He’s not talking about the shame that’s the opposite of pride, because he does teach you take a certain amount of pride in doing well in the practice. When he talks about the virtue of shame …
- Not-self… They slip through your fingers, and losing them doesn’t consign you to hell—whereas loss of right view or loss of virtue, would. So you regard the first three kinds of loss as not-self, but you hold on to the right view and virtue, which are parts of the path. The same when you’re practicing concentration: anything that would pull you …
- For What It’s Worth… It’s based on acts of generosity, acts of virtue. When you train the mind to be generous and virtuous, it’s a lot easier to watch. If you’ve been dishonest about things, lazy about things, harmful in your behavior, it’s very easy to put up walls of denial. And when you’ve got walls of denial, how are you going to …
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