One of the images that [Ajahn Chah] gave of the practice was of a coconut tree. A coconut tree draws nutriments from the planet; it draws elements good and bad, clean and dirty, up through the roots and into the top of the tree and then produces fruit that gives both sweet water and delicious meat. In the same way, as practitioners, we take all the different experiences that we have, all the diffe…
Sometimes we get lost – we blow up at each other, or we do things that aren’t very nice – but that’s not our intention; these are the heedless moments. I conduct myself in a moral way not only for my own benefit, for my own practice, but out of respect for you and towards the Sangha, and towards the community around us: to be someone who lives within the restraints of the moral precepts. Then my i…
You can think about everything, but don’t think about things too much. If you think about things [a lot] and they’re good, then they’re very good. If you think about things and they’re not good, then if you think about things a lot, they’re very bad. We have to learn that sometimes we have to stop thinking. This reflection by Ajahn Jundee Kantasaro is from the talk, An Expression of Gratitude.
“When people work with a spirit of self-sacrifice, it’s not difficult. Nobody made a fuss. Even when we worked late into the night, nobody asked when we were going to stop. Whether it was pouring with rain or the sun was beating down, there were no complaints. And so, the results every day were satisfying. It was a tribute to the harmony of Luang Por’s disciples and, as Sangha work projects go, it…
I’d like to share something else with you, because it was where this term ‘shared humanity’ came up for me. A few weeks ago there was an invitation to a rather mysterious meeting, a sort of inter-faith mingling of minds and hearts. There was a Sufi, a Swami, a Bishop, an Anglican businessman and a Buddhist monk, all of us invited to the same place to share something, though we didn’t know what unt…
Q: When I see nature, I am so full of gratitude, but that seems to be a kind of attachment. I try to see the attachment, but it’s difficult. Someone once told me: ‘If you go on like this, you will never be free.’ [Laughter] I just love trees and birds and nature … and I find I’m having to change … I don’t know how to deal with it. A: It’s true that some of these positive qualities of heart may com…
The questioner might then ask,”You say that all these visions are external, and that I can’t yet put them to any use; if I stay stuck simply on the vision I won’t make any further progress. Is it because I’ve been staying so long with these visions that I can’t avoid them? Every time I sit down to meditate, as soon as the mind gathers together it goes straight to that level. Can you give me some a…
Chanda means bringing up of motivation, desire. If we have a particular goal we want to succeed at, to develop some kind of accomplishment in, then we have to motivate ourselves with desire and interest. In short, we have to be interested in what we are doing. I think of the times when I was a young student, and not a particularly good one. I just couldn’t get any interest and motivation going to…
The act of assuming an identity on either level requires looking for food— both physical and mental (SN 12:64)—for if you don’t find food for that identity, you can’t maintain it. In fact, the need to subsist on food is the one thing that characterizes all beings (AN 10:27). This fact is so central to the Buddha’s teachings that it’s the first item in the catechism memorized by novice monks and nu…
These ways of thinking all qualify as objectification because they derive their categories—self/not-self, existence/non-existence, here/there—from the mental label, “I am.” The fact that the issues surrounding this mental label can multiply so quickly and spread so far gives some credence to the idea that papañca is proliferation. However, liberating insights can proliferate as well, as when an i…
