Search results for: virtue
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- Anti-slacker Dhamma… You hold back on applying them to your practice of virtue, concentration, and discernment. That means you don’t apply the three perceptions to the path just yet. You apply them to everything else that would pull you away from the path. In terms of virtue, if you find that your attachment to your relatives or your wealth or your health would prevent you …
- Staying on Track… It’s a framework that comes from the practice of generosity and the practice of virtue. These are qualities not only of the mind, but also of the heart. They keep you on course. This is why the Buddha taught meditation as part of a larger path, an eightfold path, not just a one- or two-fold path. Generosity is one of the prerequisites …
- Observe Yourself in Action… Here you can get some help from what are called the four precepts or four virtues of purity. As you develop right action, right speech, and right livelihood, you learn how to observe yourself. But these four precepts or virtues of purity elaborate on that a little bit. They start with the virtues of the precepts themselves: For the monks it’s the Pāṭimokkha …
- Treasures from the East… The fourth treasure is virtue. When you actually stick with the precepts, you realize that they’re a good counsel. There are times when you might be able to make some immediate profit off of lying or stealing, a little bit of enjoyment from the intoxicants all around, but you realize that, No, you’re above that. There’s a sense of honor that …
- Mistakes… Then he would talk about the long-term benefits of generosity and virtue in this life and then also on into heaven. That was the third topic, the joys of heaven. But then he would focus on the drawbacks of sensuality. Even heavenly sensual pleasures have their drawbacks, and those drawbacks can hit pretty hard. Once you’ve gotten used to things being really …
- The Noble Search… What about the rest of the world?” Well, if you find a happiness that’s blameless and you do it through virtue, concentration, and discernment, or through generosity, virtue, and meditation, how can looking for happiness in that way be a selfish thing? You’re looking for a happiness that places no burden on anyone, that doesn’t harm anyone. When you look at …
- New Year’s Day… The Buddha offers generosity, virtue, meditation as the three main ways of training your mind. In the course of training your mind, you find happiness, because generosity is happy for you and it’s happy for the people you give the gifts to. Being virtuous is happy for you and happy for the people who are not oppressed by your behavior. And meditating is …
- Firmly Intent… One is having your virtue purified; the other is having your views straightened out. Your virtue, of course, has to do with what you’ve been doing in the course of the day. Right now, as you’re sitting here, you’re not breaking any of the precepts. So you want to check and make sure that your views are straight. In other words …
- Delight in Goodness… It’s always there to do something good—opportunities for acts of virtue, acts of generosity, the opportunity to spread goodwill to people who may not be easy to spread goodwill to. Those opportunities are always there, and you want to delight in that, realizing that you’re fortunate you have this opportunity to do some good. And the more you delight in it …
- Delight in Concentration… Being clear about your intentions is what right concentration has in common with virtue. Understanding the ways of your mind, and learning how to foster skillful qualities inside: That’s what it has in common with discernment. If you focus on the concentration, everything gets pulled together right here. So take delight in this skill. Without that delight, it doesn’t get developed. With …
- When You’ve Played Enough With the Breath… You can think about your virtue; you can think about your generosity. After all, an important part of the meditation is that you’re providing the mind with an alternative to sensual pleasure. As the Buddha says, we go for the pleasures of sensuality because we think they’re the only alternative we have for pain. So here we want to make sure that …
- A Complete Gift of Merit… In other words, there’s generosity, virtue, and meditation—and the important part is the meditation, because merit is the quality of the mind. You have the activities of giving things, taking the precepts, but they aim at the qualities you develop in the mind. You’re generous out of compassion. You’re virtuous out of heedfulness. These are the qualities you want to …
- Making a Refuge… With the relationships, you look for admirable friends, people who are a good example in terms of their conviction, their generosity, their virtue, and their discernment. These are people you want to associate with because if they’re generous, they’ll be happy to share their knowledge with you. You can see the Dhamma not only in their words, but also in their actions …
- Compunction… He went on to add, “It’s because they haven’t had good practice in generosity and virtue.” Now, the training in generosity and virtue teaches you, to begin with, that you have to give before you’re going to get. And it’s teaching you at an age, if you’re learning this when you’re a child, where it’s a counterintuitive …
- Separate… It’s interesting, because we tend to think of goodwill as being a soft virtue—but he saw it as a strong and an impermeable one. As he said, outside influences cannot come into your mind when you’re radiating goodwill. Now, remember, goodwill is not saying, “May everybody be happy just doing whatever they’re doing.” You look at happiness in terms of …
- The Image of the Raft… It’s based on mindfulness, and mindfulness is based on right view and also on virtue. Why is that? Because following the precepts teaches you to be honest. If you’re really going to stick with the precepts, you have to keep them in mind. That’s mindfulness. You have to be alert to what you’re doing. That’s alertness. And you have …
The Three Perceptions
… When you’re developing your virtue, you don’t apply these perceptions to your virtue. You apply them to things that would pull you away from the practice of virtue, things that you might use as an excuse for not following the precepts. The Buddha says that there are basically three kinds of loss that would tempt people to break the precepts: loss of …- Directing Yourself Rightly… You’re here to develop the training in virtue, concentration, and discernment because those are your treasures. Those are your protection. Progress in those things is genuine progress. When you look at the world outside, you see so many people living their lives, working on a particular cause, and then it all gets dashed to pieces by a change in the economy, a change …
- Appreciating Merit… learning to appreciate acts of generosity, learning how to appreciate virtue, learning how to appreciate the cultivation of skillful states of mind. This is why gratitude is one of the basic principles in developing this sense of delight in developing, in developing a delight in abandoning. You think of the good that other people have done for you. You realize that they went out …
- Motivation… Sometimes the Buddha has you think back on your past virtue, your past generosity as a way of giving yourself a sense of self-confidence that, Yes, you can do this. The good things you’ve done in the past are a sign that you’ve got some of the perfections and some of the merit that’s needed, some of the good qualities …
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