The first lesson of skillfulness

"The first lesson of skillfulness is that the essence of an action [kamma] lies in the intention motivating it: an act motivated by the intention for greater skillfulness will give results different from those of an act motivated by greed, aversion, or delusion. Intention, in turn, is influenced by the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the act of attention to one’s circumstances. The less an act of attention is clouded by delusion, the more clearly it will see things in appropriate terms. The combination of attention and intention in turn determines the quality of the feeling and the physical events (“form”) that result from the act. The more skilled the action, the more refined these results will be."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Refuge in Skillful Action"

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

Buddhism is not saying that if you have anger you’re a bad person and it’s all your fault. Rather, it’s saying that the anger is the unskillful element in the equation of sensing that something should be done — and that’s what you want to deal with.

"Real injustices are being done out there. The question is: what to do about them? Often we see a situation that we don’t like, anger arises, and we try to think of what to do about the situation while the anger is still in the mind. From the Buddha’s perspective, the problem is not so much that we want to do something about the injustices, but that we allow the anger to color our perception of the situation and of what should be done. So he’s not telling us to simply accept things as they are and try to swallow your anger, feeling that we’re to blame for the anger. Rather, he’s saying that we have to deal with the anger in such a way that it doesn’t get in the way of responding in an appropriate way, or a skillful way, to what we see as wrong. Once you get the anger out of the way, there are two things that can happen. One is that you may see that the situation is not as bad as you thought it was, but simply that your opinions had colored the situation. The other is that you can ...
Read more

A lot of people are embarrassed to think about the fact that they may have committed some pretty bad karma in the past. But we’re all in that boat, simply that some people’s karma is showing now and other people’s is going to show later.

"The fact that you’ve done bad things in the past doesn’t mean you’re a bad person now . A lot of people are embarrassed to think about the fact that they may have committed some pretty bad karma in the past. But we’re all in that boat, simply that some people’s karma is showing now and other people’s is going to show later. Because you can’t look into your karmic account and figure out what the running balance is or when good things are going to come, when bad things are going to come. The Buddha’s image is more like a field. You plant seeds, and some of the seeds sprout quickly, some seeds sprout slowly. What you’re seeing right now are the seeds that are sprouting right now, but you don’t know what else you have planted in that field. You don’t know what else other people have in their fields. Use this thought to depersonalize the issue." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Karma Storms"
Read more