Search results for: virtue
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- Wealth Worth Holding Onto… So as we’re developing virtue, concentration, and discernment, remember that these are your valuables. Because the things of the world come and go. People, relationships, come and go. There was a novel I read one time called The Good Soldier. It’s narrated by one of the characters who’s a very slippery fellow. And one of the dominant images throughout the book …
- The Bottom Line… the needs of others, more attentive to the needs of others, realizing that your happiness spreads around and is not diminished when you’re being generous. In fact, it grows more. Virtue is to remind you that you have to keep the mind under control. There are certain things you may want to do but will be harmful, so you have to tell yourself …
- The Culture of the Practice… The four qualities the Buddha pointed out—and these apply not only to monks and nuns, but also to lay people—were (1) conviction, (2) virtue, (3) generosity, and (4) discernment. These are the qualities that create the culture of awakening, the culture of the practice. There has been a tendency in Buddhist circles, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, to reduce everything …
- Admirable Friendship… conviction, virtue, generosity, discernment. You look at his conviction. He was convinced that there was a way out of suffering. And he tried many different ways, and he never gave up. So it’s good to have that kind of conviction, too. When you run into obstacles on the path, realize there have been people on the path here before you, and they’ve …
- Understanding Happiness… So the mind gains a greater sense of spaciousness by cultivating the virtue of generosity. Then there’s the virtue of the precepts. This, too, is a kind of a gift. The Buddha says that if you make up your mind not to kill anybody at all, not to steal anything from anybody at all, not to engage in illicit sex with anybody at …
- A Slave to Craving… You start with generosity, move up to virtue, and develop goodwill. That’s how you begin meditating: meditating on goodwill. All of these things teach you important lessons that you can then bring properly to the meditation. The lesson of generosity, or of giving, is that giving does have its rewards, but to gain those rewards, you have to give first. Generosity also teaches …
- Self-Control… That’s the Buddha’s gift to us, showing us the skill of learning how to treasure our virtue, our concentration, our discernment, as our most important possessions—how to protect our intentions to make sure that they’re not simply pushed around by negative things outside. You look around at the world and it’s hardly ideal at all. We’re living in …
- A Gift of Well-Being… It’s the same with virtue. When you abstain from unskillful behavior, it’s a gift. You can make the promise to yourself and keep it that you’re not going to harm anybody in any situation regardless: no killing, no stealing, no illicit sex, no lying, no taking of intoxicants. You can hold to that promise. You don’t keep making excuses to …
- Character… You can think of your duties as an opportunity to develop your endurance, to develop your truthfulness, your determination, your persistence, all the Capricorn virtues, along with your goodwill. There are times when you have to do something because someone else needs your help, and here’s a way of proving whether you really have goodwill for other people. So it’s good to …
- Spiritual Materialism… Whereas the wealth that you build inside in terms of your conviction, your healthy sense of shame and compunction, your virtue, your generosity, your learning, your discernment: These are things that fires and floods can’t touch; nobody else can harm; nobody else can take away. It’s the kind of wealth that’s safe. And it’s going to be safe for you …
- Make the Most of Your Life… both for the sake of the person who’s passed away to dedicate the merit to him—the merit of our generosity, the merit of our virtue, the merit of our meditation—and also to remind ourselves that we’re all in the same boat. There will come a time when somebody else is doing this for us. In the meantime, you want to …
- Asalha Puja… The incense stands for virtue. As the Buddha said, the sweet smell of virtue, unlike the smell of incense, can go against the wind. In other words, a virtuous person is respected in all directions. Concentration is like the flowers. The flowers bloom. Discernment is like the candles: It gives light. And you notice we started out with just one or two candles out …
- Treasures Beyond Death… But the treasures of virtue, compunction, and shame can prevent you from doing those things to begin with. So they can do something for you that money can’t do at all. When you have virtues that you hold to regardless, they’re a very strong treasure. You’re giving universal protection to everybody else, in that you’re not going to harm them …
- Goodness in a Crazy World… they know a lot of things that we don’t know. But we can take their knowledge and make it our knowledge as we try to develop their qualities within us: virtue, concentration, discernment. These are things we have to work on. So take the good from the world and then as you create goodness inside, you’ll be giving a lot of good …
- The World Offers No Shelter… generosity, virtue, developing goodwill. Even though these things are not permanent, they can take you to a place that does not get swept away. In the meantime, they provide you with a certain amount of stability—stability that the world outside cannot provide. Not only the world outside, even your own body can’t provide that stability. Just like the world, your body is …
- Against the Stream… Conviction in the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha, and also virtues that are pleasing to the noble ones. You don’t lie; you don’t steal; you don’t have illicit sex; you don’t kill; you don’t take intoxicants. You stick to these precepts to show that you really do have faith in the Buddha’s teachings about karma. As you stick …
- Mature Strategies… His teachings on generosity, virtue, and the development of goodwill — all the things that come under the category of merit — are skillful ways of employing your strategy of self. Basically, he has you take your sense of self, your sense of a continuing identity not only in this lifetime but also even into other lifetimes, and shows how to work with it intelligently so …Show 6 additional results in this book
- Seeds of Gladness… So you develop skillful actions by being generous, by being virtuous—making the sacrifices that have to come with generosity and virtue and gaining a sense of self-worth that comes from that, a sense of your own honorableness. That can provide the sense of well-being. In other words, you look for well-being in the skillfulness of your own actions. You take …
- Gratitude… You have the virtue of generosity. Two, when you receive a gift, when you receive someone else’s kindness, then gratitude is an appropriate response. If we lived in a world where people didn’t have freedom of choice, everything would be like a machine. There’d be no need to have gratitude for a machine, because the machine wasn’t making any merit …
- Into the Cave with the Tiger… Because if you look at the kind of conversation that’s going on in the mind before you try to settle down, and it’s a nice conversation—thoughts of generosity, thoughts of virtue—then it feels good to settle down, easy to settle down with a sense of well-being. This may be one of the reasons why when Ajaan Suwat was teaching …
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