Dependent Origination is the fine analysis of how we get from the Second Noble Truth to the First Noble Truth. Even before taṇhā (‘craving’ – literally ‘thirst’), it’s describing how that experience of craving appears. It all starts off with avijjā, not seeing clearly. The first section, avijjā paccaya saṅkhāra, is describing that when the mind loses its clarity of awareness, then that creat…

Contentment is a good theme for all of us to consider. In doing so we want to learn how to be content with the circumstances around us, as well as with our own minds, internally. Most of the agitation, negativity, and fault-finding that the mind cranks out is not so much about any big event that’s happening outside. Almost invariably, it is a lack of internal contentment. When the mind is internal…

147 Look at the beautified image, a heap of festering wounds, shored up: ill, but the object of many resolves, where there is nothing lasting or sure. 149 A city made of bones, plastered over with flesh & blood, whose hidden treasures are: pride & contempt, aging & death. 181 Hard the winning of a human birth. Hard the life of mortals. Hard the chance to hear the true Dhamma. Hard the arising of A…

There is a feeling of change today since the rain has come. The rain on the roof is an unfamiliar sound after months and months of dry summer. As I came down this morning for pūjā, there was the smell of moisture in the air. We can pay attention to that feeling of change. The mind tends to look at things from a one-sided perspective. We might be people who love the warm summer and hate the cold…

During the recent Western Monastic Conference, I raised a question with the Christian monks who were there, regarding an orthodox belief. I asked, “What happens to an unbaptized baby who dies in childbirth or an aborted fetus? Is it going to heaven or not?” One of the monks answered, “Well, technically it’s not going to heaven, because it wasn’t baptized.” It’s easy to think that’s an outrageous b…

Take a few deep, long in-and-out breaths and think of the breath energy filling the body. When we talk of the breath energy being full, it’s not a matter of having your lungs stuffed with air. It’s more that the energy channels throughout the body are open and they feel saturated with comfortable energy. So try to notice where in the body you have that sense of fullness right now. Protect that spo…

Form is like a glob of foam; feeling, a bubble; perception, a mirage; fabrications, a banana tree; consciousness, a magic trick — this has been taught by the Kinsman of the Sun. However you observe them, appropriately examine them, they’re empty, void to whoever sees them appropriately. Beginning with the body as taught by the One with profound discernment: when abandoned by three things — life, w…

We can learn to use the structures and the limits of a retreat, a monastic life or those that are part of lay life…to look at the mind’s habit of chasing after a desire or an aversion. We can make an effort to not follow the craving but to know: ‘This is a feeling; this is a very potent feeling perhaps, it’s very strong, but it is just a feeling.’ The mind might make a strong case: ‘I can’t stand…

When the mind gets caught in the feeling of pleasure, there is the tendency to want more of it. Or, when the mind experiences an unpleasant, painful feeling, it wants to get away from it. This is what is called the bridge between ‘feeling’ and ‘craving’. This is the key point in the addictive process because this is where the trouble really starts: where the feeling of ‘like’ transforms into ‘I wa…

What’s interesting is that the Buddha says all this inconstancy, stress and not-self is rooted in desire. And yet because of the desire, we’re never satisfied. It’s through our lack of satisfaction that we want this and want that, and yet the things that we create in order to fill up that lack never really give satisfaction. So we desire more. We create more. The process keeps feeding on itself, b…