… He makes known—having realized it through direct knowledge—this world with its devas, Māras, & Brahmās, this generation with its contemplatives & brahmans, its royalty & commonfolk; he explains the Dhamma admirable in the beginning, admirable in the middle, admirable in the end; he expounds the holy life both in its particulars & in its essence, entirely perfect, surpassingly pure. It’s good to see such a …
… trying to figure out a way to escape from all fabrications that appear, in the same way that a caged quail keeps looking for a way to escape from its cage.
h. Equanimity with regard to fabrications (saṅkhārupekkhā-ñāṇa): viewing all fabrications with a sense of indifference, just as a husband and wife might feel indifferent to each other’s activities after they have …
… Why is that? Because his small body doesn’t find a footing in the depth.
“In the same way, whoever would say, ‘I, without having gained concentration, will spend time in isolated wilderness & forest lodgings,’ of him it can be expected that he will sink to the bottom or float away.
“Imagine, Upāli, a stupid baby boy, lying on his back, playing with his …
… That’s at the end of the path, when you’ve taken care of
all the members of the mind, and the mind gets more and more unified
in its agreement that this is the way you want to find happiness,
based on this path of virtue, concentration, and discernment, with
concentration the big middle ground that gets the mind right here in
the …
… This is the second ground on which he can be praised.” — SN 42:12
The last example shows that ascetic practices, in and of themselves, are not necessarily contrary to the middle way. It is possible to follow them all the way to the noble attainments. And, as this sutta shows, only when you have followed the path to its culmination and attained the …
… And this, going through the middle of it, is a blue, yellow, red, white, or brown thread.’ In the same way—with his mind thus concentrated, purified, and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability—the monk directs and inclines it to knowledge and vision. He discerns: ‘This body of mine is endowed with form, composed of the four …
… He starved himself until he was skin and bones, but then he
had the good sense to realize that that wasn’t the way out, either.
You can’t starve the mind of its suffering simply by avoiding
sensuality. It just begins to suffer in different ways. It starts
feeding in different ways. The person who engages in the self-denial
of that sort …
… all the time,
but it very rarely works out that way. That’s why we have to learn how
to create our own environment.
Ajaan Fuang once noted that even though the place where he taught in
Bangkok was not especially conducive—it was fairly noisy, it was right
down in the middle of the city—the fact that he was there made it …
… You find
yourself facing a wall, you’ve got to figure out, “Well, maybe there’s
some way around the wall. Maybe I’ve created the wall. How can I
un-create it? How can I stop doing the things that create the wall?”
Because remember, look at things as actions. That’s one of the most
useful ways of looking at the problems …
… Ajaan Fuang would often say, “Don’t let the external wat get
in the way of your internal wat.” In other words, the concerns of
making things nice outside, nice food, nice place to stay, nice
whatever: If they start getting in the way of your meditation, you’ve
got to cut back. So you have to look all around you. As Ajaan Lee …
… Whatever is a matter of convention follows these conventional ways.
But whatever is a matter of release—of purity—cannot be made to follow those ways, because it is not the same sort of thing. To take release or a released mind and confuse or compound it with the five khandhas, which are an affair of conventional reality, is wrong. It can’t be …
… If you didn’t stop, you’d think this was the normal way the mind has
to be. Look around you: This is the way everybody else’s minds are, so
you begin to think, “Well this is the way it has to be.” But it
doesn’t have to be.
As you get the mind more and more still, you begin to realize …
… We look at the Buddha, the way he behaved, the way he talked. He
doesn’t fit into some of our preconceived notions about what a teacher
should be. There are some portraits of the Buddha where he’s just all
sweetness and light, very gentle, very kind, who would never say
anything harsh to anybody. But if you look at the record in …
… Knowing which ways of breathing are uncomfortable, knowing how to vary the breath; knowing, “That way of breathing is uncomfortable; we’ll have to breathe like this in order to feel at ease”: This is Right Resolve.
The mental factors that think about and properly evaluate all aspects of the breath are Right Speech.
Knowing various ways of improving the breath; breathing, for example …
… The king must stamp him out!”
Then King Pasenadi Kosala, with a cavalry of roughly 500 horsemen, drove out of Sāvatthī in the middle of the day and entered the monastery. Driving as far as the ground was passable for chariots, he got down from his chariot and went on foot to the Blessed One. On arrival, having bowed down to the Blessed One …
… This is why our practice sways back and forth, like a tree in the middle of an open field, swaying back and forth in the wind. If we don’t discover the enduring principle within us, we won’t be able to find anything to act as a true refuge—for our training and education are simply supporting factors.
This is why we should …
… in the middle of a web.
Usually the spider is off to one side of the web, but it’s sensitive
to what’s going on in the entire web. Wherever a fly or other insect
comes and gets caught in the web, the spider immediately goes there,
deals with it, then returns to its original spot.
In the same way, you have your …
… What would be the most effective way of stopping that kind of behavior? The most effective way is rarely the route of anger. There are more subtle ways, more indirect ways, that are much more effective, much more lasting. But they’re not going to occur to you if you’re boiling over with indignation.
You may come to realize that you actually use …
… bodily
fabrication—the way you breathe; verbal fabrication—technically, it’s
directed thought and evaluation, but in plain terms, it’s the way you
talk to yourself; and then mental fabrication—perception and feelings.
As you look at the Buddha’s teachings, you can see that a lot of them
have to do with instructions on how to fabricate all these things more
skillfully …
… You have to act in ways that will create treasures that you would like to keep with you. You have to treat your actions as your most important possessions.
There’s a passage in the Canon where King Pasenadi comes to see the Buddha in the middle of the day and the Buddha asks him, “Where have you come from in the middle of …
MN 82 Raṭṭhapāla Sutta | About Raṭṭhapāla
… He makes known—having realized it through direct knowledge—this world with its devas, Māras, & Brahmās, this generation with its contemplatives & brahmans, its royalty & commonfolk; he explains the Dhamma admirable in the beginning, admirable in the middle, admirable in the end; he expounds the holy life both in its particulars & in its essence, entirely perfect, surpassingly pure. It’s good to see such a …
The Nine Stages of Liberating Insight | The Craft of the Heart
… trying to figure out a way to escape from all fabrications that appear, in the same way that a caged quail keeps looking for a way to escape from its cage. h. Equanimity with regard to fabrications (saṅkhārupekkhā-ñāṇa): viewing all fabrications with a sense of indifference, just as a husband and wife might feel indifferent to each other’s activities after they have …
