Search results for: virtue

  1. Page 27
  2. A Good Purpose in Life
     … generosity, virtue, renunciation, persistence, endurance, truth, determination, goodwill, and equanimity. In our practice, we have to develop all of these qualities and we have to see the opportunity to develop them as something really precious. There was one time when Ajaan Fuang was going to lead a group of his students up to the chedi at the monastery in order to meditate. The chedi … 
  3. You Can Take It With You
     … There’s generosity, virtue, renunciation, patience or endurance, truthfulness, effort and energy, determination, goodwill and equanimity. These qualities are good for the mind. These are qualities that keep it strong. You carry them with you wherever you go, even as you leave this life. When you come into this life, you bring them with you; when you go on to the next life, you … 
  4. Overcoming Doubt
    We listen to the Buddha’s teachings about goodness and how it’s generated from within. Generosity comes from within. Virtue comes from within. Goodwill comes from within. We listen to the teachings, and they make sense. That’s called acceptance. But beyond acceptance there’s conviction. Conviction is not merely a matter of saying, “Yes it sounds good.” You actually try to live … 
  5. Wanting Harmless Happiness
     … Whereas when you’re practicing virtue, concentration, and discernment, when you’re practicing generosity as well, you’re finding happiness that enables us all to get along. So you don’t see any need to harm anybody else in order to get what you want. We’re learning to change what we want because we realize that what we wanted in the past that … 
  6. Protection in all Directions
     … He would start out with generosity and virtue. The virtue here would cover all these ten skillful actions. Then he would move on, talking about the rewards of these skillful actions, but then he’d point out that those rewards have their drawbacks, if you don’t have something more solid. That something more solid is when you learn how to give up your … 
  7. Your Actions Are Yours
     … As the Buddha says, with stream-entry, you’ve perfected virtue, but there’s still work that needs to be done in terms of concentration and discernment. And the “I am” is going to be doing that work. When that work is done, then you can put the “I am” aside. So there’s an “I” lingering around even at that stage of the … 
  8. Potentials for Awakening
     … As in the case of mindfulness, he says the potentials lie in right view, or what he calls views made straight, and purity of virtue. It’s good to stop and think: Why would these things help make mindfulness grow? In terms of virtue, think of the precepts. You have to keep them in mind. That’s the mindfulness. And you have to be … 
  9. Dispassion Is Freedom
     … Without any passion for the path, it’s hard to develop virtue, hard to develop concentration, hard to develop discernment. So you do concentrate passion on the path. As it says in that chant we have from the Ariyavamsika Sutta, you develop a passion for developing and a passion for abandoning: developing skillful qualities, abandoning the unskillful ones. You want to take your pleasure … 
  10. Two Roads to the Grand Canyon
     … If virtue were easy or natural, it wouldn’t require training. The Buddha wouldn’t have called it a training. The same with concentration: You do have to put an effort into it. It’s a very delicate effort in the sense that it requires a lot of precision, but it also requires strong dedication. The same with discernment: You have to think things … 
    Show 7 additional results in this book
  11. Riding an Elephant to Catch Grasshoppers
     … However, you can very easily go to hell through losing your right view and losing your virtue. You may wonder why he doesn’t include concentration in the list. It may be because virtue and right view are the foundations for right mindfulness. Right mindfulness, of course, is how you get the mind in concentration. So once you’ve got the foundations, you’ve … 
  12. Friends with the Dhamma Wheel
     … The path, of course, is the noble eightfold path, starting with right view and ending with right concentration—basically, virtue, concentration, and discernment. You develop that. That’s what you work on. That, of the noble truths, is the one that you have to develop passion for. The other three duties all start with dispassion. But with this one, you first have to be … 
  13. Wealth That Doesn’t Leave You
     … generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, patience, truth, determination, goodwill, equanimity. These qualities are our wealth. Whatever way you can develop them, that’s how you make yourself rich—rich in a way that nobody else can take away. This kind of wealth doesn’t depend on the economy. With money they have exchange rates but this doesn’t have an exchange rate that anybody … 
  14. Enthusiasm
     … The biggest thing to fear, of course, is that in your effort to find happiness you’re going to do things that will cause suffering; in your effort to do good, you may get so that you lose your enthusiasm to do good, or when the situation gets tough, the virtues that you’ve been trying to develop, the precepts you’ve been trying … 
  15. A Frame for the New Year
     … This is why the Buddha recommended that we develop qualities of generosity, virtue. We develop meditation, particularly thoughts of goodwill. They say that Ajaan Mun, every day in the morning when he woke up, would spread thoughts of goodwill to all beings in all directions. In the afternoon when he woke up from his afternoon nap: goodwill for all beings in all directions. Last … 
  16. The Escape of Discipline
     … fact, the first factor of the path that the Buddha discovered is right concentration: ease, pleasure, rapture, filling the body. Then there are the other elements of the path as well: Virtue for instance, abstaining from harmful behavior. And although parts of the mind like to engage in harmful behavior, when you think of your position in life as a whole it’s always … 
  17. Book search result icon The Paradox of Becoming Chapter 3: Three Levels
     … And how is the defiled mind cleansed through the proper technique? There is the case where the disciple of the noble ones recollects his own virtues…. As he is recollecting virtue, his mind is cleansed, and joy arises; the defilements of his mind are abandoned. He is thus called a disciple of the noble ones undertaking the virtue-uposatha. He lives with virtue. It … 
    Show 4 additional results in this book
  18. A Life with Direction
     … the direction of conviction, virtue, generosity, wisdom. And the other one is to establish your mind in the right direction or to establish yourself in the right direction. After all, as we’re born into this life, there’s nobody that tells us what we have to do with our lives. We’re born here because we wanted to be here. But now that … 
  19. Negotiating with Death
     … This is one of the reasons why the Buddha says, in relation to your virtue, any loss in terms of your health, loss in terms of your relatives, loss in terms of your wealth, doesn’t really matter that much. But loss in terms of your virtue and your right view: That matters a lot. So virtue and right view are things you want … 
  20. Shelter Through Restraint
     … You have to remind yourself that when the Buddha talks about goodwill, as one of the types of merit you make, there’s a sutta where he lists generosity, virtue, goodwill in the body of the sutta, and then at the end of the sutta there’s a little poem, and the list gets tweaked a little bit: generosity, virtue, restraint. Restraint is an … 
  21. Timeless Practice
     … With virtue, it’s your intention. You intend not to harm. The third topic in the step-by-step discourse was heaven. This is where the rewards of generosity—beyond the reward of just being generous in and of itself, being virtuous in and of itself—give long-term benefits. This is where the Buddha first broaches the topic of how karma has an … 
  22. Load next page...