It’s easy not to believe that the quality of your intention is going to determine the results of your actions, because you see a lot of people acting out of greed, hatred, and delusion, and yet they seem to be pretty happy, in the short term at least.

"It’s easy not to believe that the quality of your intention is going to determine the results of your actions, because you see a lot of people acting out of greed, hatred, and delusion, and yet they seem to be pretty happy, in the short term at least. So it is a matter of belief. And the Buddha’s proof simply is a pragmatic one: If you believe in your actions, you’ll act more skillfully. He adds that if you really want to put an end to suffering through your own efforts, this is what you have to believe. You have to take this as your working hypothesis."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Believe in Your Actions"

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

We all have our past kamma, the things that come at us in life from our past actions. But again, it’s what you’re doing right now that’s going to make all the difference.

"So remember, your actions are important, and you can make skillful choices now. Now, as you live in this human life, we can’t guarantee that once you’ve started on the path everything will be a path of roses. We all have our past kamma, the things that come at us in life from our past actions. But again, it’s what you’re doing right now that’s going to make all the difference, so you want to focus on: What are your capabilities right now? Where are you holding onto things that are making you suffer? That was the Buddha’s definition of suffering. It’s not something that’s happening to us. It’s something we're doing." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Encouragement"
Read more

We keep coming back for more. The mind is looking for happiness, but it’s looking in the wrong place. It’s doing precisely the things that are going to cause more suffering.

"As the Buddha said, you would have a hard time meeting up with someone who hadn’t been your mother in some previous lifetime, or your father, or your sister, or your brother, or your son, or your daughter. You’ve had so many different relationships, and they’ve scattered out. You can come across a complete stranger and tell yourself, “Hey. This person was my mother sometime, but now you look how strange we are to one another.” You begin to decide that maybe these relationships are meaningless, aside from what good we can develop, and what good we can help one another develop. But even then, we have to part ways. When we part ways, there’s a lot of sorrow. The tears you’ve shed over the loss of a mother, the Buddha said, are more than the water in the oceans. The tears you’ve shed over the loss of a father are more than the water of the oceans, and so on down with all those different relationships. Yet we keep coming back for more. The mind is looking for happiness, but it’s look...
Read more