… You try to
find the middle way, where you feed the body enough to get along. Keep
it comfortable enough so that it can function. Find pleasure in the
wilderness. Even Ven. Maha Kassapa has a long passage talking about
the beauties of the wilderness, because it’s a conducive place to
practice. He doesn’t go out there just to enjoy the wilderness …
… Avoiding both of
these extremes, the middle way realized by the
Tathāgata—producing vision, producing knowledge—leads to calm, to
direct knowledge, to self-awakening, to unbinding.
“And what is the middle way realized by the Tathāgata
that—producing vision, producing knowledge—leads to calm, to
direct knowledge, to self-awakening, to unbinding? Precisely this
noble eightfold path: right view, right resolve, right speech …
… So it’s not a Catch-22,
it’s simply that these two faculties of the mind—the ability to watch
things and observe and come to reliable conclusions; and your
inventiveness in trying out different ways to experiment with the
breath and the way you focus on the breath—go hand-in-hand. They
develop together.
After all, a lot of things are …
… Where is the stress? What are you doing
that’s putting extra stress on to the mind? And what could you do to
stop that and put an end to that stress?
You have to examine all the various issues in your life that you’re
concerned about, and you have to peel away the other ones that get in
the way of this …
… Instead of focusing in the middle of the body, start out on the
periphery and then move in. See what that does. In this way, you
become a wise person whose sport is jhana. You’re not the old person
you were whose sport was indulging in different kinds of fantasies and
finding your entertainment that way. Even though you’re engaged in
restraint …
… In the same way, a pure mind—even if we can make it pure for only a little while—can give results way in excess of its size. People who are really intent on purifying the mind may even lift themselves over and beyond the world.
So we’re taught that people whose minds aren’t pure—regardless of whether they’ve given donations …
King Pasenadi once came to see the Buddha in the middle of the day,
and the Buddha asked him, “What have you been up to today?” And in a
remarkable display of candor, the king said, “Oh, the typical things
of someone who’s obsessed with power, consumed with the desire for
more power.” The Buddha asked him, “Suppose a reliable person were to …
A king once came to see the Buddha in the middle of the day, and the
Buddha asked him, “What have you been up to?” The king was remarkably
frank. He said “the typical things of people obsessed with power.”
It’s hard to imagine politicians admitting that today.
The Buddha asked him, “Suppose a reliable person came from the east
and said there …
… Phenomenon; event; the way things are in and of themselves; the basic principles that underlie their behavior. Also, principles of behavior that human beings ought to follow so as to fit in with the right natural order of things; qualities of mind they should develop so as to realize the inherent quality of the mind in and of itself. By extension, ‘Dhamma’ is used …
… It develops a sense of
samvega, a sense of dismay over the way life is everywhere for
everybody who’s still intoxicated.
It also gives you sense of confidence in the path, that this is the
way out. The people who have followed this path seem trustworthy. The
happiness that it offers seems special. It’s really something worth
giving your life to. It …
… Then it would go back and hold on, quiet in the middle of the web where no one could see it, every time.
Seeing the spider act in this way, I came to an understanding. The six sense spheres are the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind. The mind stays in the middle. The eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body are spread out …
… But most of us don’t use it that way. We find other ways of using it
and we can get eaten up by the way we compare ourselves with other
people. And so, as with any defilement, the best way to look at this
is to see: What do you gain by making those comparisons? There may be
a little sense of satisfaction …
… What are you
doing? Why are you doing it? And is there an alternative, a way of
thinking and a way of going through the world that does not add
unnecessary suffering? Those are the big questions the Buddha has you
ask, because otherwise, if you can’t solve this problem inside, then
everything else in the world is going to be a problem …
… It’s shaped by the way you
breathe, shaped by the way you talk to yourself, shaped by your
perceptions and feelings. There’s a karma, there’s an intention that
keeps the present moment going, and there’s a subtle stress that goes
along with that.
Eventually, you want to get to see that too, but you have to see it as
something …
… You have a little fragment here, a little fragment there and it’s like
archaeologists coming across a site where only fragments remain and
they’re just trying to piece them together, filling in the big blank
spaces in the middle. But what is that filler if not just ignorance
dressed up as knowledge?
This is the way most of our knowledge is. We …
… Simply by the way you think, you can create a good
energy. You can create something that’s a gift to others. Of course,
you benefit. If you have goodwill for all beings, you’re very unlikely
to do unskillful things. You’re very unlikely to harm them. In that
way, you protect yourself.
So this is a basic pattern of the path: Instead …
… He was always coming up with new ways of
conceiving the breath. And Ajaan Fuang would talk about other ways of
conceiving the breath, too. One was to imagine a line of energy
running down the middle of your body, and the breath comes in and out
of that line of energy. You try to keep that line of energy stoked. In
other words …
… the ways in which feelings in the body influence the mind,
and the ways the acts of the mind have an impact on the body. Try to
filter them through the breath.
The breath here can be long or short. It’s good to start with long
breathing for a while to energize the body. You’re going to be calming
it down, and …
… You have to train it how to think in a way where it can think
itself into silence.
So how do you talk about the breath to get more quiet about the
breath? Well, to begin with trying to get yourself out of the way as
much as possible—particularly judgments about how good you are or how
bad you are. This is one …
… Even though they had shown
disdain for him for abandoning his austerities and going for the
middle way, still he wanted to help them. So he searched them out and
taught them. After that, he went home and he taught his family, to
repay his debts to them.
In other words, the kind of happiness that comes from doing good is
something you naturally …
Spreading the Dhamma | Noble Warrior : A Life of the Buddha
… Avoiding both of these extremes, the middle way realized by the Tathāgata—producing vision, producing knowledge—leads to calm, to direct knowledge, to self-awakening, to unbinding. “And what is the middle way realized by the Tathāgata that—producing vision, producing knowledge—leads to calm, to direct knowledge, to self-awakening, to unbinding? Precisely this noble eightfold path: right view, right resolve, right speech …
Shoulds & Desires
… Simply by the way you think, you can create a good energy. You can create something that’s a gift to others. Of course, you benefit. If you have goodwill for all beings, you’re very unlikely to do unskillful things. You’re very unlikely to harm them. In that way, you protect yourself. So this is a basic pattern of the path: Instead …
