Search results for: virtue

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  2. Improving Your Speech
     … During the three months, they’re going to try to put more emphasis either on generosity or on virtue or on meditation. Any precepts that are a little bit shaky, a little bit weak, they may try to firm them up. Or ways of being generous that you haven’t been generous before. You might decide you want to chant every day, or choose … 
  3. Inner Strength, Inner Wealth
     … There’s the practice of generosity, the practice of virtue, all the qualities that create strength in the mind and provide the mind with its wealth. There are two lists that the Buddha gives: one of inner wealth, and the other of inner strengths. They’re both useful to think about, especially as you’re leaving the monastery and having to maintain your own … 
  4. Self-restraint
     … But the desire to do it well, the desire to do the practice well in the practice of virtue, concentration, discernment—that’s where the wisdom lies, realizing that’s an issue where you have to depend on yourself. You can’t depend on anyone else. You can get advice from other people. They can set a good example. But the actual doing is … 
  5. Eat, Die, Repeat
     … generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance, truth, determination, goodwill, equanimity.” These are the qualities the Buddha had to develop in order to become Buddha. And these are qualities we should all develop in our lives, because these are the things that really stick with you. You can gain all kinds of wealth, have it piled up all around you, but when you go, you … 
  6. Give Before You Get
     … After giving came virtue: all the good things that come when you give up certain kinds of unskillful behavior. So the principle is there: You have to give before you get. And it’s good to carry that attitude into the meditation. You’re going to have to give up a lot of time. You’re going to have to give up all the … 
  7. Clinging & Its Cure
     … There’s pleasure in virtue. There’s pleasure in right view, in seeing things clearly. Think of all those people who listen to a Dhamma talk by the Buddha and, at the end, they say, it’s magnificent, magnificent, like someone who’s carried a lamp into the dark, who’s turned upright things that were turned over. Just seeing things clearly explained in … 
  8. A Skillful Heart
     … We develop virtue to make sure that our goodwill doesn’t get swayed by ideas that are short-sighted, saying, “Well, it would good for so-and-so if I lie to them a little bit and make them feel good.” You have to realize that, in the long run, that’s not going to be good for anyone at all. They’re going … 
  9. The Energy of Conviction
     … This conviction is strength for the mind, and you feed it through the practice of generosity, virtue, concentration. That way, the strength of the mind will be able to stay stable and solid even though strength of the body may ebb and flow. You want the strength of your mind to be solid, and you’re in charge of making sure that it is.
  10. A Legacy of Strengths
     … that loss in terms of health, wealth, or even relatives is not nearly as serious as loss of your virtue or loss of your right view. As you lose your virtue, you lose your right view, you can create a lot of trouble, not only in this lifetime but for many lifetimes down the line. Even when the people we love and respect are … 
  11. All-around Practice
     … What kind of practice did they have? But as the author pointed out to them, “Well, there’s generosity and there’s virtue, all these other elements of the path that are not encompassed simply by sitting with your eyes closed.” Now, it is important that you get to know your own mind, but a good way to know your own mind is not … 
  12. Freedom & Security
     … All these things together—virtue, shame, and compunction—are a form of wealth in that they protect you from having to look back on unskillful actions, the sense of remorse and regret that can come when you realize you’ve done something really, really harmful, really, really stupid. Those actions, once they’ve been done, can’t be taken back. No matter how much … 
  13. The Pleasure of Goodness
     … But when you’re finding happiness through generosity, through virtue, and especially through meditation, you’re not creating any divisions at all. In fact, your goodness spreads your happiness around and erases boundaries. So we should work as much as we can at developing these kinds of goodness. Especially with meditation, because meditation is the most direct form of developing merit and is also … 
  14. Endurance & Contentment
    Endurance and contentment are virtues that Westerners are notoriously bad about and lacking in. The ajaans in Thailand noticed, when they had Western students, that these were their weak points. Westerners had trouble enduring hardships, enduring restrictions. They were always finding something wrong with the situation and making themselves thoroughly miserable. So these are two virtues that we have to work on. And a … 
  15. Merit Radiates Out
     … This applies to the generosity and the virtue and the meditation: They’re all good things to do. And they spreads the happiness around. When you’re meditating, the less greed, aversion, and delusion you can allow in your mind, then the less other people around have to suffer from them. It’s easier for you to observe the precepts, it’s easier for … 
  16. Page search result icon Honest to Goodness
     … The second quality is virtue. You want to look for someone who sticks to the precepts and encourages other people to stick to them, too. This second quality follows naturally on the first, because anyone who really believes in the power of action wouldn’t want to harm any being at all. This means no killing, stealing, illicit sex, lying, or taking intoxicants. In … 
  17. Appreciation
     … He said it was because people here in the West come to meditation mainly without having gone through the training in generosity and the training in virtue that Buddhism gives. Or at least, they hadn’t found the joy in being generous and virtuous. This is partly because the training in generosity and virtue we receove here is that generosity is forced on you … 
  18. Possessiveness
     … And even before the noble eightfold path, there’s the teaching of the graduated discourse, where the Buddha teaches developing qualities of generosity, virtue, reflecting on the rewards of virtue and generosity, realizing that the sensual rewards that come from those activities are going to end and they entail a lot of drawbacks and what the Buddha says is even degradation. So you realize … 
  19. Sources of Lasting Happiness
     … The second is virtue. And the third is developing the mind—by which he meant developing good qualities in the mind, qualities like goodwill, mindfulness, concentration, discernment, alertness: qualities that help you act in skillful ways because they enable you to see what’s actually going on. They can help you see what you’re doing and see the results of what you’re … 
  20. Squeezing Goodness Out of the Aggregates
     … where your strengths are, where your weaknesses are in terms of learning, virtue, generosity, conviction, discernment, and particularly your ingenuity. So you try to develop these things. Try to get a sense of what you’ve got here in terms of these aggregates, and what you can do with them. Like the aggregate of form: What can you do with the different elements or … 
  21. Mental Balance
     … All the good things the Buddha has us practice—generosity, virtue, cultivating the sublime attitudes, getting the mind into good state of concentration, developing insight, gaining release: The primary focus is on what they do for your mind, but in each case, you’re not only helping yourself. The people around you benefit as well. With generosity, the dual benefit is obvious. One the … 
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