One night I was sitting in meditation outside in the open air–my back straight as an arrow–firmly determined to make the mind quiet, but even after a long time it wouldn’t settle down. So I thought, “I’ve been working at this for many days now, and yet my mind won’t settle down at all. It’s time to stop being so determined and to simply be aware of the mind.” I started to take my hands and feet ou…

The body is something that we are familiar enough with that we can take parts of it in our mind and keep our attention on them, turning them around and thinking about them to see their attributes and their associations and to see their cause-and-effect relationships. Because we know so much about the body already, it’s a very good basic subject for meditation. Body contemplation takes two basic di…

Buddhism takes a familiar American principle–the pursuit of happiness–and inserts two important qualifiers. The happiness it aims at is true: ultimate, unchanging, and undeceitful. Its pursuit of that happiness is serious, not in a grim sense, but dedicated, disciplined, and willing to make intelligent sacrifices. What sorts of sacrifices are intelligent? The Buddhist answer to this question reson…

Gradually, little by little, one’s practice should gain momentum and as time passes, whatever sense objects and mental states arise will lose their value in this way. One’s heart will know them for what they are and accordingly put them down. The path has matured internally when, having reached the point where one is able to know things and put them down with ease, one will have the ability to swi…

The essential teaching of the Lord Buddha is the Four Noble Truths. There are four truths and three aspects of each truth, which make twelve insights. Three times four is twelve. And if you have all twelve insights, you are an arahant (a fully enlightened person). So the three aspects of each Noble Truth: dukkha is the first aspect, and this is the first Noble Truth – there is dukkha. It’s a state…

When we look after the mind continually with meditation, it will gradually become more and more calm. When it’s calm, it will begin to develop radiance along with its calm. And once it’s calm, then when we contemplate anything we can penetrate into the workings of cause and effect so as to understand in line with the truths that appear both within us and without. But if the mind is clouded and con…

We know when we know; we know when we don’t know. It’s much more simple than it sounds in one sense but it’s also quite difficult to do. Our nature is that we like to speculate, rather than to just be aware. Rather than to just simply know. “A feeling is a feeling,” or “a thought is a thought.” It’s so simple it’s difficult to do, to not proliferate. The mind has a proliferating nature. Desire dri…

If you get the mind to grow still in equanimity without focusing on gaining insight, it’s simply a temporary state of concentration. So you have to focus on gaining clear insight either into inconstancy, into stress, or into not-selfness. That’s when you’ll be able to uproot your attachments. If the mind gets into a state of oblivious equanimity, it’s still carrying fuel inside it. Then as soon as…

For people in the modern world facing the issue of how to practice the Dhamma in daily life, the ten perfections provide a useful framework for how to do it. When you view life as an opportunity to develop these ten qualities–generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance, truth, determination, good will, and equanimity–you develop a fruitful attitude toward your daily activ…

If at any time one can’t cultivate goodness through introspective sitting, this doesn’t mean that there’s no hope; it means that you should practise other skilful kamma. So there’s always some possibility. There is always some act of generosity that you can do, some act of calming, some act of service; and the result of that will be that it will increase the sense of confidence and trust in onesel…