One of the themes in Buddhist practice that I get questioned on by Westerners is that of ‘making merit.’ What they see is people coming to the monastery with bags of food and other requisites, making a formal offering (sometimes with Pali chanting) to the Sangha who then responds with some chanting in Pali. Some of these people will ask that the merit (puñña) of their act of generosity (dāna) be s…

Saddhā is often translated as faith, confidence or conviction. The Buddha said that faith comes from having seen that the human condition is unsatisfactory. It is imperfect, wrought with dissatisfaction, discontentment, pain, grief, fear and anxiety. Having seen that, then the mind naturally seeks a path out of that state. It questions the meaning of life and how to find inner happiness. So this f…

Is there anyone, any person or any condition that is absolutely right or absolutely wrong? Can right and wrong, or good and bad, be absolute? When you dissect it, when you really look at it in terms of the way it is now, there is nothing to it. It’s foam on the sea; it’s soap bubbles. Yet this is how we can get ourselves completely caught up in illusions. We’ll sacrifice our life for an illusion i…

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…