Search results for: virtue
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Potentials for Awakening… 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 alert …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Determination… As for the quality of truthfulness, this covers the perfections of truthfulness and virtue. Truthfulness means not just telling the truth but also sticking with something that know is really good no matter how hard it may be. The virtues of the precepts carry that principle through. You make up your mind that you’re going to avoid harmful behavior and you stick with …
- Food for Endurance… Suppose we lived in a world where there was no Dhamma, where all people could think about was gaining wealth, gaining power, with no sense of right or wrong, no sense of generosity, no sense of virtue. It’d be a hard world to live in—not the kind of world you would want to live in. But here we live in a world …
- An Auspicious Night… So why would you want to do that to other people? That’s virtue. Next on the list is generosity. How generous are you with your time, with your belongings? If you have something, do you see it as an opportunity to give it away? If you don’t have things, what non-material gifts can you give? We live together. We know that …
- Cleaning Out the Stables… He talked about generosity and virtue. These are all really great skills to develop. He talked about the rewards, particularly the rewards that come in heaven: the best place you can be reborn in. But then you realize it’s almost like it’s a fiendish trick. You work so hard at being good—being generous and virtuous, getting to a place you want …
- Goodwill Permeates the Dhamma… The Buddha lays out some principles out for us in terms of generosity, virtue, and meditation, or virtue, concentration, and discernment. But for a lot of things, we’re going to have to depend on our own powers of observation: looking at our actions, looking at our intentions, being very honest with ourselves about our intentions. Don’t do anything that you anticipate would …
- The World Is Swept Away… There was an incident in the life of Ajaan Mun when someone came to see him and asked him, “Can you separate a person’s virtue from that person’s heart and mind?” In other words, is it something external? Ajaan Mun said, “No. If you could separate it, then people would probably steal your virtues. But they can’t be separated.” Working on …
- Fear of the Truth… Build virtues. Build concentration. It’s interesting that of all the virtues, the Buddha makes truth the most important. Truth is not just a quality of accurate statements; it’s also a quality of the mind. In fact, if you want to find the truth, you have to develop this quality of truthfulness: the willingness to look at what’s there, admit what’s …
- Group Harmony… And then in terms of your views and in terms of your virtue, you try to be on par with everybody else. This doesn’t mean that we go for the lowest common denominator. It means that at the very least to have the five precepts that we took just now. This is why we keep repeating the five precepts every week. It’s …
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