Search results for: virtue
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- Guardian Meditations… about generosity and virtue, the rewards of generosity and virtue in heaven, the drawbacks of those rewards, and then how to see renunciation—in other words, the pleasure of concentration—as rest for the mind. You can imagine, being someone who was a hired killer, listening to this Dhamma, being the focus of that teaching. I’ve always thought it was a shame that …
- Nobility Through Inner Strength… Things outside can always be replaced, but the virtue of your mind, once you’ve destroyed it, is hard to repair. The things you do with the mind when you lose your virtue, you regret for the whole rest of your life. Remind yourself of that when you’re tempted to do something like that. That way, you can save yourself a lot of …
- A Handful of Leaves… by developing the qualities of the path, which come down to virtue, concentration, and discernment. Virtue is when you avoid harmful behavior. Concentration is when you get the mind solidly gathered around one object. And that’s to give strength to your discernment, to see exactly what you’re doing that’s causing the suffering and what you can do to stop. That chant …
- If These Walls Could Talk… The Buddha talks about the fact that we’re training the mind in virtue, concentration, discernment, or what he calls heightened virtue, heightened mind, heightened discernment. Even though to some extent the Buddha is our trainer, he’s not here right now. You have to internalize his instructions, internalize his values. Which means that part of your mind is the trainer, and part of …
- Twigs & Branches… The same as when you’re practicing virtue: You don’t look at your precepts as being inconstant, stressful, and not-self, even though they are. For the time being, you don’t focus on that. You try to make them as constant as possible. Learn how to wear your virtue with a sense of ease. Focus that analysis on things that would pull …
- New Beginnings… In other words, the Buddha teaches generosity; he teaches virtue; he teaches meditation. So you try it and you try your best. If you don’t try your best, you don’t learn. It’s when you try your best and then you reflect—and the results are still not good enough—that’s when you learn. There’s something new you need to …
- Stepping Out of Yourself… Then there’s virtue, your ability to avoid harm to yourself and harm to other people. It’s all about training the mind. And here there’s no competition. We may see that other people seem to be more advanced in their concentration, but that’s their business. You measure yourself in terms of how much better your mind is than it was before …
MvVI: bhesajjakkhandhako
… This is the first drawback coming from an unvirtuous person’s defect in virtue. puna caparaṁ gahapatayo dussīlassa sīlavipannassa pāpako kittisaddo abbhuggacchati. ayaṁ dutiyo ādīnavo dussīlassa sīlavipattiyā. “And further, the bad reputation of the unvirtuous person, defective in virtue, gets spread about. This is the second drawback coming from an unvirtuous person’s defect in virtue. puna caparaṁ gahapatayo dussīlo sīlavipanno yaññadeva parisaṁ upasaṅkamati …- Top Priorities… A while back I was leading a course on the perfections, and someone noticed that when you look at the list of ten perfections, it’s a pretty generic list of virtues. You go into any culture, any religious tradition, and they’ll all say that these are good things to develop. What makes them particularly Buddhist, though, is the element of discernment brought …
- Conviction in Charge… The incense is a symbol of virtue, in that the Buddha said the scent of virtue goes against the wind. The flowers are a symbol of concentration: the flowering of the mind. And, of course, the light of the candles is like the light of discernment. Those are symbols. What you want to do is develop the genuine qualities in your own mind. As …
- A Haven for Inner Wealth… And there are virtue, shame, and compunction. These three qualities go together. Virtue is the promise you make to yourself that you’re not going to harm anybody, and then you stick with that promise. This requires mindfulness; it requires alertness. That’s how it develops qualities that are good for concentration practice, because you have to keep your precepts in mind, your original …
- The Ten Priorities… The determination of truthfulness includes the perfections of truth, virtue, persistence, and endurance. There are a lot of difficult tasks in the path. You really have to stick with it. It’s not something you do for a weekend: spending Saturday learning about your awakened nature, then Sunday thinking about integrating your awakened nature with the rest of your life, and then going back …
- 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 …
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