Today I have brought nothing of material substance to offer you, only the Dhamma, the teachings of the Lord Buddha. You should understand that even the Buddha himself, with his great store of accumulated virtue, could not avoid physical death. When he reached old age, he ceded his body and let go of the heavy burden. Now you too must learn to be satisfied with the many years you’ve already depende…

From time to time we come to a stuck place in our dhamma practice, sometimes for long periods. This happens to everybody because it is a stuck place in our life process, a place of holding on based on false assumptions of how the mind is supported and how it is released. That is, we tend to come from the mode of self-orientation, in which we determine, struggle, learn, adapt and get results. This…

The world needs more true people—those who are accountable and compassionate in their actions. Human society, to be livable, has to be based on trust, and people true in this way are the only ones really worthy of trust. The Buddha offers a way to train people to be true, starting with their experience of pain. Pain, he once noted, sparks two reactions: The first is bewilderment—we don’t understan…

It’s not that things will always feel good—that’s impossible—but as we practice, little by little, our old tendencies start to shift, and new ways of responding get stronger. Guided by our own wisdom and a wish for freedom, things start to open up. We feel the joy of being aligned with the Path, and we can direct our internal compass to this joy as we navigate our way through the journey of life.…

But just as it is important to have an adequate conception of the goal of our practice, it is also important to gain proper knowledge of the path leading to that goal… In a discourse in the Udāna, the Buddha describes the path of practice by comparing it to the continental shelf off the coast of India. [Ud. 5.5] This image gives a sense of the training required to reach the goal of Nibbāna: a grad…

At Sāvatthī. Then Ven. Ānanda early in the morning adjusted his under robe and—carrying his bowl & outer robes—went into Sāvatthī for alms. He saw the brahman Jāṇussoṇin leaving Sāvatthī in an all-white chariot drawn by mares. White were the yoked horses, white the ornaments, white the chariot, white the upholstery, white the reins, white the goad, white the canopy, white his turban, white his clo…

When we buy into ‘I want more, just one more; I want to keep this, this is really great,’ then at that moment we believe the promise that ‘If I had just one more, then I would be happy.’ We’re feeling we’re incomplete, but if we get one more drink or one more piece of cake or one more profound meditation experience, then we’re going to be happy and satisfied. Whether the object of addiction is coa…

Even if you are doing mettā as a meditation, you still need to have an anchor. You still need to be grounded in something and have someplace to keep returning to, which is mindfulness of the body. Become very familiar with returning to the body. There are many ways of using mindfulness of the body, but in terms of the formal practice of meditation, become familiar with mindfulness of breathing an…

There can be times when there is wisdom in our minds, when we will have wise emotion and times when we have no wisdom in our minds, when we have unwise emotion; the same with thought. When there is wisdom in our minds, then we will have wise thoughts. When there is no wisdom in our mind, then we will have unwise thoughts as a result. These are all results of the perceptual process, which is the th…

Wisdom is one of the great blessings of the citta. True inner happiness is a lovely quality which allows the citta to unfold and be free from anxiety, criticism, doubt, anger and so forth. As the citta unfolds, its wisdom capacities become more available, more revealed. You can imagine the citta as something that gets contracted, distracted and tangled up. Even when it’s excited, it doesn’t have t…