… 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.
… He makes known—having realized it through direct knowledge—this world with its devas, Māras, & Brahmās, this generation with its contemplatives & brahmans, its royalty & commonfolk; he explains the Dhamma admirable in the beginning, admirable in the middle, admirable in the end; he expounds the holy life both in its particulars & in its essence, entirely perfect, surpassingly pure. It’s good to see such a …
… a magical way of protecting
himself so that no matter how much you spear the middle of his chest,
you can’t get to his heart, so you can’t kill him. What they do is to
go out and find the tree where the heart is, and all they have to do
is squeeze it, and he dies.
It’s the same with …
… Why is that? Because his small body doesn’t find a footing in the depth.
“In the same way, whoever would say, ‘I, without having gained concentration, will spend time in isolated wilderness & forest lodgings,’ of him it can be expected that he will sink to the bottom or float away.
“Imagine, Upāli, a stupid baby boy, lying on his back, playing with his …
… 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 …
… 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 …
… 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 …
… 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 …
… 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 …
… 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 …
… 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 …
… The king must stamp him out!”
Then King Pasenadi Kosala, with a cavalry of roughly 500 horsemen, drove out of Sāvatthī in the middle of the day and entered the monastery. Driving as far as the ground was passable for chariots, he got down from his chariot and went on foot to the Blessed One. On arrival, having bowed down to the Blessed One …
… Ajaan Fuang would often say, “Don’t let the external wat get
in the way of your internal wat.” In other words, the concerns of
making things nice outside, nice food, nice place to stay, nice
whatever: If they start getting in the way of your meditation, you’ve
got to cut back. So you have to look all around you. As Ajaan Lee …
… 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 …
… You find
yourself facing a wall, you’ve got to figure out, “Well, maybe there’s
some way around the wall. Maybe I’ve created the wall. How can I
un-create it? How can I stop doing the things that create the wall?”
Because remember, look at things as actions. That’s one of the most
useful ways of looking at the problems …
… 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 …
… 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 …
… If you didn’t stop, you’d think this was the normal way the mind has
to be. Look around you: This is the way everybody else’s minds are, so
you begin to think, “Well this is the way it has to be.” But it
doesn’t have to be.
As you get the mind more and more still, you begin to realize …
… 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 …
… This is why our practice sways back and forth, like a tree in the middle of an open field, swaying back and forth in the wind. If we don’t discover the enduring principle within us, we won’t be able to find anything to act as a true refuge—for our training and education are simply supporting factors.
This is why we should …
MN 82 Raṭṭhapāla Sutta | About Raṭṭhapāla
… He makes known—having realized it through direct knowledge—this world with its devas, Māras, & Brahmās, this generation with its contemplatives & brahmans, its royalty & commonfolk; he explains the Dhamma admirable in the beginning, admirable in the middle, admirable in the end; he expounds the holy life both in its particulars & in its essence, entirely perfect, surpassingly pure. It’s good to see such a …
The Nine Stages of Liberating Insight | The Craft of the Heart
… 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 …
