Search results for: virtue

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  2. A Sense of Yourself
     … generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance, truth, determination, goodwill and equanimity. You can take that list and ask yourself, “Where are you lacking?” If you don’t know about what it means to “lack” in these qualities, you can think about the practices of the people you’ve admired in the past. How do you stack up against them in terms of these qualities … 
  3. Initiative
     … You engage in admirable friendship, which means that if they have good qualities, and the Buddha gives a list—conviction, virtue, generosity, discernment—you try to emulate those qualities. You actually ask them, “How do you do this?” If you have trouble being generous, ask people who are generous, “How do you do this? What is your way of thinking that allows you to … 
  4. Asalha Puja – Completeness
     … We take the qualities of the path—which boil down to virtue, concentration, and discernment—and try to make them complete. These are qualities that all of us have to some extent. The Buddha made this point over and over again: The fact that he gained awakening wasn’t because he was some sort of special being who could do things and develop things … 
  5. A Memorial to Your Life
    There’s a phrase that Ajaan Fuang would use when he tried to teach people to put forth extra effort in the practice—whether in the practice of generosity, virtue, or meditation. And that was to “create a memorial to your life.” It took me a while to understand what he was talking about. Basically, suppose that in some future lifetime you gain the … 
  6. What’s Worth Doing?
     … At stream entry, your virtue is perfected, and so you don’t need any sense of yourself around your virtues. You don’t exalt yourself over others. You don’t create a sense of who you are around the precepts. They’re just there. But there are still other parts of the path that you have to work on, which is why there is … 
  7. Fear of Death
     … Of those four fears, one of them can be alleviated by the practice of generosity and virtue. That’s the fear that you’ll be punished for cruel behavior. People who’ve come back from near-death experiences often say that the things they regret most—when they look back on their lives, thinking that they’re about to die—are the opportunities where … 
  8. Categorical Truths
     … And then, the fourth noble truth is the noble eightfold path, which boils down to virtue, concentration, and discernment. These are all noble truths because they carry duties that, when you fulfill them, will lead to the deathless: something that doesn’t age, doesn’t grow ill, doesn’t die; something that stands outside of space and time. All this is categorical. Now, when … 
  9. An Equanimity You Can Feed On
     … It’s in this way that equanimity is a social virtue. It’s the equanimity that allows you not to have to feed off your relationships with other people. We were mentioning today the story where Ven. Sariputta talks about how he was sitting one afternoon, realizing there was nothing whose change in the world would cause his mind any grief. Ven. Ananda heard … 
  10. The Perfection of Truth
     … That’s when truthfulness really becomes a virtue. You’re not just reporting the truth. You’re creating really good truth in the world. After all, the truths you report might be good or bad, but the truths you create: You want all of those to be good, and it’s in your power to make them good. It’s something you can do.
  11. Doing Favors & Making Merit
     … It would have no virtue at all. That’s why the Buddha said, when he introduced karma, “There is what is given, there is what is sacrificed.” In other words, these things have meaning. Then he went on to say, “There are parents.” You might think, “Well, that’s obvious.” But what he meant is that your parents should have a special place in … 
  12. Goodwill
     … When the Buddha talks about generosity, talks about virtue, talks about meditation, these are all good things to do, honorable things to do—things that you can be proud of, in that you’re looking for happiness in a way that harms no one at all, and it actually lifts the level of your mind. All too many pleasures in the world pull you … 
  13. Dethinking Thinking
     … Why is it that in some of the lists you have discernment coming first, then virtue, then concentration, and in others you start out with virtue, then concentration, then discernment—or mindfulness, discernment, then leading to concentration? What’s going on there? And what patterns are consistent? You’ll find that one pattern is always consistent: that mindfulness comes before concentration. In some cases … 
  14. The Constant Teachings
     … how many Buddhas there have been throughout the course of time, they all teach the same thing: “Abandon what’s unskilful; develop what’s skillful.” What’s skillful? Generosity is skillful. Virtue is skillful. Meditation is skillful. These are the things that you can really depend on. They create within the mind a refuge that grows stronger and stronger until finally you reach a … 
  15. The Four Biases
     … It’s not just the case that virtue allows the mind to settle down. Once the mind is settled down and solid, it allows your virtue to become more and more solid and reliable, too. And it’s not just an abstract thought. There’s a real visceral sense when your mindfulness fills the body, and you can allow the breath energy in the … 
  16. A Complete Training
     … As we develop merit—or goodness, basically—through generosity, virtue, and the development of goodwill, we’re learning about how to construct good states of heart and mind, and to have a good influence on the world around us. After all, this is the world in which we’ll be practicing, so you want to create a good environment. At the same time, if … 
  17. A True Man of No Rank
     … So, we look at the example of the people from the past and we regret that some of their virtues are getting less and less common around us. But that should stir us to have a sense that we can keep those virtues ourselves. It’s a trait of a good person—you see somebody else has a good habit, a good capability, and … 
  18. Determination
     … In this way, he nourishes himself with that thought, uses his wisdom, uses his concentration, uses his virtue. There’s an interesting passage where Citta the householder is about to die. Some devas come to see him and say, “Set your mind on becoming a universal monarch, ruler of the continent of India, because you’d be a good ruler.” And the reason they … 
  19. The Challenge
     … Ajaan Suwat once noticed when he was teaching a meditation retreat that one of the reasons why everyone was so grim about their meditation was that they didn’t have any more basic experience of the Buddha’s teachings, experience with generosity, experience with virtue, or at least the particular way the Buddha taught generosity and virtue. He noted that if you had that … 
  20. It’s Up to You
     … Where are they still lacking? Are you lacking in terms of generosity? Lacking in terms of virtue? Lacking in terms of meditation? This is a good time to make a determination that for the next three months you’re going to be more careful about your precepts, for example. Especially that one about lying: It’s all too easy to think, “Well, I can … 
  21. Inner Refuge
     … We have a certain amount of virtue, a certain amount of concentration and discernment. Our refuge lies in developing these things to the point where we really can depend on them, when they’re all-around. As Ajaan Mun once said, you have to make your practice in the shape of a circle. Keep going around and around and around in a circle and … 
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