Search results for: virtue

  1. Page 55
  2. Abandoning & Developing
     … Goodwill is one of those general virtues that’s extolled in almost all religious traditions, but the Buddha has a particular take on it, because when you’re wishing for happiness, you have to ask yourself: Where does happiness come from? It has to come from your actions. If you’re wishing goodwill for others, you’re hoping that their actions will be skillful … 
  3. Staying Still
     … It’s interesting that in that verse we chanted just now, there’s a phrase, “respect for the training,” and the training, of course, covers virtue, concentration, and discernment. Then it comes back and emphasizes “respect for concentration.” The Buddha wants you to realize that this stillness of mind, this ability for the mind to just settle down and be still, requires extra respect … 
  4. The Ennobling Path
     … It might be the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha; qualities of generosity, goodwill, any of the brahmaviharas ; the practice of virtue. Contemplate these things until the mind feels inspired. Once it gets lubricated, you can settle down with the breath again. And you find that the mind is willing to settle down and be still. So the practice of concentration is designed specifically … 
  5. Accepting the Way Things Function
     … If you’re feeling discouraged, think thoughts about your generosity and your virtue: the good that you’ve done. Think in a way that gets the mind more and more in the mood to meditate. Then you can focus on the breath. Here, again, it’s not just awareness of the breath. There are also your perceptions, your visualizations. How do you visualize the … 
  6. Feeding your Attack Dogs
     … As you look and listen and think in the course of the day, ask yourself, “Is this really helping in the practice, or am I feeding these attack dogs?” Years back, when Ajaan Suwat was asked about how to bring meditation into the course of your daily life, he focused on the issue of precepts and virtue: Sila is the Pali word. Ordinarily when … 
  7. Why We Train the Mind
     … When you’ve had enough of that, you say, “Maybe there’s another way out, another way to happiness.” You start looking inside, looking into this practice of training the mind through generosity, through virtue, through meditation. You see that you really can change the direction of the mind to look for happiness in new places, to look for happiness in new ways—like … 
  8. Even Animals Can Be Trained
     … The beauty represents the beauty of a monk’s virtue. The strength represents the right effort that’s needed for concentration. And the speed represents discernment. You have to remember that we’re trying to get the mind to settle down, and it requires some discernment in order to get it settled down right, because you’re trying to keep the mind in a … 
  9. Respect for Happiness
     … the training in virtue—in other words, learning to abstain from things that harm yourself and harm other people; and training in concentration like we’re doing right now—learning to be mindful and alert, developing your strength of mind to stay with one thing consistently, to really learn from it, to really observe it, both so that you gain knowledge and so that … 
  10. The Duties of Happiness
     … That’s at the end of the path, when you’ve taken care of all the members of the mind, and the mind gets more and more unified in its agreement that this is the way you want to find happiness, based on this path of virtue, concentration, and discernment, with concentration the big middle ground that gets the mind right here in the … 
  11. Commit, Reflect, Discern
     … practice in virtue, practice in concentration, practice in discernment. We reflect on these things—and the fact that things are inconstant, stressful, not-self, as we chanted just now; the fact that we’re subject to aging, illness, and death—not to get depressed, but to motivate ourselves to take on the training. After all, the Buddha didn’t simply lay out a theory … 
  12. Dhamma Warrior
     … What are your strengths, what are your weaknesses, what are you capable of? If you’re in a group of people, what’s your position in the group? What’s the appropriate behavior for someone in that position? What work do you still need to do in training in virtue, concentration, discernment? In other words, be very realistic about where you are, not getting … 
  13. Making Yourself Worthy of Trust
     … And there you have it, the three main virtues of the Buddha—wisdom, compassion, purity—in your search for happiness. So you internalize the examples set by the Triple Gem. That’s where the inner refuge comes in. You train the mind to be reliable because you start out with a mind that’s partly reliable and partly not. Ajaan Chah liked to say … 
  14. A Committed Relationship
     … That means that you have to develop the virtues of being long-term: determination, patience, equanimity, truthfulness. Once you make up your mind you’re going to do something, you really do it. That’s what truthfulness means. It’s not just a matter of telling the truth. It also means being true to the decisions you’ve made, the determinations you’ve made … 
  15. Page search result icon All about Acceptance | Things as They Can Be
     … conviction (in the Buddha’s awakening), virtue, generosity, and discernment. To enter into an admirable friendship means not only looking for friends of this sort but also trying to emulate their good qualities, so that you can become an admirable friend to yourself and to others as well (AN 8:54). A friendship of this sort, the Buddha said, is the most important external … 
  16. Page search result icon All about Acceptance
     … conviction (in the Buddha’s awakening), virtue, generosity, and discernment. To enter into an admirable friendship means not only looking for friends of this sort but also trying to emulate their good qualities, so that you can become an admirable friend to yourself and to others as well (AN 8:54). A friendship of this sort, the Buddha said, is the most important external … 
  17. Endurance with a Purpose
     … If endurance on its own were a virtue, chickens would have us all beat. They can sit on their eggs for hours and hours on end. But you have to remember, we’re enduring for a purpose. We want to be able to create goodness in our minds in terms of the happiness that comes from the goodness of our actions. We want that … 
  18. Guardian Meditations
     … You have to protect your right view and your virtue, and you want to be as mindful as possible. That’s going to be difficult. You think that, sitting here in this nice quiet place, it’s hard to get your mind to be mindful. What’s it going to be like when you’re dying? You’re being evicted from the body. You … 
  19. Mindful of Death
     … The recollection of your virtue, the recollection of your generosity: These are really sustaining for the mind. You can see this even as you sit here and meditate. There are times when the meditation is not going well and you start thinking, “I just don’t have it. I don’t have the potential.” But then you can recollect times when you’ve been … 
  20. The Same but Different, but the Same
     … s the general thirst and desire to feed on things: That’s the cause of suffering. This is true across the board. The path also contains the same elements for everyone: virtue, concentration, and discernment. So regardless of your nationality, regardless of the type of mental illness you suffer from—greed, anger, delusion are all different forms of mental illness—the basic structure of … 
  21. Book search result icon The Shape of Suffering Chapter Three
     … His mind heads straight, based on virtue. And when the mind is headed straight, the disciple of the noble ones gains a sense of the goal… the mind becomes concentrated. “Mahānāma, you should develop this recollection of virtue while you are walking, while you are standing, while you are sitting, while you are lying down, while you are busy at work, while you are … 
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