The Joy of Heedfulness (extract)

"Meritorious actions, of course, are generosity, virtue, and developing goodwill [mettā]. Skillful actions have to do with the ten guidelines: no killing, no stealing, no illicit sex, no lying, no divisive speech, no harsh speech, no idle speech. And then for the mind: no inordinate greed, no ill will, and developing right view. These are the things that you shouldn’t underestimate. They can do a lot of good for you.

Even little things, like generosity: You think of ways in which you can add to the goodness of the world, even if it’s just immediately around you. When I was at Wat Dhammasathit, especially during the time of construction, my job was to look after all the cleaning up around the monastery. I found that by cleaning up the place, I felt that I really belonged there. I no longer felt like a foreigner because I had put something of myself into the place — and I was getting something back.

So don’t underestimate acts of merit, and don’t underestimate the joy that can come from being heedful. After all, what are you being asked to do? Be generous. Be virtuous. Think thoughts of goodwill for everybody. That should be a source of joy. Learn to behave in ways that avoid harm. That’s a source of joy. So there’s a joy in being heedful. And the more you appreciate that, the better your practice will go."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Joy of Heedfulness"

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