… When he goes to visit the lay followers, though, instead of asking their forgiveness he quotes passages from the suttas and Vinaya showing that the Buddha did not allow bhikkhus to accept money. This time the lay followers are convinced by his arguments and announce that of all the bhikkhus in Vesālī, he is the only true son of the Sakyan. The Vajjiputta bhikkhus …
… I needed only to arouse mindfulness in them.
“So, monks, you, too, should abandon unskillful qualities and commit yourselves to skillful qualities, and in that way you, too, will come to growth, increase, & abundance in this Dhamma-Vinaya. Suppose, monks, that—not far from a village or town—there were a large sal-forest choked with castor-oil weeds. And suppose that some man …
… The Vinaya counts as one’s relatives all those related back through seven generations past one’s grandparents—in other words, all those descended from one’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents.
2. Apparently, “ornaments” for poultry would consist of brilliant plumage. Similarly, “ornaments” for elephants, horses, & cattle might consist of attractive markings.
3. For some reason, the translation of this …
… This is one of the reasons why we have the Vinaya. The rules are
there, not simply to look after the individual’s mind, but also to
look after peace in the community, harmony in the community. So as
we’re living together, it’s good to think about the principles—not
only the rules, but also the larger principles of how we can …
… There’s a passage in the Vinaya where Ven. Moggallana’s talking to some monks and saying that when he was in what they call the imperturbable concentration, sitting by the bank of a river, he heard the elephants in the river playing and trumpeting, splashing around and crossing over the river. The monks got upset. They didn’t think that if he was …
… For those who knew the suttas, he assigned lodgings in the same place, (thinking,) “They will rehearse the suttas with one another.” For Vinaya experts, he assigned lodgings in the same place, (thinking,) “They will investigate the Vinaya with one another.” For Dhamma teachers, he assigned lodgings in the same place, (thinking,) “They will discuss the Dhamma with one another.” For those who practiced …
… It’s always amazing to see throughout the Vinaya, when someone has
misbehaved and they get called into the Buddha’s presence, the Buddha
asks them, “Did you say this? Did you do this?” And there was
something about being in the Buddha’s presence that people who may
have been devious at other times weren’t devious with him. They
admitted, yes, that …
… AN 4:19 Agati Sutta | Off Course — Four states of mind—desire, aversion, delusion, and fear—that the Vinaya often cites as leading to unfair and biased behavior.
AN 4:24 Kāḷaka Sutta | At Kāḷaka’s Park — The Buddha explains how, despite his wide range of knowledge, he is “Such” with regard to all that he knows: He is not fastened to that knowledge …
… He established the religion, established the Dhamma and the Vinaya to make it available to people so that they, too, could put an end to suffering.
So as you sit here and meditate, ask yourself: What are the potentials here? There’ll be some bad ones, but there will also be some good ones. Why stew around in the bad ones? Why encourage them …
… He follows the teachings of the Dhamma and Vinaya well and so doesn’t offend his fellow monks. He is interested in studying and diligently practicing the threefold training of virtue, concentration, and discernment. He takes instruction easily, has faith in the principles of the Dhamma and Vinaya, is intent on his duties, and believes in what is reasonable.
The third sort of monk …
… He ordained them and he had them stay with their teachers for a
while so that they could pick up the teacher’s habits, pick up the
teacher’s way of looking at things, pick up some knowledge about the
Buddha’s teachings, both the Dhamma and the Vinaya, to provide the
student with good friends inside.
So try to figure out who your …
… When you read the story of his life, even just the section in the Vinaya, you see all the problems that the monks and nuns created for him—and those were the people who were supposedly his disciples. On top of that, he had to deal with sectarians of other kinds. Here he was, offering them a path to the end of suffering, and …
… The monks all
adhere to the Vinaya. The lay people all adhere to the precepts. If we
don’t, there’s going to be trouble, there’s going to be disharmony in
the group, and it becomes an unpleasant place to practice.
But if we have these bases for harmony in terms of the precepts and
right view, then the fact that we’re …
… that you take the Dhamma and the
Vinaya as your guide, and you don’t let people’s opinions pull you
away from that.
This relates to a couple of themes that Ajaan Suwat said Ajaan Mun
would talk about quite a lot. One was the theme of the customs of the
noble ones. Ajaan Mun, as he was practicing out in the forest …
… The basic code contains 227 rules,
but then the Vinaya as a whole has far more many rules than that. In
fact, I don’t think anybody’s ever sat down to count them all, there
are so many. Many of them deal with very minor, minor things.
You might wonder: How could such a broad-minded, enlightened person
like the Buddha get caught …
… Yet in that state of no obligation, he had the compassion to teach and
to go through all that effort—walking all over northern India for
forty-five years, teaching the Dharma, establishing the Vinaya,
establishing his fourfold parisa: monks, nuns, lay-followers, male
lay-followers, female lay-followers. That was a lot of work.
So think about that. Here’s someone who’s …
… The word vineyya, “subduing,” there relates to Vinaya, which
is the discipline. We’re disciplining the mind when we practice right
mindfulness and on into right concentration. This is a part of
concentration some people don’t like. There’s that interpretation of
mindfulness as being broad, open, and accepting, whereas concentration
is narrow and restrictive. And in one sense it is, because you …
… You may categorically hold, ‘This is not the Dhamma, this is not the Vinaya, this is not the Teacher’s instruction.’
“As for the dhammas of which you may know, ‘These dhammas lead to utter disenchantment, to dispassion, to cessation, to calm, to direct knowledge, to self-awakening, to unbinding’: You may categorically hold, ‘This is the Dhamma, this is the Vinaya, this is …
Back in the early years of the last century, the monks in Bangkok came
out with a series of Dhamma and Vinaya textbooks that became the
standard all over Thailand, and still are today. In the Dhamma
textbook for the first level of the exams that these books were
designed for, they defined virtue as “restraint of body and speech.”
Someone brought this to …
… And staying with the teacher is not just a matter of learning about the words of the Dhamma or of the Vinaya, or learning about the techniques of meditation. It’s a total training because if you’re going to be observant in your meditation, you have to learn how to be observant outside.
It may seem like little things are unimportant: where things …
Disciplinary Transactions | The Buddhist Monastic Code, Volumes I & II
… When he goes to visit the lay followers, though, instead of asking their forgiveness he quotes passages from the suttas and Vinaya showing that the Buddha did not allow bhikkhus to accept money. This time the lay followers are convinced by his arguments and announce that of all the bhikkhus in Vesālī, he is the only true son of the Sakyan. The Vajjiputta bhikkhus …
MN 21 Kakacūpama Sutta | The Simile of the Saw
… I needed only to arouse mindfulness in them. “So, monks, you, too, should abandon unskillful qualities and commit yourselves to skillful qualities, and in that way you, too, will come to growth, increase, & abundance in this Dhamma-Vinaya. Suppose, monks, that—not far from a village or town—there were a large sal-forest choked with castor-oil weeds. And suppose that some man …
The World of Conviction
… Yet in that state of no obligation, he had the compassion to teach and to go through all that effort—walking all over northern India for forty-five years, teaching the Dharma, establishing the Vinaya, establishing his fourfold parisa: monks, nuns, lay-followers, male lay-followers, female lay-followers. That was a lot of work. So think about that. Here’s someone who’s …
