Search results for: virtue
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- For When the World Can’t Help You… We also have the example of the Dhamma he taught on how to train the mind in generosity, virtue, and meditation. Then there’s the Sangha—the people who’ve practiced in line with what the Buddha taught and found that, yes, it’s true: You can achieve the deathless through this path. That’s an external refuge. Then you try to internalize that …
- To Comprehend Suffering… And concentration, to be *honest *concentration, requires virtue. It also requires mindfulness and alertness, so that you can watch what’s actually happening in the present moment. It’s in this way that the duties of the four noble truths all come together. When the path is fully developed, that’s when you complete the duty for the third noble truth, which is dispassion …
- When Aging Closes In… You develop more generosity, virtue, persistence, endurance, determination, goodwill, discernment, equanimity. All these good qualities are your real treasures. That’s what you want to keep in mind: that true worth of a human life lies in the quality of the mind, the quality of the heart. When you have that conviction, it nurtures your mindfulness so that it grows into concentration. From the …
- Dhamma for Laypeople… He starts out with emptiness, but they complain, “That’s a little bit too high for us.” So the Buddha teaches them generosity and virtue. The two stories provide an interesting contrast, and get at an issue that’s really important. We see that many of the teachings in the Canon are addressed to monks, but to what extent are these teachings appropriate for …
- Abandoning Effluents (3)… The destroying includes right resolve and all of the factors for virtue: right speech, right action, and right livelihood, because these things depend on maintaining skillful intentions and not acting on unskillful ones. And it’s also part of right effort, the destroying part. As for the seven factors for awakening you’re developing, you’ve got right view in analysis of qualities. And …
- Heedfulness… But the virtues that make life as human beings together really worthwhile—generosity and gratitude—really have a basis in the way the world works. That’s true only in a world where people do have choices and are responsible for their choices. When the Buddha was teaching Rahula, one, he seemed to be getting down on Rahula for apparently having told a lie …
- Withstanding Pleasure & Pain… As the Buddha says, if you’re developed in body, developed in mind, developed in virtue and discernment, and you make your mind unlimited—in other words, with the brahmavihāras—the results of past karma can come, but they don’t have to have an impact on the mind. In fact, in some cases, you scarcely feel them at all. In other cases, where …
- The Best Place to Practice… But even then, before you can get out of that situation, you do want to work with your mind, to discover the areas where you can develop virtue, concentration, and discernment to minimize the harm you’re doing to yourself and to other people. But otherwise, when you find the mind gazing far off, wanting to go practice over the ocean—and maybe someday …
- The Complexity of Pain… It’s through the development of virtue, development of discernment, development of mind and body, as he calls it: basically, learning how not to be overcome by pain or overcome by pleasure. That’s part of the key right there. When we allow ourselves to be overcome by pleasure, then there’s an opening to be overcome by pain, too. So, you have to …
- You’re Already Dead… your life. In other words, he was able to find true happiness through his own efforts, developing qualities in his mind that you have in a potential form in your mind. Virtue: being restrained in your actions, not harming yourself, not harming anybody else, Having a sense of shame and compunction: Shame here doesn’t mean that you’re ashamed of yourself, you’re …
- Sophisticated Dhamma… respect: respect for the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha; respect for the training; and respect for concentration. Now, respect for the training covers all the main parts of the training: virtue, concentration, and discernment. So it’s interesting to think about why the Buddha added respect for concentration. It’s included in the training, but why is it singled out as being the …
- Conviction in the End of Suffering… And the path of virtue, concentration and discernment seems like a good thing.” But that third truth, that’s the one you’ve got to take on conviction. Yet as the Buddha points out, conviction is a kind of wealth. It’s a strength. Often we don’t think of it in those terms. We’ve been through so many instances where we had …
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