Search results for: virtue
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- 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 …
- A Refuge from Karma… You train the mind in virtue, you train it in discernment, so that it doesn’t have to suffer from things. You train it not to be overcome by pleasure or pain. You do that through the concentration. You can sit here, and everybody has had this experience: You start out meditating and there’s a pain here and a pain there. Your immediate …
- All Dhamma, All the Time… You take the virtues of the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, and you bring them in. And you do that by imitating the Buddha. He was the sort of person who questioned himself all the time. As a young prince, he noticed he was suffering. He didn’t blame his father, he didn’t blame his mother, he didn’t blame the surroundings …
- Things as They’ve Come to Be… So ask yourself, what would be inspiring right now? The Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha? Your own past generosity? Your own past virtues? Or do you need something besides the carrot? Do you need a stick? Think about death. It could come at any time, and you can ask yourself, “Am I ready to go?” Almost universally the answer is, “Not yet.” Okay, what …
- Safety All Around… With the training in heightened virtue, where you observe the five precepts, you observe them strictly. If you’re consistent in holding to the precepts, you’re providing safety to everybody. They don’t have to fear anything from you. They don’t have to fear that they’re going to be killed or that their things will be stolen by you or that …
- The Rewards of Right View… On the one hand, it’s because we do choose our actions—and our actions are under our control—that all the virtues we can think of really are worthwhile. If everything were predetermined, the fact that you were good or bad wouldn’t be your responsibility. It’d be something or somebody else’s. But you have your choices—you’re the one …
- In the Context of the Deathless… You look at the things the Buddha asks you to do in terms of virtue, concentration, discernment: They’re all honorable qualities. They’re all things you can be proud to do. Good qualities of the mind. Qualities of the mind that you respect within yourself. The Buddha’s asking you to develop them even further. So there’s a joy in being on …
- Metta & Merit… The other three qualities are being generous with any special gains you get, having virtue on the level of the noble ones in common, having right view in common. These are the things that give rise to harmony in the group. But as I said, half of harmony is goodwill. So take some time to generate thoughts of goodwill. We read the news, and …
- Meaning & Becoming… It includes generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance, truth, determination, goodwill, equanimity. When you develop these qualities, they take you out. So, if you’re looking for meaning and significance., it doesn’t have anything to do with the relationships you develop, although if you want to find what the Buddha calls an admirable friend, someone to helps you develop these qualities, that’s …
- Patience… You have to learn how to talk to yourself, to remind yourself you’ve got this virtue of generosity that’s going to pay off someday. In the meantime, you think about how spacious your mind is because you were able to give. One of the most important lessons, though, is that there is a ranking of pleasures. Say you have some food. You …
- Don’t Be Burdensome… Contentment is one of the virtues that you develop within: contentment with your material surroundings, what you’ve already got, but not content with where you are in the practice. If there’s work that needs to be done, you’re willing to do it. But contentment with your material things really does have an impact on the people around you. It helps you …
- The Buddha’s Map… For instance, the Buddha teaches us how to put virtue, concentration, and discernment together. These are all things that we have to put together. Our intention to observe the precepts is something we put together. The precepts themselves are sketches. But they’re very useful sketches. If they were too complex, too detailed, they’d be hard to hold to, because they’d be …
- For the Cessation of Dukkha… Everything we do as we practice virtue, concentration, and discernment, developing all the perfections, is based on that understanding. It’s because we realize that the pain is mental and the causes of the pain that are mental are the really important ones: That’s why we’re sitting here meditating. If the kind of pain that we can put an end to were …
- Worldly Effort… The Buddha says we should look right here, developing virtue, concentration, and discernment. It seems an unlikely place, looking for refuge in our own actions, but he says that’s the only place you can do it. Our actions seem awfully ephemeral, but he says everything else is based on action. But the path is a special type of action. It’s the action …
- Happy to Be Here… the happiness of generosity, the happiness of virtue. You want to reflect on that and bring that attitude into the meditation. You’re going to be providing food for the mind, and you don’t want to force the food on yourself. You want to lay the food out in front of the mind and wait for it to be interested in eating. So …
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