… You
look for ways in which you can improve your life around you, the life
of the people around you, and you work at it. You look for ways in
which to improve things. Try to find some form of right livelihood and
engage in it.
The second quality is that once you’ve gained your livelihood in a
good way, you try to …
… If
there’s a pleasant feeling, say, in the middle of the chest, try to
breathe in a way that keeps that pleasant feeling going all the way
through the in-breath, all the way through the out, without any breaks
in-between. Don’t let the in-and-out of the breath disturb the ease
and spaciousness and pleasure that come with that …
… The gradual slope is the practice of getting
more and more sensitive to what’s actually happening right here, and
also getting more and more sensitive to what it means to practice the
middle way, to know when you’re putting too much pressure on things
and when you’re not put enough pressure on things. That sort of
sensitivity you can develop only …
… Once you’ve gotten to the other side, that’s when you let it
go—but you don’t let go in the middle of the river. The ajaans have
their own way of making the same point. Ajaan Fuang’s image was of a
rocket booster. You want to send a capsule to the moon. The capsule
can’t go on its own …
… Here are these shells, gravel, and pebbles, and also these shoals of fish swimming about and resting.’ In the same way, the monk discerns, as it has come to be, that ‘This is stress… This is the origination of stress… This is the cessation of stress… This is the way leading to the cessation of stress… These are mental effluents… This is the origination …
… And was there
a continent behind the mountains, or were they simply a chain set in
the middle of the sea? A lot of things they didn’t know at all. Just
finding a path through the mountains was quite an endeavor.
But they learned about the mountains in two ways. One was through
their initial forays, just trying to find a path through …
… You start breathing in weird ways, and that puts you in a bad mood, and then the bad mood makes the breathing get even stranger, and you go spiraling down.
Working with the techniques of breath meditation is one way of cutting those vicious circles, giving you a handle on your state of mind. But it’s also important that you use right view …
… They make it part of their self-image and do unskillful things with it, rather than seeing it as something of the world that has temporarily come their way.
The wise question to ask when gain comes your way is, “How are you going to squeeze the best use out of it?” This doesn’t mean squeezing as much pleasure as you can. It …
… He starved himself until he was skin and bones, but then he
had the good sense to realize that that wasn’t the way out, either.
You can’t starve the mind of its suffering simply by avoiding
sensuality. It just begins to suffer in different ways. It starts
feeding in different ways. The person who engages in the self-denial
of that sort …
… He started his first sermon by explaining the noble
eightfold path as the middle way between self-torture and indulgence
in sensual pleasure. And to the very last person he taught, he said
that it’s only in a teaching where you have the noble eightfold path
that you’re going to find anyone awakened.
The eight folds of the path are actually eight …
… trying to figure out a way to escape from all fabrications that appear, in the same way that a caged quail keeps looking for a way to escape from its cage.
h. Equanimity with regard to fabrications (saṅkhārupekkhā-ñāṇa): viewing all fabrications with a sense of indifference, just as a husband and wife might feel indifferent to each other’s activities after they have …
… You’ll have to learn how
to stop clinging to them, but first you have to cling to them in a way
that gets you across.
In this way, you’re taking the ordinary, everyday functions in the
mind, where it has feelings and perceptions—the labels you put on
things—thought constructs or thought fabrications, where you put
thoughts together, and your consciousness …
… Well, the martial arts expert finally comes around, he
sees a donkey, he walks way around the donkey, stays away from it.
You need concentration as that ability to walk your way around things.
When the storms in your mind are blowing and they seem really strong,
just say, “I’m going to stay right here with the breath and focus on
that and …
… This is the second ground on which he can be praised.” — SN 42:12
The last example shows that ascetic practices, in and of themselves, are not necessarily contrary to the middle way. It is possible to follow them all the way to the noble attainments. And, as this sutta shows, only when you have followed the path to its culmination and attained the …
… all the time,
but it very rarely works out that way. That’s why we have to learn how
to create our own environment.
Ajaan Fuang once noted that even though the place where he taught in
Bangkok was not especially conducive—it was fairly noisy, it was right
down in the middle of the city—the fact that he was there made it …
… And this, going through the middle of it, is a blue, yellow, red, white, or brown thread.’ In the same way—with his mind thus concentrated, purified, and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability—the monk directs and inclines it to knowledge and vision. He discerns: ‘This body of mine is endowed with form, composed of the four …
… We look at the Buddha, the way he behaved, the way he talked. He
doesn’t fit into some of our preconceived notions about what a teacher
should be. There are some portraits of the Buddha where he’s just all
sweetness and light, very gentle, very kind, who would never say
anything harsh to anybody. But if you look at the record in …
… in the beginning, admirable in the middle, admirable in the end.” It starts by your dedicating yourself to the purity of your intentions, and it leads to something that goes beyond intentions—something really worth experiencing for yourself.
So. Faith in the Buddha, conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, is a really good investment: It pays off in more ways than you can imagine.
… Whatever is a matter of convention follows these conventional ways.
But whatever is a matter of release—of purity—cannot be made to follow those ways, because it is not the same sort of thing. To take release or a released mind and confuse or compound it with the five khandhas, which are an affair of conventional reality, is wrong. It can’t be …
… That’s at the end of the path, when you’ve taken care of
all the members of the mind, and the mind gets more and more unified
in its agreement that this is the way you want to find happiness,
based on this path of virtue, concentration, and discernment, with
concentration the big middle ground that gets the mind right here in
the …
Sangha | Refuge: An Introduction to the Buddha, Dhamma & Sangha
… Here are these shells, gravel, and pebbles, and also these shoals of fish swimming about and resting.’ In the same way, the monk discerns, as it has come to be, that ‘This is stress… This is the origination of stress… This is the cessation of stress… This is the way leading to the cessation of stress… These are mental effluents… This is the origination …
MN 77 Mahāsakuludāyi Sutta | The Greater Discourse to Sakuludāyin
… This is the second ground on which he can be praised.” — SN 42:12 The last example shows that ascetic practices, in and of themselves, are not necessarily contrary to the middle way. It is possible to follow them all the way to the noble attainments. And, as this sutta shows, only when you have followed the path to its culmination and attained the …
