Search results for: virtue
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- Fire… But even on the way there, the treasures that we build into the mind – our conviction, our virtue, our sense of shame and compunction, our learning, our generosity, our discernment – are treasures that no outside fire can burn. Just make sure your inner fires don’t burn them up, and you’ll be safe.
- The Gift of Discernment… Try to feed off virtue. Try to feed off concentration. Feed off all the factors of the path—concentration in particular. That’s where you can get a sense of inner nourishment. But it also steadies the mind so that when thoughts move in one direction or another, you know. Then you begin to see that what you used to think was simply watching …
- Push Yourself… loss of wealth, loss of health, loss of relatives, loss of view, loss of virtue. Those first three can actually happen through holding to the precepts. You can make money by lying, but you’re not going to lie. You can save your relatives by lying about what they did, but you’re not going to lie. You can feed yourself, become wealthy, maintain …
- Happy to Be Here… We train it through virtue. And we train it through meditation, like we’re doing right now. You give it something good to think about—something that’s easy, nearby, that can be restful, soothing. The breath. You can breathe in lots of different ways. You can engage in short breathing, long breathing, fast, slow, heavy, light, deep, shallow. And you can experiment. Try …
- Straightening the Arrow… seeing the value of generosity, seeing the value of virtue. Getting the mind in concentration, the Buddha said, is a perception attainment. You have to maintain the perception of breath and choose the proper perception of breath so that the mind can settle down with it, so that you don’t forget and wander off someplace else. The perception is the marker that keeps …
- Something Good to Cling to… We hold on to the concentration, we hold on to the practice of generosity, virtue, we hold on to our discernment, because these things enable us to strengthen the mind and give us a good place to stay as other things in the world come and go, so that as the other things that we tend to hold on to and we tend to …
- Determination… There’s more to the practice than just meditating.” She said, “Go back and look more carefully.” And sure enough, the people were practicing generosity, they were practicing virtue, they were teaching their children gratitude. The woman who was doing the study began to realize that there’s more to the practice than just sitting here with your eyes closed. We’re developing all …
- Saṃvega & Pasāda… selfish about that? You’re willing to replace our common habit of feeding with one of giving. Instead of taking in, you distribute out. Generosity, of course, is giving material gifts. Virtue is said to be the gift of safety. You may not be able to protect everybody from other sources, but you are protecting them from any potential harm coming from you. As …
- Choose Your Battles… As you get more and more clear about what you’re doing and the results of what you’re doing—in your practice of virtue and concentration—then when things come together, then there’s a sharp drop. It’s a quantum leap, something very different from anything that went before. But for that balance to come together, and for that sharpness of discernment …
- The Perfection of Freedom… your life. But none of the qualities in the list can be totally perfected. Generosity: You can’t be perfectly generous, because there are constraints on what you have to give. Virtue: You can’t be perfectly virtuous. Even if you hold by the five precepts, the five precepts cover only so much. You can’t be totally sure that you’re not killing …
- The Anatomy of the Present… It’s developed in virtue and developed in discernment. And it’s trained so as to not be overcome easily by either pleasure or pain. When your mind has these qualities, it’s like the large river, so that whatever past karma you’ve done in the past doesn’t really pain you that much. This gives you a sense of how things are …
- Noble Priorities… You could attack those three kinds of craving by doing other things—in other words, following the path, starting with right view all the way through right concentration under the headings of virtue, concentration, discernment. And through that path it’s possible to put an end to suffering. It’s an inside job. The suffering is inside; the causes are inside; the solution is …
- Expanded Possibilities… of meeting Ajaan Fuang, realizing that there are these possibilities that can be done, but that they’re going to require a lot of work. But still it’s good work. Virtue, concentration, discernment: These are all good things. The qualities of mind that can be developed as you practice are all good things. Prior to meeting Ajaan Fuang, I’d always wondered if …
- Vows… So even though we’re living in a land where it doesn’t rain much during the rains retreat, we can still make use of the tradition to decide that for the next three months we’re going to try to do something special with our lives, in terms of generosity, virtue, or meditation. The word meditation here, bhavana, means developing. You’re trying …
- Analysis of Qualities… This is why we have those other meditation topics—like recollection of death, recollection of the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, recollection of your own generosity and virtue—to incline the mind to see the importance of getting trained, settling down, developing some concentration. That’s one thing you have to watch out for in the mind. The other thing you have to …
- Learning from Determination… The same with virtue: The precepts are not just Sunday school rules that you have to quietly obey as you follow them. You have to be observant as you try to stick with them. You learn about your intentions when they run up against a precept. You learn that you have to develop theh skills of mindfulness, alertness, and ardency: mindful to keep the …
- Put Your Heart into It… He wanted to see “flourishing” more as the Buddhist virtue. But the Buddha is very precise in what it means to be harmless. You don’t intentionally do anything that’s going to injure others: no killing, no stealing, no illicit sex, no lying, no taking intoxicants. This person was saying, well, what about the ripple effect of your actions down the line? The …
- The Reasonable Path… It takes virtue, concentration, and discernment, and puts them in a reasonable context. The Jains often complained to the Buddha that his precepts were sloppier than theirs. But again they took the idea of harmlessness to totally useless extremes. It was logical but it was useless. It didn’t work. The same with concentration. You can get the mind into a dead concentration where …
- Complexities of Karma… not just meditation, but also generosity and virtue. That way, your mind is under control, and you have good opportunities waiting to open up for you. So the Buddha’s policy for living a good life—and that includes managing a good death—comes down to some very basic things: Be generous, be virtuous, develop thoughts of goodwill in your mind, and then try …
- Change… The path requires not only discernment but also virtue and concentration, because any happiness that’s not based on these qualities is sure to fall apart. Even some of the happiness that comes with the path is going to fall apart if you let yourself just stop where you are and say, “Well, this is good enough for me.” You get a little bit …
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