Posts

Your main possession consists of your actions. No matter how bad someone else is going to be, you’ve got to have goodwill for them.

"Your main possession consists of your actions. And what’s going to keep them going well in bad circumstances? Strong goodwill [mettā] . Here in America we’d say, “industrial strength” goodwill, that no matter how bad someone else is going to be, you’ve got to have goodwill for them. Because your main concern is how skillfully you’re going to behave toward that other person. And it may happen that they pick up on the fact that you do really mean well for them. You see that they’re simply misguided. As the Buddha said, when someone is doing something unskillful, you have to have compassion for them. If there are no redeeming characteristics in the other person at all, you have to have even more compassion, because they’re just digging themselves deeper and deeper into a hole. And as for the damage they can do to you and people you love or the people you care for, the Buddha said that kind of damage is much less a concern than damage to your virtue and damage to your right views. N...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Samsaric Mud Fight (extract)

"We could view samsara as a big mud fight. I splash mud on you. You splash mud on me. And then I splash mud on you back because you splashed mud on me. It goes back and forth like this and it never ends. So the idea of trying to straighten everybody out — or trying to settle the score — again makes no sense. There’s that famous story of Somdet Toh. A junior monk came to see him once, complaining that another monk had hit him over the head for no reason at all. He hadn’t done anything to harm the other monk. The other monk was just a really bad guy who came up and hit him. And Somdet Toh said, “Well, you hit him first.” The junior monk replied, “No, no, he came up and hit me first. I didn’t do anything to him at all.” Somdet Toh kept insisting, “No, you hit him first.” And so the young monk went to complain to Somdet Toh’s superior, who must’ve been the supreme patriarch. He went to Somdet Toh to question him about this: “Why did you keep insisting that the innocent m...
Post a Comment
Read more

You Hit Him First (short morning talk)

"There’s a story where Somdet Toh was approached by a young monk complaining about another monk who had hit him. And Somdet Toh told him, “Well, you hit him before that.” The young monk replied, “No I didn’t. He just came up and hit me out of nowhere.” And Somdet Toh kept saying, “No, you hit him first.” So the young monk went to complain to the abbot of another monastery. The other monastery’s abbot came over and asked Somdet Toh what he was talking about. Somdet Toh said, “Well, obviously, he hit the other monk sometime in a previous lifetime.” In other words, if you try to trace things back to where a problem started, you go crazy. Because it just goes back and back and back, and there’s no sense of who was the original instigator. Which means that when you’re thinking about issues in the past, you just have to let them go. Just say, “Whatever it was, it was a karmic back and forth. Do you want to still continue it?” There’s another story — it’s in the Commentary — o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Restraint of the senses: There’s the kamma of how you watch, the kamma of how you listen, and so on, so you want to look at (1) the intention and (2) the result.

"Restraint of the senses: being really careful about how you engage with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and ideas — realizing, again, that your mind is what goes out and looks for trouble. If the mind were not actively involved in wanting  to see and hear and engage with other senses, it wouldn’t receive any input. There’s an act of the mind that goes out to these things — flows out to these things, as they would say in Thai — and you want to watch for that. Who’s flowing out? Your greed and your anger? Or your discernment? You want your discernment to be the strongest flow, so that when you look at things, you can take them apart and see where they might draw you into lust or anger or greed or fear. Then remind yourself: You don’t have to be drawn in that way.  Again, have a sense of your own power. Don’t let yourself be overpowered by influences from outside. Sensory input is not a given. Remember that it’s a construct. There’s the kamma of how you watch...
Post a Comment
Read more

People are so poor in goodwill. We keep battling, battling, battling, then we die. We have nothing to show for it except a lot of bad kamma. But goodwill raises the level of the mind.

"If people misbehave toward you, you want to overwhelm them with goodwill [mettā] . After all, just look at this world: People are so poor in goodwill. With the least little bit of disagreement, people draw lines and get all upset and want to attack the other side. For what? We keep battling, battling, battling, then we die. We have nothing to show for it except a lot of bad kamma. But goodwill raises the level of the mind." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Metta Math" (Meditations12)
Post a Comment
Read more

People are going to be happy, not because you simply wish them to be happy, but because they create the causes for happiness in the skillfulness of their thoughts, their words, their deeds.

"Goodwill [mettā] is a wish for happiness — true happiness — which means it’s happiness that comes from within. As we know from the Buddha’s teachings on karma, people are going to be happy, not because you simply wish them to be happy, but because they create the causes for happiness in the skillfulness of their thoughts, their words, their deeds. Which means that when you’re extending goodwill to yourself, extending goodwill to others, there’s no question of whether you or they deserve goodwill, whether you or they deserve happiness. When the Buddha was teaching the end of suffering to people, he didn’t ask them first, “Do you deserve to suffer?” Everybody he met had karma that could induce them to suffer, but they didn’t have to suffer from it. That’s what the teaching was all about. You don’t have to suffer. And again, he didn’t hold people’s past against them. This is the way out. That should be the attitude you have to others as well. There are a lot of people out there wh...
Post a Comment
Read more

Karma & Not-self (extract)

"There’s that old question you hear every time people hear the Buddha’s teachings explained, and it’s this: Given the teaching on not-self, how do to explain the teaching on karma? If there’s no self, who does the action? Who receives the results of the action? There are two problems with that question. One is that the Buddha never answered the question of whether there is or isn’t a self. The second problem with the question is that it’s got the context backwards. It should be: Given the teaching on karma, how do you explain the teaching on not-self? The teaching on karma comes first. It’s the context. On the night of the Buddha’s awakening, the second knowledge in the second watch of the night was about karma, about how people’s views shape their actions and how their actions then shape what happens to them, now and into the future. It wasn’t until later that issues of self and not-self came into the picture." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Karma & Not-self"
Post a Comment
Read more