Search results for: virtue
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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 …Show one additional result in this book- Right Next to Ignorance… Think about your virtue. In times like this, you want to think about how good it has been, the times when you actually were able to carry through with the precepts when it was difficult, or you were able to be generous when it was difficult, to give you a sense of well-being. But eventually you do want to get back to the …
- Be Bigger Than Your Pains… There’s no virtue in just sitting there and suffering. You want to try to understand the pain, so you need to develop a place where you can watch it. You see, “Oh, this is how the pain begins. And this is how it’s inconstant; it comes and goes and comes back again, goes again and moves around.” It’s the same with …
- The Mind’s Eating Disorders… Give it the good food of concentration, a sense of well-being that comes from generosity and virtue, and the mind gets stronger and stronger. Give it conviction in the practice. That strengthens you. Make it persistent, be mindful, develop concentration so that you can develop the discernment that sees these things clearly. This is how you strengthen the mind to the point where …
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Buddhist Romanticism
An Ancient Path
… Other religious teachings may contain elements of the noble eightfold path, such as the practice of virtue or strong concentration, but because they lack right view—and thus fail to ask the right questions that would induce total dispassion for even the subtlest levels of fabrication in the highest states of concentration—they remain stuck in states of becoming. The Buddha’s claims for …Show 6 additional results in this book
- The Allure of Self… the self that developed virtue, that developed concentration, that developed discernment. It got you to a dimension where there was no sense of self. You saw it, but then you returned to the experience of the senses, you returned to the aggregates, and you realized that there’s more work to be done. That lingering sense of self was still there to do the …
An Arrow in the Heart
… When Sāriputta passed away, did he take virtue along with him? No. Concentration? No. Discernment? No. Release? No. Knowledge and vision of release? No. In other words, the good work of the world—the best work of the world, the path to total release from suffering—is still there to be done. It’s when this work is accomplished that renunciation-based distress leads …- Friends with The Breath… This refers to the brahmaviharas, but also to training in virtue, training in discernment, training so that your mind isn’t overcome by pleasure or overcome by pain. These are all things we can do right now so that the salt of our past bad actions gets dissolved away. And the goodness of our current actions is like that broad river. So pay attention …
- In Training… erase their past actions. What it does, though, is that it gives you the right attitude so that you’re not going to create new bad karma yourself. That’s generosity. Virtue: How are your precepts? In particular, the precept against lying: The Buddha held that as having the most importance. As he said, if you have no shame at telling a deliberate lie …
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