Search results for: virtue
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- Refuge in an Admirable Friend… This, too, is one of the virtues of the Buddha that you want to learn how to emulate. This is what it means to become a friend with the Buddha and to take refuge in the Buddha at the same time. You look for happiness that’s long-term. You take into consideration the happiness of others as you do that. And finally, there …
- Long-term Happiness… The Buddha talks about generosity, virtue, meditation. These are the ways of finding happiness that don’t cause any trouble. In fact, this is the beginning of wisdom: looking for true happiness. As the Buddha said, wisdom begins with the question, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” All the other Buddha’s wisdom teachings come from …
- Remembering Luang Loong… But we realize that we don’t have to let that discourage us. We can be independently good. After all, where does generosity come from? It comes from our own intentions. Virtue comes from our own intentions. Goodwill comes from our own intentions. These are things that we can generate inside regardless of what the world is doing. We can learn how to make …
- Respect for the Path… In other words, the more you’re true in practicing virtue, concentration, discernment, the truer the happiness you’ll find. This is one aspect of what’s called the miracle of instruction. The Buddha was asked one time why he didn’t display his psychic powers more. He replied that when you just display psychic powers, people get suspicious: “What kind of trick is …
- Metta Metacognition… The same with virtue: There are times when you’re going to have to make a sacrifice in order to hold to the precepts, but you find that you do that with a sense of honor, that you’re not going to just let money govern your life. You’ve got something of higher value, and that higher value is in you. It’s …
- Refuge for All Beings… He says, if you have an unlimited mind, if you train yourself in virtue, train yourself in discernment, train yourself not to be overcome by pleasure or pain—which are issues of concentration and discernment—then when results come from past bad karma, they’re going to be a lot less. He gives the example of the lump of salt. If you put the …
- A Sense of Yourself… And if it’s a weak point, what can you do to strengthen it? The second quality is virtue, learning to be consistent in being harmless in your actions. The consistency is the important aspect of this. As the Buddha pointed out, even people who break the precepts are not breaking them most of the time. It’s not the case that there are …
- Friends with the Breath… in terms of developing happiness within the world, but also in taking us beyond the world. This path comes down to three things: virtue, concentration, discernment. At the moment we’re focusing on the concentration. But all three are involved. Virtue is a quality of normalcy in our intentions, harmlessness in our intentions. As we’re sitting here meditating, we’re not harming anybody …
- A Good Place to Stay… You also find that it helps your virtue. A lot of times, we do unskillful things because there’s a thirst for pleasure “of any kind, right now.” That’s what the mind says, and then we end up doing unskillful things to please it. Well, here the breath is giving you a sense of ease you can tap into. Whenever you feel tempted …
Safety in a Duality
… Their precepts are “untorn, unbroken, unspotted, unsplattered, liberating, praised by the observant, ungrasped at, leading to concentration.” The fact that they’re untorn, etc., means that they’re observed consistently. “Ungrasped at” means that even though such people are virtuous, they don’t fashion themselves around their virtues (MN 78). In other words, they don’t build an identity around being virtuous. This means …- The Energy You Broadcast… thoughts of generosity, thoughts of gratitude, thoughts of virtue, thoughts of harmlessness. When you’re sending out that kind of energy, that’s a lot of what gets reflected back. It creates a better atmosphere, a better environment in which to allow the mind to settle down and really get still inside, so that you can send out even better energy. Of course, you …
- Consciousness, Awakened & Not… Why did the Buddha formulate the path of virtue, concentration, and discernment? If you can simply open to the unconditioned, why would he formulate such a difficult path? In some schools, they define discernment in terms of how you define emptiness, and they have courses of study that go for years until you get the right understanding of what emptiness is and what it …
- Admirable Friends & Amiable Company… The fifth quality is being equal in our virtue. For the monks this means that everybody adheres to all the precepts that the monks are supposed to adhere to. For the laypeople, it means the five and the eight precepts. We all hold that these are important qualities, and they form the basis of our interactions. In particular, this has to do with our …
- Wise About Pleasure… You have conviction in the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha, and you have virtues that are pleasing to the noble ones. After all, if you really have conviction, you have to act on it. It has to show up in your actions. That’s the first strength. The second strength is persistence. Once you determine that you’ve got to develop skillful qualities and …
- Right View Comes First… Then from there, when the Buddha would introduce transcendent right view, he’d give what is called the “graduated discourse” or the “gradual discourse.” He’d talk about how generosity and virtue do have meaning, again because of the principle of karma, and they get rewarded in heaven. It’s interesting that the Buddha talks a lot about generosity, a lot about virtue, but …
- The Dhamma Eye… Incense stands for virtue. Flowers stand for concentration, when the mind blossoms in concentration. And of course, the light of the candles is symbolic of the light of discernment. That’s all on the symbolic level. Now we’re going to do the actual practice, sitting here meditating, because concentration is one of the factors of the path, right concentration, which involves right effort …
- The Lightning Bolt… You can reflect on your virtue: the times in the past when you’ve done good things that you didn’t have to do. Reflect on your generosity: the times when you were generous when you didn’t have to be generous, either with material things, your time, your knowledge, or your forgiveness. These reflections help inspire a sense of confidence in yourself. Acts …
- Determined on Awakening… All the aspects of the path that we follow—virtue, concentration, discernment, all the qualities of mind we try to develop, the ways we live, trying to be modest, trying to be content, trying to find some seclusion, being unentangled: All of these are expressions of those four determinations. All of them advance those four determinations. So the Buddha is basically asking you to …
- The Right Piece in the Right Puzzle… For example, with the practice of virtue, when you realize that following the precepts might sometimes be bad for your health or your wealth, you have to make some sacrifices there to maintain your precepts. Or if your relatives come and ask you to lie for their sake, you have to say No. That’s when you have to realize the sense of self …
- How to Think about Death… There’s generosity, there’s virtue, there’s renunciation—the ability to step back from sensual pleasures and find a higher level of pleasure in a concentrated mind—discernment, persistence—your powers of endurance—truth, determination, goodwill, equanimity. These are things of lasting value. They might not be as hard as the hardwood of release, but at least they’re not just twigs and …
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