Search results for: virtue
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- A Thread Out of the Maze… Think of the times when people could have harmed you but they didn’t, and now you have the opportunity to develop that quality, the quality of restraint, the quality of virtue as well. Then live your life with those thoughts in mind. Take advantage of this freedom that you have to choose in the present moment, the freedom of intention. Learn to use …
- Dhamma is Timeless… So even though the Dhamma may not have lots of new things to tell you with the passing of time, that’s actually one of its virtues. Its lessons stay the same. I appreciated this when I was staying with Ajaan Fuang, that once you learned the principles, you could live by them. He was the sort of person who wasn’t going to …
- Secluded from Sensuality… He starts with generosity, with virtue, and the rewards that come from developing these qualities in your mind. You get to the sensual levels of heaven but then you fall. You get carried away with your instantaneous sensual pleasures, and the integrity of the mind, the character of the mind, begins to erode. You get used to having whatever sensual pleasure you want, and …
- Perspectives & Priorities… of your heart. Memorize those and listen to the Dhamma regularly to straighten out your views. That really helps put things into perspective. The other things that the Buddha recommends are: virtue—in other words, holding to the precepts; restraint of the senses; and restraint over your conversation. In all these cases, you’re watching over your mind, you’re watching over your behavior …
- The Gift of Meditation… All of the goodness we do in the practice—in terms of generosity, virtue, concentration, discernment—is the kind of goodness, the kind of happiness that spreads around, that doesn’t have clear boundaries—which is what makes it special. As the Buddha said, when you look after yourself, you’re looking after others; when you look after others, you’re looking after yourself …
- Timeless Dhamma… This is what the basic elements of the path—virtue, concentration, and discernment—are all about. The Buddha’s notion of action covers not just physical action or acts of speech, but also acts of mind. If you want to find a way that leads to true happiness, you’ll have to train all areas of action, in particular, the acts of the mind …
A Good Independent Self
… When you realize that your true well-being lies in acting in skillful ways, acting on skillful intentions, then even if you have any idea of an independent self, you’ll want to act on impulses for generosity, virtue, the desire to train the mind. At the same time, you avoid a lot of the problems of the idea of an interdependent self. For …- Understanding Contentment… You develop the virtue of generosity. In other cases, you figure out how to fix them so that they actually are more useful in more situations. You use your ingenuity to make the most of what you’ve got. That’s an important element of contentment. People who are not content with what they’ve got but want more just sit around dreaming, or …
- Endurance… The virtue of endurance is that your goodness doesn’t have to depend on outside circumstances, and this relates directly to the principle of four noble truths. Suffering comes from the way you talk to yourself. Physical pain may be inherent in having a body, but the suffering that goes into the mind is not automatic. It comes from how you relate to the …
- Nibbana Is Better than You Think… This is why, when the Buddha was introducing the four noble truths to lay people, he would start out with the goodness of generosity, the goodness of virtue, saying that these things do have meaning. But then they get rewarded. Many people who are generous, many people who are virtuous, go to the heavenly realms. There they get complacent and then they fall. So …
- All for the Sake of Freedom… And then all aspects of the path—virtue, concentration, discernment: Finally we let those go, too. This is the purpose of everything the Buddha taught. So we’re not here just to be mired in aging, illness, and death or what’s inconstant, stressful, not self; trying to embrace these things briefly and squeeze whatever little pleasure we can out of them before we …
- Respect for What’s Noble… This way, when you train these forms of clinging to be actually part of the path, as you develop virtue, concentration, and discernment, you have energy. You have confidence. This is another reason why we respect the Buddha: He basically teaches us to respect ourselves, that this is something we can do. So it’s all of a piece. Sometimes you hear people say …
- Learning from Labor… We can take that slogan and adjust it a little bit to make it a slogan for the Buddha’s teachings: “Learning from Labor.” In other words, you do the work of the training in terms of virtue, concentration, and discernment, and in the doing you’re going to learn a lot about the mind, a lot about how you’re causing suffering, and …
- Look after the Source… That’s your perfection of virtue. And that’s where you should focus your attention: on the good qualities you’re developing, both because they’ll lead to your true happiness, and also because a mind that’s imbued with these good qualities is going to come up with words and actions that are more conducive to well-being all around. Still, the focus …
- Things that Arise & Pass Away… Creating states of concentration, practicing virtue, working on your discernment, all involve effort. There’s going to be some stress there, so you have to be up for that. But the really amazing part of the path is that it’s the one kind of fabrication that leads to the end of fabrication—or as the Buddha says, the karma that leads to the …
- The Kamma of Meditation… When you’ve trained yourself in virtue and concentration, you develop discernment to see that even the good things you’ve developed in the path as you’ve let go of everything else, you’ll eventually have to let go of those good things, too. There’s a time and place for using the perception of self. There’s a time and place for …
- Beyond Imagination… As you practice virtue, you find yourself challenged in different ways—specifically around the precept on lying, which is probably the most important of the precepts—because there will be times when you have some information and don’t want to give it to everybody. There are some people you know who will want that information but then abuse it. So how do you …
- Slogging Through Difficulties… Keep remembering that patience and equanimity are important virtues—and this is how they’re built, one breath at a time. This is how all of those Capricorn perfections—determination, truthfulness, persistence, patience, the ones that require work, the ones that require that you slog through things—this is how they’re built: one step at a time. Those steps are nurtured by your …
- Nobody’s Servant… There’s virtue, not harming others; a sense of shame, in other words, being ashamed at the idea that you would do something harmful. Compunction, realizing that if anything that would cause harm, you just don’t really want to have to inflict that harm on yourself or anyone else. Conviction, conviction in the principle of karma, that your actions really do make a …
- Is ‘I Am’ the Problem?… the skills of the path—taking virtue as a skill, concentration as a skill, discernment as a skill. After all, what we like about what we see and hear, etc., is what we can make out of these things, either in terms of fantasies or a sense of possession or the changes we can make in the world—the same as when an artist …
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