Search results for: virtue

  1. Page 32
  2. Getting the Most Out of the Present
     … In particular, whatever goodness you may want to develop in terms of generosity, virtue, all the qualities that are called perfections: Those are things you develop. That’s the duty there, and in that way your life away from formal practice is not wasted. We have only so much time, but we also have duties that are imposed on us, either from outside or … 
  3. Appreciating Goodness
     … He lists three types of goodness in particular—generosity, virtue, and the development of goodwill—because these are ways of finding happiness that don’t cause any harm to anybody. The Buddha never said that the search for happiness is a bad thing. He never said that you should try to deny your happiness for the sake of others. He said you should work … 
  4. Dedicating Goodness, Spreading Goodwill
     … One is generosity and the other is virtue. Generosity, of course, means giving. And as the Buddha said, you give where you feel inspired. But if you want your giving to be skillful, you want to be careful about your motivation for giving, the actual items you give, and the people you give to. You can turn generosity into a skill. Your motivation may … 
  5. Prerequisites for the Practice
     … The second quality is virtue. You want to look for someone who sticks to the precepts and encourages other people to stick to the precepts. That means following the precepts in all situations, without exceptions. As the Buddha once said, when you hold to the precepts in all situations, you’re giving universal safety to all beings and you have a share in that … 
  6. Strong Against Anger & Fear
     … The virtue you maintain, the discernment you develop—these are all treasures. They’re not the kind of treasure that the kings can take away from you, dictators can take away from you, fire can burn, or water can wash away. The only way you can lose them is if you throw them away yourself. So you have to be heedful. That’s the … 
  7. Right Action & Right Livelihood
     … Remember, as the Buddha said, “Concentration fostered by virtue has great fruit.” Now, it is possible to get the mind into concentration without virtue, but the fruit is going to be spoiled. As you’re practicing right concentration, remember: You want a good crop of fruit—something you can feed on to maintain the livelihood of the mind. So make sure that these factors … 
  8. Whole-body Consciousness
     … But your discernment took you there, and the discernment was based on virtue and on concentration. The virtue makes you honest, makes you sensitive to what you’re doing and the power of your actions. Concentration, again, makes you sensitive to what you can do simply with the intentions of your mind, the perceptions you hold in mind. And because it’s still and … 
  9. Warm Your Heart
     … After all, acts of merit—generosity, virtue, developing universal goodwill—are the first answer to the question that the Buddha says lies at the beginning of discernment, wisdom: “What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” Think about the wisdom there: One, you see that happiness is going to depend on your actions. Two, long-term is possible … 
  10. A Good Path to Be On
     … He says you can develop the skills of virtue, concentration, and discernment so that they can lead to total freedom. Think about that. Whenever you’re getting discouraged, remind yourself that there is this opening. There’s a possibility for you to become more and more skillful. And it doesn’t have to depend on anybody else. You don’t have to go around … 
  11. A Day of Gratitude
     … As Ajaan Lee said, the teachings on how to practice virtue, concentration, and discernment are like a recipe for a medicine. If you’ve never taken the medicine, you don’t know how good it is, so the recipe just sits there. If nobody pays any attention to it, after a while people say, “Well, this is just old trash, old pieces of paper … 
  12. Determined to be Happy
     … All the forms of goodness—generosity, virtue, meditation—are totally harmless and they’re based on goodwill. With generosity and virtue, that’s easy to see: When you give to others, they’re happy. When you abstain from harming them, they’re happy. But especially meditation—getting the mind under control so that your greed, aversion, and delusion don’t take over: That’s … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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.
  22. Load next page...