You might think of breaking the precepts as harming other people, because after all, you’re killing them or stealing from them, lying to them. But the Buddha said, no, that’s where you’re harming yourself.

"You cause harm to yourself by breaking the precepts. You cause harm to yourself by giving in to greed, aversion, and delusion. You might think of breaking the precepts as harming other people, because after all, you’re killing them or stealing from them, lying to them. But [the Buddha] said, no, that’s where you’re harming yourself. If you want to harm other people, you get them to do these things, because then that becomes their karmic load."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Compunction"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

You Don't Have to Be Afraid of Missing Out on Your Karmic Legacy

Question: Kamma and Rebirth, second try. How does individual kamma migrate from this life to the next one? Is this a relevant question? If no, how can our next life be better if we don’t have the benefit of a kind of karmic legacy? Thank you, Ajaan, for clarifying this “critical” question. Thanissaro Bhikkhu: It’s not a matter of migrating. Our kamma is actually what creates our experience of the next life — or rather, it supplies the raw material for our experience of the next life. When we leave this life and go to the next one, it doesn’t feel like we’re going someplace else. Just as we have a sense of our present life as “right here,” the next life will also have a sense of being “right here,” right at our consciousness. It’s like going from one dream to another. Even though the appearance of the location in the second dream is different from the location in the first, it still has a sense of happening “right here” just as the first one did. To give another example,...
Read more

Mundane right view "there is what is given" implies free will and human worth beyond this body

 " “There is what is given.” This sounds perfectly obvious, but it had a special meaning in the time of the Buddha. For millennia, the brahmans had been preaching about the virtue of giving, especially when things were given to brahmans. In the texts of old brahmanical ceremonies for making merit for the dead, for example, there’s a part of the ceremony where the brahmans will address the bereaved and say, “We are speaking in the voice of your dead relatives: ‘Give to the brahmans!’” When the bereaved gave to the brahmans, the brahmans — again assuming the voice of the dead relatives — said, “Give more!” You can imagine the reaction that eventually developed. Over the centuries, there sprang up schools of contemplatives who said, in reaction, that there is no virtue in giving. One of their arguments was that people do not have free will, therefore even when they give things, it doesn’t mean anything because they had no choice in the matter. Another argument against the merit of ...
Read more

The more observant you are in the way you relate to the breath, the more your muddle will turn into a process of discovery.

"At the very least, when you're sitting here meditating and things don't seem to be going right, don't blame it on the weather. Don't blame it on the time of day. Just look at what you're doing. Look at the raw material you have to work with and your skill in fashioning that raw material into a state of calm. From the Buddhist point of view, that raw material comes from past actions. You can't change the fact that this is the raw material you have at hand, but you can fashion that raw material in different ways. That freedom of choice is always present. So if things aren't going well in your meditation, look at your intentions to see what you might change. Look at your perceptions, at the questions you're posing in the mind. Experiment. Improvise. See what makes a difference. When things are going well, try to maintain them well. See how you can develop that sense of wellness even further. This is Right Effort. This is where we encounter the eleme...
Read more