… The Buddha expresses it this way: You give in to thoughts that say,
“It’s too early… It’s too late… It’s too hot… It’s too cold… I’m too
tired…” and the work that needs to be done doesn’t get done.
In cases like that, you can’t let those attitudes get in the way. You
have to put yourself …
… Find which part of the body responds
to the way you breathe, is sensitive to the way you breathe. For a lot
of people, it’s down around the sternum, or it could be in the throat,
or some place in the middle of the head. But wherever you’re
especially sensitive to how the breath feels, try to focus your
attention there and …
… Try other ways of testing your perceptions
until ultimately you develop a repertoire. You get a more and more
intuitive sense of what feels right for any particular state of the
body.
Say you’ve got a headache. There are certain ways of breathing that
are good, that help counteract the headache. And you also find there
are ways of breathing that aggravate it …
… The way in which this sutta raises a number of questions about the cessation of perception and feeling and its relationship to awakening but then leaves them unanswered has a parallel in AN 9:36. That sutta details how the various concentration attainments up through the dimension of nothingness can be used as a basis for the ending of the effluents. Beyond that point …
… the way you feed, physically and emotionally.
He’s holding you to a high standard, and there will be parts of the
mind that resist. To overcome that resistance, you have to remind
yourself: This really is a respectable, honorable path that we’re
taught here. As the chant says, it’s “admirable in the beginning,
admirable in the middle, admirable in the end …
… It’s like putting a salt lick in the middle of a forest.
You’re going to get all the animals eventually. They’re all going to
come there because they all need the salt. So you can set up your
camera and get pictures of whatever you want.
In the same way with the breath, whatever aspect of the practice needs
to get …
… But remember, the Buddha has us focus on ways of breathing that make
us sensitive to how the mind fabricates its experience through its
perceptions, through its feelings, and even—in the way the
instructions for breath meditation are given—through the way you talk
to yourself. The act of becoming sensitized to these things is what’s
really going to make a difference …
… If he wasn’t getting the
results he wanted, he’d ask: “Okay, what am I doing wrong?” He’d tried
to find some way around that impasse. We read about the mistakes he
made along the way, but they were always followed by his ability to
stop and take stock. That’s one of the character traits you want to
develop as a …
… But you’ve got to be consciously making the
comparisons and seeing the areas where you can focus on things outside
in certain ways so that your center is not disturbed by other ways of
focusing, i.e., involving greed, anger, delusion, and all the other
unskillful mental qualities that knock your center off kilter.
This requires discernment: comparing things, seeing connections, and
seeing …
… We have to
recognize that our practice tries to find a middle way between those
mental extremes.
For many people, the issue is, “Should I learn to accept myself or
should I reject myself?” And the psychologists would say, “Learn to
accept yourself.” Well, acceptance and rejection of yourself are two
extremes. We need to recognize them as extremes and start looking at
behavior …
… One day he came to see the Buddha in the middle of the day, and the Buddha asked him, “What have you been doing today, great king?”
Let me read you his answer:
“Just now, lord, I was engaged in the sort of royal affairs typical of head-anointed warrior kings intoxicated with the intoxication of sovereignty, obsessed by greed for sensuality, who have …
… Right effort doesn’t mean middling effort all the time, you know. What makes the effort right is that it’s skillful, appropriate for right here, right now—and you’re up for the challenge.
In the Buddha’s description of right effort, you’re told to generate desire. And one of the best ways of generating desire is to learn how to enjoy …
… Sometimes it falls splat in the middle, without much rhyme or reason.
Karma is what drives all this, but the workings of karma can be very
complex. And they can come out in very unexpected ways. We’ve been
through this so many times, the Buddha said, that it’s very hard to
meet someone who has never been your mother or your father …
… We can either be
enthusiastically resolved, in the sense that we really like our
self—attached to our wants, attached to our thoughts, attached to
however we identify ourselves—or we can be resolved in a negative way:
We look at ourselves, we don’t like our habits, we don’t like the way
we interact with the world. We see how we create …
… from the back of the neck down the spine,
out the legs; from the middle of the chest down through the stomach
and the intestines; down the shoulders, down the arms; all throughout
the head.
Think of the breathing as a whole-body process. In the Buddha’s
analysis, there’s breath element throughout the body. You feel it most
prominently as you breathe …
… It’s the same with the middle way as a whole. It’s very easy to
practice in extremes. Sometimes it might be exhausting, but it’s easy
in the sense that you don’t have to do much thinking, just plow into
whatever you do. But finding the point of just right requires
discernment. And it’s going to take time. This is …
… Then there’s the way you talk to yourself about it, about how this
person behaves this way—always behaves this way—and it’s unbearable.
Something’s got to be done. Well, learn how to question that. We do
have the choice of how we talk about our experiences as we go through
the day. And the way we talk about our experiences …
Majjhima Nikāya | The Middle Collection
The Majjhima Nikāya — the Middle Collection — is the second collection in the Sutta Piṭaka. It takes its name from the length of the discourses it contains: shorter than those in the Long Collection, longer than those in the Connected and Numerical Collections. There are 152 suttas in all. This anthology offers complete translations of 103 of these suttas, and …
… It’s part of
the middle way, a pleasure that’s actually conducive to developing
clarity and discernment in the mind.
So work on your concentration to make sure that it’s something you can
rely on. Work on your virtue, work on your discernment so that you can
hold on to them with confidence.
When the Buddha says that the self is its …
… It could be the
tip of the nose, the middle of the chest, the abdomen, any part of the
body where you have the sensation that now the breath is coming in,
now the breath is going out. Allow that area to stay relaxed all the
way through the in-breath, all the way through the out-, and all the
way through the spaces …
AN 5:166 Nirodha Sutta | Cessation
… The way in which this sutta raises a number of questions about the cessation of perception and feeling and its relationship to awakening but then leaves them unanswered has a parallel in AN 9:36. That sutta details how the various concentration attainments up through the dimension of nothingness can be used as a basis for the ending of the effluents. Beyond that point …
Conclusion | Facing Aging, Illness, & Death
… One day he came to see the Buddha in the middle of the day, and the Buddha asked him, “What have you been doing today, great king?” Let me read you his answer: “Just now, lord, I was engaged in the sort of royal affairs typical of head-anointed warrior kings intoxicated with the intoxication of sovereignty, obsessed by greed for sensuality, who have …
