… 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 …
… 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 …
… 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 …
… When he decided to abide by the customs of
the noble ones, to follow the Vinaya, follow the dhutanga practices,
he got criticized by a lot of people—monks included—saying, “You’re
not following Thai customs. You’re not following Laotian customs.” His
response was, “Thai customs, Laotian customs, are the customs of
people with defilement. If you want to become a noble …
… Teachings of the Elders”—the only one of the early schools of Buddhism to have survived into the present; currently the dominant form of Buddhism in Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Burma.
Vinaya: The monastic discipline, whose rules and traditions comprise six volumes in printed text.
English-Pāli
Although I have tried to be as consistent as possible in rendering Pāli terms into English, there …
… There are even rules in the Vinaya about your physical windows and
doors during the cold season and during the hot season. During the hot
season, you keep your doors and windows open during the night and
closed during the day. During the cold season, you keep your doors and
windows open during the day and closed at night. In other words, you
get …
… He teaches her eight principles for deciding
what is Dhamma and Vinaya, and what’s not.
Those principles can be applied in two directions: One, when you hear
somebody teach the Dhamma, you ask yourself, “What kind of behavior
would this Dhamma inspire inside me: in my actions, in my
relationships with other people, in my own practice, in terms of the
goal that …
… Yet even 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 …
… Two passages, one from the Vinaya and one from a sutta, show what ek’agga means in the everyday context of listening to the Dhamma.
In Mv.II.3.4, the phrase, “we pay attention,” in the instructions for how to listen to the Pāṭimokkha, is defined as: “We listen with an ek’agga mind, an unscattered mind, an undistracted mind.” Even if ek …
… 1) dispute-issues (vivādādhikaraṇa) concerning Dhamma and Vinaya (see Sg 10), which the Community must deal with by declaring which side is right and which wrong;
2) accusation-issues (anuvādādhikaraṇa) concerning offenses (see Sg 8 & 9; Ay 1 & 2), which the Community must deal with by judging them true or false;
3) offense-issues (āpattādhikaraṇa), in other words, the commission of offenses, which are …
… This is why we have all those rules in the Vinaya. You see the
many times that people report this monk did that, that nun did this.
You can imagine the Buddha saying to himself, “Why do we have to make
a rule against this? People should know.” But he had to make a rule.
Then they tried to find a way around the …
… For the monks, of course,
this means the precepts of the Patimokkha and all the other precepts
in the Vinaya. You make them the measure of what you’re going to do
and what you’re not going to do. For the lay people, this means the
five precepts and, on occasion, the eight. The five precepts are: not
killing, not stealing, not having …
… Eventually, of course, he became tormented by guilt and went to the resident Vinaya expert to admit a pārājika and disrobe.
The Vinaya expert, though, wouldn’t let him disrobe until he had found the owner of the cloth and inquired about it more fully. Eventually, after a long search, the bhikkhu was able to track down the original owner at a monastery back …
… They’re even included in the Vinaya. In fact, they’re the only meditation instructions contained there, which shows that they were considered especially important: a necessary part of the training for monks who, specializing in memorizing that part of the Canon, might not have had time to memorize any of the discourses.
These instructions come in sixteen steps divided into four sets of …
Aṅguttara Nikāya | suttas on dhammatalks.org
… 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 …
Glossary | The Wings to Awakening
… Teachings of the Elders”—the only one of the early schools of Buddhism to have survived into the present; currently the dominant form of Buddhism in Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Burma. Vinaya: The monastic discipline, whose rules and traditions comprise six volumes in printed text. English-Pāli Although I have tried to be as consistent as possible in rendering Pāli terms into English, there …
