The Quotable Thanissaro

A discussion on all aspects of Theravāda Buddhism
dhammapal
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:Psychologists talk a lot about objectification, how we turn other people into objects, and the Buddha’s insight was that we start out by turning ourselves into objects first. To stop the process, we first have to change the way we view ourselves. This is why the path to peace and calm — upasama, as they say in the suttas — starts with right view. Instead of looking at your experience in terms of yourself and other people or the world, i.e., objects in the world, you look at things simply in terms of the four noble truths — as stress, its cause, its cessation, and the path leading to its cessation — terms that don’t refer to people at all.
From: No Happiness Other than Peace by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:Sometimes you hear the idea that when you meditate you’re supposed to practice radical acceptance, as if that’s what the path were all about. While you accept what’s actually going on, you’ve got to do a lot more. You’ve got to learn how to be skeptical about what’s going on as well. These stories that the mind tells itself: Why believe them? What do you gain by believing them? Are they really true? How much do you know about their truth? Even if they are true, are they really beneficial? You’ve got to have a certain skeptical ear as you listen to these thoughts, and a skeptical eye as you observe what they’re doing.

It’s only with this measure of skepticism that you can begin to recognize your defilements for what they are. The sense of being at ease in the body helps keep that skepticism from becoming bitter or cynical. Simply learn to put a question mark next to things. Is that really true? Is it really beneficial? Is this really the right time to be thinking that thing? Why should I believe that story if it makes me suffer? In this way, you learn how to free yourself from a lot of influences that otherwise would take over your mind and then stay there ensconced for days on end. This ability to be a little bit skeptical can keep you sane in the midst of all the insanity going on around us.
From: A Mind Like Wind by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:So if you find that things aren't working in the meditation, it's because one of these qualities isn't properly focused. Either your desire to be with the breath is flagging; or you're not being as consistently persistent, breath after breath after breath; or you're not really paying attention — you're just going through the motions; or you're not using your analytical powers to see what's wrong, what could be changed if something has to be changed, or see where you're trying to push change too much. Use your powers of analysis to watch over all four of these qualities — to see what's unbalanced, what's unfocused — and then figure out how to put things into shape. Once you've got these qualities working together on the meditation, there will have to be progress. There are no two ways about it.
From: Basics by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:The Buddha wasn’t just expressing how wonderful it is to be awakened. He gave us directions for how to do it. And his directions are very precise, very clear....
The Buddha has it all very clearly laid out, so that we don’t have to keep starting from scratch every time we practice. You just learn how to apply general principles to your specific case. In this way, there is a creative element in the practice. But you can rest confident that things were laid out clearly. Whatever’s there in the Dhamma is meant for you to use as part of the path to awakening. When you find awakening, you don’t have to have anybody describe it for you, or tell you how wonderful it is. You know what it’s like for yourself.
From: Conviction & Confidence by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Ahern = Element
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by Ahern = Element »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
1) Ignorance: not seeing things in terms of the four noble truths of stress, its origination, its cessation, and the path to its cessation.

2) Fabrication: the process of intentionally shaping states of body and mind. These processes are of three sorts:
a) bodily fabrication: the in-and-out breath,
b) verbal fabrication: directed thought and evaluation, and
c) mental fabrication: feeling (feeling tones of pleasure, pain, or neither pleasure nor pain) and perception (the mental labels applied to the objects of the senses for the purpose of memory and recognition).

3) Consciousness at the six sense media: the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and intellect.

4) Name-and-form: mental and physical phenomena. Mental phenomena include:
a) feeling,
b) perception,
c) intention,
d) contact, and
e) attention.

Physical phenomena include the four great elements—the properties constituting the kinetic sense of the body—and any physical phenomenon derived from them:
f) earth (solidity),
g) water (liquidity),
h) wind (energy and motion), and
i) fire (warmth).

5) The six internal sense media: the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and intellect.

6) Contact at the six sense media. Contact happens when a sense organ meets with a sense object—for example, the eye meets with a form—conditioning an act of consciousness at that sense organ. The meeting of all three—the sense organ, the object, and the act of consciousness—counts as contact.

7) Feeling based on contact at the six sense media.

8) Craving for the objects of the six sense media. This craving can focus on any of the six sense media, and can take any of three forms:
a) sensuality-craving (craving for sensual plans and resolves),
b) becoming-craving (craving to assume an identity in a world of experience), and
c) non-becoming-craving (craving for the end of an identity in a world of experience).

9) Clinging—passion and delight—focused on the five aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness. This clinging can take any of four forms:
a) sensuality-clinging,
b) view-clinging,
c) habit-and-practice-clinging, and
d) doctrine-of-self-clinging.

10) Becoming on any of three levels:
a) the level of sensuality,
b) the level of form, and
c) the level of formlessness.

11) Birth: the actual assumption of an identity on any of these three levels.

12) The aging-and-death of that identity, with its attendant sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, and despair.

In each of these examples, assume (1) that you are operating in ignorance—i.e., you are not thinking in terms of the four noble truths, and instead are looking at your situation in light of your personal narratives about the family situation and your own place in it.

A. As you walk to the door of your parents’ house, thinking about the situation (2b—verbal fabrication), you pull up memories of things your uncle
has done in the past (2c—mental fabrication). This provokes anger, causing your breathing to become labored and tight (2a—bodily fabrication). This
makes you uncomfortable (2c—mental fabrication), and you are aware of how uncomfortable you feel (3—consciousness). Hormones are released
into your bloodstream (4 f through 4i—Form). Without being fully aware that you are making a choice, you choose (4c—intention) to focus (4e—
attention) on the perception (4b) of how trapped you feel in this situation. Your consciousness of this idea (5 and 6—mental contact) feels oppressive (7—feeling). You want to find a way out (8—craving). At this point, you can think of a number of roles you could play in the upcoming dinner (9d and 10—clinging and becoming): You might refuse to speak with your uncle, you might try to be as unobtrusive as possible to get through the dinner without incident, or you might be more aggressive and confront your uncle about his behavior. You mentally take on one of these roles (11—birth), but unless you keep your imaginary role actively in mind, it falls away as soon as you think of it (12—aging-&-death). So you keep thinking about it, evaluating how your parents will react to it, how you will feel about it, and so on (2b—verbal fabrication). Although the stress of step (12) in this case is not great, the fact that your role has to be kept in mind and repeatedly evaluated is stressful, and you can go through many sequences of stress in this way in the course of a few moments.

B. You have been walking to your parents’ house with the above thoughts in mind (2 through 4), already in a state of stress and unhappy
anticipation. You knock on the door, and your uncle answers (5 and 6) with a drink in his hand. Regardless of what he says, you feel oppressed by his
presence (7) and wish you were someplace else (8c). Your mother makes it obvious that she does not want a scene at the dinner, so you go through the evening playing the role of the dutiful child (9c, 10a, 11). Alternatively, you could decide that you must nevertheless confront your uncle (again, 9c, 10, and 11). Either way, you find the role hard to maintain and so you break out of the role at the end of the dinner (12). In this way, the entire evening counts as a sequence of stress.

C. Instead of dropping the role you have taken on, you assume it for the rest of your life—for instance, as the passive, dutiful son or daughter; as the
reformer who tries to cure your uncle of alcoholism; or as the avenger, seeking retributive justice for the many hardships you and your mother have
had to endure. To maintain this role, you have to cling to views (9b) about how you should behave (9c) and the sort of person you are or should be
(9d). You keep producing (10) and assuming (11) this identity until it becomes impossible to do so any further (12). In this way, a full sequence of
dependent co-arising could cover an entire lifetime. If you continue craving to maintain this identity (8b) even as you die, it will lead you to cling (9) to opportunities for rebirth (10 and 11) as they appear at the moment of death, and the full sequence of dependent co-arising could then cover more than one lifetime, leading to further suffering and stress on into the indefinite future.

As these scenarios show, there is no single, definitive time frame for the ways in which dependent co-arising can produce suffering and stress. A single sequence can last a mere moment or many years.

From: The Shape of Suffering by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
dhammapal
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

:goodpost:
Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:In practice that there is no need to know the entire sequence of factors in order to put an end to suffering and stress. A person merely needs to focus on a particular factor or relationship within the sequence — whichever is easiest to focus on — and to apply knowledge in terms of the four noble truths to that spot. This is why the Buddha, in teaching the way to the end of suffering and stress, did not have to explain the entire sequence every time to every student. He could focus simply on whichever factor or set of factors was most transparent to the student, recommend a relevant meditative practice, and that would be enough for the student to bring suffering to an end.
From: The Shape of Suffering by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:Look at the elements of the path: It doesn't contain anything superhuman, anything that requires you to exhaust yourself. In fact, a lot of the path lies in learning how to husband your energy so that you don't waste it on unskillful things. When you don't waste it on unskillful things, you've got extra energy for the skillful ones. So on the days when the situation really does require that you sit for a long period of time to work through a difficult issue, you've got the energy to draw on, because you didn't fritter it away with trivial pursuits.
From: No Preferences by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:Your meditation may not be going as well as you'd like it to, but you don't give up, you don't just throw it away. You just lower your immediate expectations. You lower your demands on the meditation.
....
So, learn to be a warrior. Sometimes warriors have to admit temporary defeat, sometimes they have to go into retreat, but they don't totally give in. They simply adjust their tactics to deal with the situation as it presents itself.... There are times when the body is sick and you have to give up your sense of yourself as being strong and healthy — at least for the time being. "Okay, I'm sick. I've got to deal with this sickness with the tools I've got." Don't totally give in.
From: A Warrior's Stronghold by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:That’s one of the uses of our ability to shift contexts: to be in one story and all of a sudden go through a modulation and find yourself in a totally different story, a different world. This ability is also useful for insight. If we didn’t have this ability, if everything in the mind were perfectly consistent, we would go mad. When you think about people who try to develop a system that explains all of reality — where everything is consistent and everything fits very neatly in its own proper place — you realize they’re crazy. Our minds are more like a bag full of bits and pieces; some of the bits and pieces are large fragments, and others are just tiny little ones. As we move from one state of becoming to another, what makes sense in one state of becoming is not going to make sense in another. And when we meditate, we learn how to use that.
From: The Wisdom of Incongruity by Thanissaro Bhikkhu (also see Moving Between Thought Worlds)
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:Wherever there’s loss in life, you have to reflect that the important things have not been lost. The story of Ananda and Sariputta continued, and it turned out that Sariputta ended up dying before the Buddha. For some reason, there’s a Mahayana version of the story in which the Buddha says he lost his sense of the directions, he was so upset that he’d lost Sariputta and Moggallana. But that’s really an insult to the Buddha. It’s pandering to people’s ideas of the importance of their emotions to slander and betray the Buddha in that way.

The actual story is that Ananda was the one who was upset when he heard of Sariputta’s death. He went to see the Buddha and complained that he had lost his sense of the directions when he learned that Sariputta had died. And the Buddha said, “Well, did Sariputta take virtue away with him? Did he take concentration away? Did he take discernment away? Did he take release away?” No, all the important things in life were still there. The important possibilities, the important opportunities were still there. And the Buddha continued, “Did I ever tell you that anything born will never leave you? Things that are born, things that age, things that grow ill: Do you think they’ll never leave you?” And Ananda had to say No.

But there is one thing in life that will never leave you, and that’s release....
From: Loss by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
dhammapal
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:As you sit down to meditate you’ll find some days that things are going well and other days things are not going well at all. You’ve got to pull out your toolkit to see what tools you have to deal with that particular problem. Sometimes it’s just a problem of a bad mood; some days nothing seems to go right. You want to think of these things as training opportunities because worse situations are going to come along — serious illness, unexpected accidents, death — and they’re not pretty at all. Remember in the old days how they would talk about how life is good, death is a part of life, therefore death can be good? Death is no good. You lose control of the body, all kinds of things happen. So you really need to prepare for it.

This is why we practice concentration, why we practice discernment, so that we’ll have the tools we need at that point. We also want to practice the right attitude that no matter how bad things get, there’s still something we can do about it....

So no matter how bad things get, remember that the skills of meditation are there to make the best of a bad situation: How you can still find happiness in the midst of birth, aging, illness, death, and all the craziness that tends to go on around us. How you can maintain your sanity in an insane world. And having the confidence that no matter how bad it gets, there’s always an approach, there’s always a tactic, there’s always a strategy, there’s always a skill.
....
So try to keep that optimism in your own mind—that there is a solution for every bad mood that comes through the mind, every bad situation there is around you. There is a way to respond skillfully, there’s a way to maintain a sense of well-being no matter what.
From: The Best of a Bad Situation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:Now, you may want to be at a more advanced stage than trying to rein in the mind. You want to sit down and Bung, there it is: the first jhana. But when it doesn't happen quickly you get frustrated. So put that frustration aside. Put away all the pride and the shadow side of pride, which is the shame. Just put those things aside, and remind yourself that this is the way things are, this is where you are, and be willing just to keep coming back, coming back, to stick with those simple tasks. The people who master any kind of skill are the ones who are willing to step back and master the simple steps, to practice them over and over again, because it's in doing the simple steps and being observant that you learn many of your most important lessons.

These steps are not just a mechanical process that you have to bulldoze your way through as quickly as possible. You have to pay attention to what you're doing even when things are not going well. Pay attention to how the mind slips off, pay attention to how you bring it back, and you'll learn an awful lot right there. Underlying all this has to be an attitude of good-natured goodwill. If there's a sense of frustration, remember that you're here because of goodwill, not for the sake of frustration, not for the sake of finding some new thing to beat yourself over the head about or to be judgmental about. You're here for the sake of goodwill, for the sake of giving the mind a place where it can settle in and be at ease.
From: Judicious vs. Judgmental by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:When the Buddha set out dependent co-arising, he wasn’t trying to impress people with what a complex idea he could cook up. Some of the most important features of dependent co-arising are right on the surface. And one of those features is just that: you look at things on the surface without trying to guess at what lies in the depths. You reduce these things to simply, "There is passing away, arising again, passing away on the surface." You see that they are not nearly as powerful as you thought they were. They are not nearly as compelling as you thought they were. That puts you in a position of greater strength.
From: Arising & Passing Away by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
dhammapal
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:However, the complexity of dependent co-arising does not have to act as a deterrent to the practice. Many of the aspects of dependent co-arising that are most useful to know for the purpose of putting an end to suffering appear right on the surface. In fact, they are so obvious that they are often overlooked. And even the complexity of dependent co-arising, although it may be initially confusing, is actually an aid in bringing suffering to an end. So it’s good to look both for the obvious features of the process and for the ways in which the complexity is actually a friend in disguise.
From: The Shape of Suffering: A Study of Dependent Co-arising by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:All across the board, the ones who excel at their skills — whether as musicians, sportsmen, or craftsmen — are the ones who find that the skill captures their imagination. That's why the effort put into the skill is no big deal for them. They get so absorbed that the effort becomes enjoyable. They like thinking about it, they like figuring out the problems they face, and sometimes detecting problems that other people might not even notice. Then they try working out solutions. These are the kind of people who do well.
From: Freedom Undefined by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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