Search results for: middle way

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  2. Book search result icon Handful of Leaves, Volume One DN 29 The Inspiring Discourse | Pāsādika Sutta
     … The discussion that begins with this paragraph provides an explanation for what is meant by the “middle way” in the Buddha’s first sermon. See also the discussion of pleasure and pain in MN 101. 9. Reading añāṇadassanaṁ with the Thai edition. The other editions have ñāṇadassanaṁ, “that is knowledge & vision,” which doesn’t fit into the general message of the text here. This … 
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  3. The View from the Mountaintop
     … That chant we had just now about the four mountains comes from a passage in the Canon where King Pasenadi, one of the major kings of that time, came to see the Buddha in the middle of the day. The Buddha asked him, “What are you coming from in the middle of the day like this? What have you been doing?” And the king … 
  4. Nuts & Bolts
     … Sometimes we have a sense of obligation for certain ways of thinking. We feel, “If I didn’t think in these ways, I wouldn’t be me.” As we mentioned just now, we develop certain patterns of reacting to certain events, reading certain situations in a certain way, and we keep reverting to those ways. But you have to remember, there must have been … 
  5. What Makes Concentration Right
     … One of the reasons why this is called the middle path, or the middle way, is that you have to find the point of balance, and it’s in find that balance that you really develop your discernment. There’s the discernment that comes from reading books, the discernment that comes from thinking things through, but the discernment that comes from finding the point … 
  6. Discernment Is in the Doing
     … Maybe you can change the way you breathe. Maybe you can change the way you talk to yourself. What perceptions are you holding in mind? Could you change them? Those are some of the parameters. But you’re going to have to learn for yourself. When you’re alert to see something’s actually working, then you remember it for the next time around … 
  7. Virtues Bright & Neither Dark nor Bright
     … You realize that this is a way of showing goodwill. It’s a way of showing compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity—equanimity in the sense that you realize there are some things you would like to gain, but the only way you could gain them would be by taking the precepts, so you realize you have to give them up. With empathetic joy, you see … 
  8. Occupy Your Space
     … Imagine a line in the middle of the body running from the middle of the head down to the base of the spine. The breath energy comes into that line, goes out of that line. This way, you sweep out the space of the body. Any patterns of tension you may feel in any part of the body: Allow them to be dissolved by … 
  9. The Uses of Pleasure & Pain
     … There are better ways to think, better ways to manage the thought processes in the mind. And a funny thing happens. As you master these processes, they bring you to a point where everything reaches equilibrium. That’s where you can really let go. You can even let go of your tools at that point because they’ve taken you where you want to … 
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  10. Book search result icon A Heart Released A Heart Released
     … Where do the ways of the world arise? In ourselves. The ways of the world have eight factors, and the path that cures them has eight as well. The eightfold path is the cure for the eight ways of the world. Thus the Buddha taught the middle way as the cure for the two extremes. Once we have cured ourselves of the two extremes … 
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  11. Book search result icon Inner Strength & Parting Gifts Knowledge & Vision
     … When this sense of mahābhūta-rūpa is nourished with breath and mindfulness in this way, it will grow and mature. The properties will grow quiet and mature, and become mahā-satipaṭṭhāna, the great frame of reference. This is threshold concentration, or vicāra—spreading the breath. In centering the mind, we have to put it on the middle path, cutting away all thoughts of past … 
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  12. Befriending the Breath
     … In the same way, find a spot in the body where you feel that you can easily settle down and stay here. It might be in the middle of the head, the middle of the chest, the abdomen, anywhere in the body where you feel that your attention can settle in settle in, settle down, and begin to fit together. All the scattered little … 
  13. Asalha Puja
     … The path that works is the middle way. By this, he didn’t mean a middling way, halfway between pleasure and pain. It was a path that involved comprehending suffering, and for using the pleasure of right concentration as an alternative to either sensual pleasure or physical pain. Right view, which was part of the path, was focused on the question of how to … 
  14. Appreciating Goodness
     … He said you should work for your own happiness in a way that actually increases the happiness of others, or at the very least doesn’t harm them in any way. In that way, you’re being responsible in your search for happiness. That builds a solid happiness right now and goes on into the future. When you’re generous, the Buddha recommends that … 
  15. Dimensions of Right Effort
     … This relates to the fact that this path is a middle way. If it were an extreme path, pursuing an of extreme sensual pleasure or an extreme of self-denial, it wouldn’t require that much sensitivity. You’d just push, push, push in whichever direction is extreme and that would get you there. The middle way, though, requires a lot more precision, a … 
  16. How to Feed Mindfulness
     … So try to picture them learning to see to the error of their ways and changing their ways. In other words, you wish for them to start creating the causes for happiness. You don’t feel that you have to settle old scores first before you let them be happy or wise. When you learn how to think in these ways, it helps to … 
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  17. In Charge of Your World
    There’s a story in the Canon, where King Pasenadi comes to see the Buddha in the middle of the day. And the Buddha asks him, where are you coming from in the middle of the day? The King says, “Oh, I’ve been meeting with my ministers and talking about the sorts of things that people obsessed with their power talk about:—which … 
  18. First Principles
     … In the front of the body, think of the breath coming in right at the heart in the middle of the chest, then going down through the stomach and intestines. And those are just the beginning. As you read Ajaan Lee’s other Dhamma talks, you see how he had lots of other ways of perceiving the breath, too. Ajaan Fuang had his own … 
  19. Steering the Raft
     … But it’s different from all the other ways you could exert control. It’s the only form of karma the Buddha says is neither dark nor bright. When he talks about the middle way, it’s not just a middling way. It’s very precise in how it looks at the process of control, and how it leads you to a point where … 
  20. Book search result icon First Things First Did the Buddha Teach Free Will?
    Did the Buddha Teach Free Will? As with so many other issues, the Buddha took a middle path between the two extremes of determinism and total free will. If all your experience were predetermined from the past—through impersonal fate, the design of a creator god, or your own past actions—the whole idea of a path of practice to the end of suffering … 
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  21. A Much Better Place
     … It’s the strength that allows you to deal with the sufferings of life and at the same time to find a way out—to be up for the challenge in such a way that you’re not creating more trouble for yourself but you’re actually finding a way out of the trouble. Because a lot of the practice is a practice of … 
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