… This is a path that’s good in the beginning, good in the
middle, and good in the end—good all the way through. As for yourself,
remember that you’re not stuck with any particular innate nature. If
you find yourself thinking any petty or unwise or selfish thoughts,
that’s not necessarily your nature. Those are just habits you’ve
picked up …
… You’d start with a powder and then mix it with water, kneading
the water through the powder in the same way you’d you knead water
through dough for bread. In the same way, as you meditate, you get a
sense of ease from staying focused on the breath and then you knead it
through the body.
So you have to figure out …
… So spreading thoughts of unlimited goodwill help in this direction is a way of preparing you to settle down with the breath. Then actually being with the breath is a very good way of showing goodwill for yourself right now. There’s enough suffering in life. You don’t have to compound it by breathing in a way that’s harsh, uncomfortable, or unhealthy …
… It’s simply showing two
different ways you can get the mind to be mindful and* *concentrated.
So if you find yourself having trouble settling down, remember these
two ways of doing it: thinking in ways that will get you more
interested in the present moment, and thinking in ways that can get
you uninterested in anything that would pull you away from the …
… Ups and downs are
normal.”
When you find yourself in the middle of a down, you can remind
yourself, “Okay, this is to be expected. It’s not the end of the
world. Your meditation hasn’t crashed. It’s part of the normal cycle
of meditation.” When you have that calm attitude, it makes it a lot
easier to try to figure out …
… The way in which this sutta raises a number of questions about the cessation of perception and feeling and its relationship to awakening but then leaves them unanswered has a parallel in AN 9:36. That sutta details how the various concentration attainments up through the dimension of nothingness can be used as a basis for the ending of the effluents. Beyond that point …
… Having sown it there, he
would sow it in the middling field. Having sown it there, he
might not sow it in the poor field—sandy, salty, with bad soil—or
he might. Why is that? It would at least go toward cattle
fodder.”
“In the same way, headman, like the excellent field are the
monks & nuns to me. I teach them the Dhamma …
… In the same way, there are certain intersections in
your breath energy channels that tend to seize up first. It can be in
the middle of the chest. It can be in the solar plexus, or someplace
deeper down in the abdomen. We all have our own specific spots.
So you want to be especially careful around those spots. Try to keep
them open …
… This requires extreme restraint of the senses
because there is that tendency when you leave sitting meditation to just
let the mind go back to its old ways, which means wasting the stillness
you gained from the meditation. So you try to gather your mind together,
keep yourself focused, say, in the middle of the chest or wherever your
favorite spot is in your …
… There’s nothing that the Buddha asks you to do that’s in any way mean
or dishonest. It’s all very upright, honest, clear-eyed,
compassionate. Compassionate, in the sense that when you stop creating
suffering for yourself, you benefit, and the people around you benefit
too.
When we’re suffering, we’re constantly trying to lean on other
people in one way …
… Place yourself in the middle and take a good look at the body, until you see that, when taken apart in this way, it vanishes into nothing, into ashes—what they call ‘death’—and you will come to feel a sense of dismay and detachment. If, however, you don’t see any results appearing, go on to—
5. Consider the fact that the body …
… The Buddha expresses it this way: You give in to thoughts that say,
“It’s too early… It’s too late… It’s too hot… It’s too cold… I’m too
tired…” and the work that needs to be done doesn’t get done.
In cases like that, you can’t let those attitudes get in the way. You
have to put yourself …
… There has to be a middle way between the expression and the suppression. This is important. Often as you meditate you try to tell yourself, “Don’t react. Just be equanimous. Don’t get excited. Don’t get worked up about things.” And then you try to convince yourself that that’s what’s actually happening. You see ideals of what an enlightened person …
… One day he came to see the Buddha in the middle of the day, and the Buddha asked him, “What have you been doing today, great king?”
Let me read you his answer:
“Just now, lord, I was engaged in the sort of royal affairs typical of head-anointed warrior kings intoxicated with the intoxication of sovereignty, obsessed by greed for sensuality, who have …
… Find which part of the body responds
to the way you breathe, is sensitive to the way you breathe. For a lot
of people, it’s down around the sternum, or it could be in the throat,
or some place in the middle of the head. But wherever you’re
especially sensitive to how the breath feels, try to focus your
attention there and …
… Try other ways of testing your perceptions
until ultimately you develop a repertoire. You get a more and more
intuitive sense of what feels right for any particular state of the
body.
Say you’ve got a headache. There are certain ways of breathing that
are good, that help counteract the headache. And you also find there
are ways of breathing that aggravate it …
… But you’ve got to be consciously making the
comparisons and seeing the areas where you can focus on things outside
in certain ways so that your center is not disturbed by other ways of
focusing, i.e., involving greed, anger, delusion, and all the other
unskillful mental qualities that knock your center off kilter.
This requires discernment: comparing things, seeing connections, and
seeing …
… If he wasn’t getting the
results he wanted, he’d ask: “Okay, what am I doing wrong?” He’d tried
to find some way around that impasse. We read about the mistakes he
made along the way, but they were always followed by his ability to
stop and take stock. That’s one of the character traits you want to
develop as a …
… the way you feed, physically and emotionally.
He’s holding you to a high standard, and there will be parts of the
mind that resist. To overcome that resistance, you have to remind
yourself: This really is a respectable, honorable path that we’re
taught here. As the chant says, it’s “admirable in the beginning,
admirable in the middle, admirable in the end …
… It’s like putting a salt lick in the middle of a forest.
You’re going to get all the animals eventually. They’re all going to
come there because they all need the salt. So you can set up your
camera and get pictures of whatever you want.
In the same way with the breath, whatever aspect of the practice needs
to get …
AN 5:166 Nirodha Sutta | Cessation
… The way in which this sutta raises a number of questions about the cessation of perception and feeling and its relationship to awakening but then leaves them unanswered has a parallel in AN 9:36. That sutta details how the various concentration attainments up through the dimension of nothingness can be used as a basis for the ending of the effluents. Beyond that point …
Portraits of the Buddha | Noble Warrior : A Life of the Buddha
… Having sown it there, he would sow it in the middling field. Having sown it there, he might not sow it in the poor field—sandy, salty, with bad soil—or he might. Why is that? It would at least go toward cattle fodder.” “In the same way, headman, like the excellent field are the monks & nuns to me. I teach them the Dhamma …
