The Quotable Thanissaro

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

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:[The Buddha] tells you to listen to the wise because the wise have a lot to tell you. But there comes a point where you’ve learn from them and then you have to apply what you’ve learned on your own. And this is where there’s a lot of responsibility. You can’t keep throwing things back on the teacher. I had a student once whose attitude was, “If the teacher doesn’t already know ahead of time what’s going to work for me, then he’s not really a teacher.” So he went away. Then he found out wherever he went, all the teachers were teaching the same thing: "Try this and see what works. If it doesn’t work, try to figure out something else that does.”
From: The Wise, Experienced Cook by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:If your concentration and discernment aren’t yet good enough for these techniques to work with every distracting thought, then when they’ve all failed with a particularly persistent thought, place the tip of your tongue at the roof of your mouth, clench your teeth, and repeat to yourself over and over that you won’t think that thought. Or you might repeat a meditation word, like buddho, very quickly in the mind to jam the circuits until the temptation to follow the thought has subsided.

This fifth approach is like a sledgehammer compared to the other approaches, which are more like scalpels. But just as every handyman needs a sledgehammer in his toolkit, every meditator needs a few heavy tools to be prepared for all eventualities. That way unskillful thoughts won’t be able to bully you around.
From: With Each & Every Breath: A Guide to Meditation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:Mindfulness is what keeps the practice in mind and allows you to remember what you did so you can understand the connection between what you did and the results you're getting. Alertness is what allows you to see what you're doing right now. When you develop the resolve to act only on skillful intentions, and the proper understanding of how your actions shape your life, those are the conditions that feed mindfulness, that allow mindfulness and alertness to grow strong.

So it's not the case that people can just walk in off the street, sit down, and develop mindfulness. It takes the ability to look at your life and make some decisions about how you're going to live, and how you understand the best way of living. That's when mindfulness has a chance.
From: How to Feed Mindfulness by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:Ardency is the effort you put into being alert, and into being mindful to keep reminding yourself: breath, breath, breath. This is one of the reasons why people often use a meditation word to go along with the breath. A traditional one is “Buddho”: “bud” with the in-breath, “dho” with the out. Buddho means awake. It’s actually the term the Buddha used to describe himself: not a human being, not a deva, just “awake.” It’s a quality of mind you want to develop. And you can use the word as a marker to remind yourself you want to stay here with the in-breath, and with the outbreath, then with the in-breath again, and then with the out-breath again.
From: Strengthening Mindfulness by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:Some people think they can short circuit the process of attachment [to the body] by going straight to their sense of self, thinking that by cutting out the sense of self they won't have to work on contemplation of the body because the work they're doing goes deeper, straight to the root. But attachment is like a vine: You can't find the root until you take hold of the nearest branch and trace it back. You can't really get to the root of your attachment to self until you've looked at where your most blatant day-to-day, moment-to-moment attachment is: right here at the body. The least little thing happens to your body and you can't stand it. A little bit of hunger, a little bit of thirst, too much heat, too much cold sets you running off. A little bit of illness and you go running for medicine. If that's not attachment, what is?
From: Contemplation of the Body by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:There's a lot to be covered in training the mind. It's not just a matter of mastering one single technique. I was once asked the question, "How does someone who's mastered meditation overcome the problem of pride?" After all, you've been able to master this technique; you're pretty sharp. Well, that happens mainly in places where everything is reduced to a meditation technique, in meditation centers where the people who meditate don't have anything else to do. Everything gets channeled into that one shoot at the end of the banana tree. Things may happen fast, but there's no shade. It's an incomplete training.

The complete training has to go all around. It has to deal with the way you treat other people, how you handle difficult situations. Your whole life is part of the training, and in the course of the whole-life aspect of the training, you need to learn how to see how you've been sloppy, how you've been stupid, how you've been ignorant, how you've been thoughtless and careless. If you don't see those things, you're not going to learn anything. The experience is chastening instead of pride-inducing. When the training is complete, every aspect of the mind has been trained, so that you're skilled at all kinds of activities, with an attitude nicely balanced between humility and pride.
From: Cleanliness is Next to Mindfulness by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:The teaching on kamma, in its narrative and cosmological forms, provides the context for the practice, giving it direction and urgency. Because the cosmos is governed by the laws of kamma, those laws provide the only mechanism by which happiness can be found. But because good and bad kamma, consisting of good and bad intentions, simply perpetuate the ups and downs of experience in the cosmos, a way must be found out of the mechanism of kamma by mastering it in a way that allows it to disband in an attentive state of non-intention. And, because there is no telling what sudden surprises the results of one's past kamma may still hold in store, one should try to develop that mastery as quickly as possible.
From: A Refuge in Skillful Action by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:When teaching concentration, the forest ajaans rarely go into detail about a particular technique. Instead, they talk about developing a particular attitude, one of samvega: looking around and seeing that all the things that you might want to think about are not really worth thinking about, looking at the mind’s own tendency to go after those things, and realizing that you don’t want to go there. You don’t want to follow it along. That’s when the mind can begin to settle down and be still.
From: Infinite Good Humor by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:It's hard to imagine what you could accomplish by saying that life is suffering. You'd have to spend your time arguing with people who see more than just suffering in life. The Buddha himself says as much in one of his discourses. A brahman named Long-nails (Dighanakha) comes to him and announces that he doesn't approve of anything. This would have been a perfect time for the Buddha, if he had wanted, to chime in with the truth that life is suffering. Instead, he attacks the whole notion of taking a stand on whether life is worthy of approval. There are three possible answers to this question, he says: (1) nothing is worthy of approval, (2) everything is, and (3) some things are and some things aren't. If you take any of these three positions, you end up arguing with the people who take either of the other two positions. And where does that get you?
From: Life Isn't Just Suffering by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:Qualities of mindfulness, discernment, and concentration are basic to any skill, basic to our ability to deal with any situation. So by focusing on these few things we really do cover all of our bases. They encompass everything. One of the good things about the Dhamma is that it's so big. You can give your whole life to it. It's something worth giving your life to, because it teaches you what you need to know, teaches you the skills you need to handle whatever life throws at you — and more. So even though a life of renunciation may seem like a life of getting pared down and narrowed down, it's not really that way at all. It broadens out because you're not confining the mind with narrow, petty issues.
From: Simplify by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:And as for perceptions of the three characteristics, don’t apply them too quickly to what you’re doing. There’s a passage in the commentaries describing the three characteristics as the Buddha’s categorical teaching — in other words, the teaching that’s true across the board. But the Buddha didn’t treat them that way. There are only two teachings in the whole Canon that he treats as categorical. One is the four noble truths, and the other is the principle that skillful qualities should be developed and unskillful ones should be abandoned. Those two teachings are true across the board.

The three characteristics, as the Buddha showed, should be applied only in certain times and certain places. There was once a young monk who was asked by a wanderer from anther sect what the results of karma were and the monk said, “Stress.” Then he went back to the Buddha and asked him if he’d given the right answer and the Buddha said, “No. When asked about karma, you talk about how skillful karma leads to pleasure, how unskillful karma leads to pain.” Another one of the other monks piped up and said, “Well, wasn’t he thinking about the fact that all feelings are stressful?” And the Buddha replied, essentially, that was not the time or place for that teaching.

So, an important part of strategy is knowing which teachings to use when. And not jumping the gun or trying to skip over things.

When you’re practicing concentration, apply the three characteristics or any other type of contemplation that would give rise to dispassion to the things that would pull you out of concentration. But while you’re trying to develop the concentration, you don’t focus on the fact that the concentration is inconstant because in the very beginning it’s all too obviously inconstant. You want to focus on making it as constant and pleasant and under your control as possible. For the time being, you have to push against the three characteristics. Otherwise, you won’t have the strength you need to stick with the path.
From: A Noble Warrior's Path by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:So hold onto these practices — virtue, concentration, discernment — because if you hold onto them, you don’t have room in your hands to hold onto unskillful things. You find yourself letting go of all kinds of unskillful things you never even knew you were holding onto. And there’s no sense of loss. Sometimes there may be a sense of fear around the idea of letting go of certain things because you think you need them. But when you suddenly realize, “Hey, you don’t!” it can be surprising, not only in how much you can let go of, but also in how much stronger you are in the letting go.
From: The Line of Fire by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:There are things you can’t change in one way or another in your own life. You realize that other people have the same problem: There are things in their lives that they would like to change but they can’t. This is how equanimity gives rise to a sense of samvega: the realization that we’re all suffering in one way or another, and in a lot of ways we can’t do anything about. Unless we practice.

To think of all the suffering in the world is not meant to get you depressed. It’s meant for you to question yourself: How can I find a way out? If I can find a way out, how can I share it with others? This means that instead of looking to other people for a cure for your suffering, leading to your happiness, you want to find what you can within.
From: The Particulars of Your Suffering by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:So don’t be in too great a hurry to get to [the advanced level of meditation where the mind is making fewer and fewer choices]. What you should be focusing on right now is making sure you’ve got the basic choices down pat, over and over and over again. This requires patience. Everybody, of course, would like to go straight to the end but you can’t go to the end until you’ve gotten really sensitive about the basics: the choice to keep coming back to the breath and to choose skillful ways of breathing. Those are the choices that will open things up inside. The path may not progress as quickly as you’d like, but it does progress. It gets you there. Otherwise, if you try to force yourself straight to the end, you end up falling off and going nowhere at all.
From: Choiceful Awareness by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:So even though you may have been identifying with your body, you find there comes a point where it’s an unnecessary burden. You may have gotten some use out of identifying with it but there comes a point in the practice where that becomes an obstacle to any kind of happiness. So before that point comes, you want to learn how to let go, realizing that any concern about the physical state of the body is ultimately going to have to meet up with the fact that the body has to grow old and ill and die, regardless of how worried you are about it. So the worry accomplishes nothing. It becomes a distraction and an unnecessary burden.
From: Energy & Efficiency by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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