Search results for: virtue
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- The Beginnings of Wisdom… the pleasures of generosity, the pleasures of virtue, and the pleasures of meditation. Even though these may not be permanent—they have their ups and downs—still, they’re more long-term than your typical pleasures because they’re totally blameless. And as you look for happiness in these ways, you get a sense of self-esteem. You realize that you’re being responsible …
- Free Like a Wild Deer… No one’s laid claim to virtue. You’re free to develop your meditation. No one else has laid claim to your mind and your meditation. This is an area where the opportunities are wide open—so that maybe one day your mind, too, can be free like a wild deer.
- No Happiness Other than Peace… the same virtues that the Buddha developed himself. Wisdom in realizing that your actions do make a difference in terms of your happiness, and that long-term happiness is better than short. Compassion in realizing that if you want your happiness to last, it can’t cause suffering to anybody else. And purity in that you really do look at your actions and their …
- Staying Grounded… But over there, studying with Ajaan Fuang, having opinions about things where you didn’t really know was not regarded as a virtue at all. And I think that’s wise. You can avoid a lot of problems that way. It gives the mind more time to be by itself, to be with the body, and not get blown around. So try to keep …
- The Desire to Do Well… Everything from generosity through virtue through meditation, everything from right view all the way through right concentration, requires that you have some desire. As the Buddha said, “All things are rooted in desire.” That includes skillful and unskillful things. It even includes the path. The only thing that’s not rooted in desire is* nibbāna*. That’s the ending of all things. So of …
- Family Ties… As he said, some parents have no virtue, no generosity, no conviction, and no discernment. And your way to repay them is not just to hang around and do everything they tell you. You try to find some way of inducing them to be generous if you can, more virtuous if you can. The “if you can” here is important. Sometimes you realize you …
- Harmony Inside & Outside… Generosity, virtue, meditation, or in other terms, virtue, concentration and discernment—all the things that develop good qualities in the mind: That was considered practice, whereas in the Anglo center, it was just sitting and walking mindfully. That was it. The author recounts how one night she was talking to one of the members of the Anglo center, and it suddenly hit that person …
- Neither Here nor There… He starts out with generosity and virtue. He talks about sensual heavens, where the rewards of generosity and virtue are at their highest. But then he talks about the drawbacks of sensuality—even the degradation, as he says, of sensuality. That’s when the mind is ready to think of renunciation as a good thing—and when you’re ready for the four noble …
- What’s Constant, What’s Not… intentions. Stay with your breath. Observe your breath. Be as sensitive as possible to your breathing. Get the mind to settle down and engage in all the aspects of the practice: virtue, concentration, and discernment, based on generosity. If you trust in the principle of causality, this is where your certainty lies. You put good causes into the system, and good things will have …
- The Need for Right View… Giving doesn’t have any virtue at all,” either because people when they die just vanish, get annihilated, so what you do for them doesn’t have any long-term benefits, for them or for you. Or there was the argument that everything was determined, that there was some causal mechanism put into motion in the beginning of the cosmos, either by a personal …
- The Advantages of Many Selves… It’s training in generosity, training in virtue, training in goodwill. Work on those. You already have those seeds inside you. This is a large part of what conviction means. When the Buddha gained awakening, it wasn’t just news about him. It’s news about us as well. We read about him in his last lifetime, and he seems amazing, almost superhuman. But …
- Opting Out… our independence—and it’s a noble act. In that last year, as the Buddha taught, going from place to place, one of the recurring themes was the four noble dhammas: virtue, concentration, discernment, release. It’s the release that makes these dhammas noble. But they’re also noble in the sense that you’re not harming anyone. You’re not harming yourself, you …
- Respect for the Training… The training is very basic—virtue, concentration, discernment—and in some cases it’s so basic we tend to overlook it. We want to go to the higher Dhamma, things that are more abstract that seem to be more in line with our level of intelligence. As a result, we tend to miss a lot of the really good lessons that can be learned …
- Develop Your Inner Observer… As you come here to meditate, you have to ask yourself, “What do they know?” When you’re training the mind through virtue, concentration, and discernment, you’re going into territory that most of them never knew before. So you’ve got to train your inner critic to actually be helpful as you train in these skills. Some people say they just want to …
- Suffering is an Addiction… That’s what the path is for—the practice of mindfulness, concentration, the practice of virtue, learning to take some satisfaction in knowing that you’ve behaved in a skillful way. In the Buddha’s instructions on how to help yourself through helping others—treating other people with goodwill and with sympathy, with patience and equanimity—the Buddha says it’s immediately good for …
- Mind the Gap… As the Buddha said, the things you need for a happy rebirth are conviction, virtue, generosity, and discernment. In some cases, he expands that list to the seven treasures: those four plus learning, shame, and compunction. These are the things that protect you. There are many stories of King Pasenadi coming to see the Buddha. Here was someone who lived his life looking for …
- Choosing a Teacher… You’re not going to know their virtue—i.e., their truthfulness—until you’ve been with them for a while and seen them in action. And you have to be observant. This requires that you be honest, too. You’re not going to know a person’s discernment until you hear them discuss issues and see how they treat a particular issue, how …
- Rewriting the Mind’s Song… Because after all, we’d like to see all the unskillful people in the world stop being unskillful and learn to work in ways that are conducive to generosity and virtue and general well-being all around. So you have to consciously learn to think these thoughts. Goodwill doesn’t mean that you’re giving your approval to what people are doing or that …
- The Purity of Your Intentions… There may be times when, by holding the precepts, you’re going to suffer a loss of some kind, but as the Buddha said, that kind of loss is nothing compared to the loss of your virtue. So when information is hard to come by, all you have is your intentions, the purity of your intentions, to fall back on. This is why we …
- A Slave to the Dhamma… all the Capricorn virtues. It’s important to realize that this is a part of training the mind. If training the mind were simply a matter of closing your eyes and sitting very still, it’d be a lot easier, but it wouldn’t really challenge you in the way that the full training of the heart and mind does. One of the things …
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