Search results for: virtue
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- 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 …
- Safety in an Uncertain World… He does this with his standards in terms of virtue, concentration, and discernment. He helps to protect us against our doing unskillful things, thinking unskillful things, saying unskillful things, because the uncertainties of the world are nothing compared to a mind that’s uncertain, that can’t trust itself, so we have to learn how to make ourselves trustworthy. This is why the precepts …
- Insight Is a Judgment Call… The same with virtue: There are lots of things you could gain by breaking the precepts, but there comes a point when you realize they’re not worth it. It’s better to have the precept than to have the money that could come, say, from lying, stealing, or cheating. You begin to see things in terms of cause and effect, actions and the …
- Attachment to Views… Remember the four noble dhammas? Noble virtue, noble concentration, noble discernment, and noble release. The first three are for the sake of the last. The release is the essence of the teaching. It’s the core, the heartwood of the teaching. That’s where this is all aimed. Everything else is right or wrong as it helps in that direction. This is why when …
- Delighting the Mind… The Buddha talks many times, when he’s describing the steps of the practice, about how you gladden the mind through the practice of virtue and through abandoning the hindrances. Then, when the mind is glad, it finds it easy to settle down. So what can you do right now to gladden the mind? In some cases, the Buddha talks about a fever in …
The Buddha’s Teachings
The Buddha’s Teachings
… However, even the goodness of this sort of generosity is a small thing compared to the goodness of virtue. Virtue Virtue is the voluntary intention to behave harmlessly. Training in virtue starts by taking on and following the five precepts. This means that you resolve not to intentionally engage in: 1) killing any human being, or any animal large enough to be seen with …- Appropriate Attention Plus Admirable Friendship… Conviction in the principle of action, in other words, belief that what you do really does matter, really will make a difference, generosity, virtue, and discernment. The Buddha said that one of the advantages of living with a person like that is that you get a good example and, two, you get to hear the Dhamma. But sometimes the examples shout louder than the …
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