Search results for: virtue
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Ultimate Reality… And you do that through developing the noble eightfold path, which boils down to virtue, concentration, and discernment. These are things you do, and you learn about what you’re doing by being very systematic in what you do. This is why we practice concentration, why we have techniques for concentration, and specific questions to ask about what you’re doing while you’re …
- Five Reflections… This is why we make merit, practice generosity, develop virtue, both for the happiness it brings in the present moment — as the Buddha said, these activities are happy in and of themselves — and because they create good opportunities for us in the future, so that the flames, if they flicker out, will flicker out to, say, another nice house, rather than to some forest …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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