The Quotable Thanissaro

[dhammapal]

Remember, mindfulness isn’t just being aware of the present moment. If you were solely aware of the present moment and nothing else, you would have no memory of what had worked and hadn’t worked in the past, what was skillful, what wasn’t skillful. You’d be totally at sea. Mindfulness actually means keeping things in mind, reminding yourself that when something looks attractive, it’s not necessarily good for you, may not lead you to happiness. And remember your experience with those thoughts in the past: Where did they lead?
From: Fabricating Against Defilement by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

Ajaan Lee also talks about being sensitive to outside energies. Different places have different kinds of energy. Different species of trees have different energies. In some of the places where you meditate, the energy is healthy and helpful; in other places, it’s not so helpful. So you have to learn how to tune in to the levels of energy that are actually going to help you. If the energies from outside are not so helpful, you have to fill the body with your own energy to help keep them out.

But there will come times when you’re really sick and there doesn’t seem to be anything in the body that gives you any source of energy. That’s where you’ve got to depend on the mind.

The Buddha enumerated five kinds of mental strength: conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. You’ve got to find your energy here, and the energy starts with your understanding, understanding that your actions matter. That’s what conviction is all about, and that can make a difference. But there are some areas where your actions can’t make a difference. That’s where you have to drop any worries you might have.
From: Don't Worry, Be Focused by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

To see the deathless you have to be very precise in your powers of perception. After all, the deathless is always there. Why are we not seeing it? Because we’re not sensitive enough. How do we become more sensitive? By focusing on the little things: those little movements of the mind that head off in a skillful or unskillful direction. How do you nurture the skillful ones and how do you get rid of the unskillful ones? That’s the big question.

So if you’re dealing only with larger abstractions, you’re going to miss the details because the larger abstractions say that the big deals are more important. There’s that saying, “Don’t sweat the small stuff, and it’s all small stuff.” Well there’s some small stuff you gotta sweat. Humility is a lesson, humility is the quality that allows you to admit that there are lots of little things you’ve got to learn. You don’t let yourself feel exasperated if they seem elementary or if you find yourself going back to the beginning again and again. Each time you go back to the beginning, you learn new things.
From: Sweat the Small Stuff by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

As long as you really stay with the breath you'll be okay. Slipping away from the breath is what creates the problems, because the mind then immediately creates stories about the pain, creates issues around the pain: "Why is this pain happening to me?" Or if it's a physical pain that you know you caused: "Why did I do that?" All these questions — "How much longer is it going to last? Am I going to have this pain the rest of my life?" — just drop them right now. Stay with the breath. Deal immediately in the present, because the past and the future are not actually there. They are things the mind creates, and once they're created they turn around and bite the mind. So try to stay with that thread of the breath as it goes through the pain.
From: An Introduction to Pain by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

....you have a property of awareness larger than everything it knows, that goes deeper than everything it knows. It can encompass everything. Hold that image in mind. And that awareness keeps on knowing regardless of whether the body feels strong, weak, sick, whatever. Ajaan Maha Boowa even advises, at the moment you’re about to die and there’s pain in the body, that you try to get in touch with that sense of awareness and ask yourself: “Which is going to disappear first, the pain or the awareness?” The pain is going to go first. As long as you can keep that perception in mind, it gives you the strength to deal with a lot of things that otherwise you couldn’t bear. You’re less likely to be overwhelmed.
From: Broad, Tall, & Deep by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

To the extent to which you can learn not to suffer, you are much less likely to harm others. That’s the big issue. It has nothing to do with comparing yourself as better than or worse than or even equal to other people. The whole comparing mindset is out of order here.

It’s often related to the way we judge ourselves. Something doesn’t go well in your meditation, something doesn’t go well in your life, and you tend to judge yourself as a bad person. Something goes well and you tend to judge yourself as a good person. The reading, the judging of your self is what gets in the way.
From: Thoughts with Fangs by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

The Buddha’s approach to dealing with the problems in the mind is not so much tracing things back to what you did as a child, as they do in psychotherapy. He has you focus more on looking at your habits right now, as they keep coming back again and again and again. You don’t have to ask, “What happened when I was a child, why did this happen?” You just have to look at what you’re doing, to see the unnecessary suffering you’re causing yourself. Or you can keep an eye out for any lack of openness and honesty in the mind: What’s that doing to the mind? Do you want to do that? Do you continue wanting to do that as you see the stress that it’s causing?
From: Limitless Thoughts by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

It’s not like we’re saying the body is bad and the mind is good. There’s something deeper than even the mind that we’re after. As the Buddha says, this "something" can be touched by the mind and it’s touched and seen at the body. The potential opening to it is always right here in the present moment where the mind and the body meet. Where you have an experience of the body right now: That’s where the experience of the deathless will come. As long as the mind has these issues around liking or disliking the body, it’s not going to be able to settle into the spot where it can touch and see that other dimension.
From: The Kindness of Body Contemplation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

We don’t like to think about it but interbeing, the idea that we’re all connected, basically comes down to intereating. We feed on other people. Even when we’re nice to them, we feed on them. And the feeding seems to come first. The niceness comes second.

This is why I see so many cases of people being nice to people in the ways they want to be nice to them, but without much thought as to what the people on the receiving end really need. It’s only when you don’t have to feed on people that you can really see what they need, and provide it if you can.
From: Beyond Inter-eating (2008) by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

So you simply start with that thought: “May I be happy,” like we chanted just now.

I was once talking with one of the nuns from Chithurst and happened to mention that we also chanted both in English and Pāli here at the monastery. And she said, “Oh, how do you chant?”
I said, “Aham sukhito homi... May I be happy.”

She practically fell out of her chair laughing. In her monastery they translate it in a much more refined way: ‘May I abide in well-being.’ I must admit I prefer ‘May I be happy.' It’s straightforward and gets right to the point; it’s an unabashed thought. You’re not embarrassed to say, ‘May I be happy’ — because when you think about where true happiness comes from, it’s not a selfish thing. What you’re actually saying is, ‘May I find the resources inside to develop true happiness.’ If you can make yourself happy by being generous and developing thoughts of gratitude, it’s a perfectly harmless thing. If you can make yourself happy by thinking thoughts of good will for yourself and other people, that’s a harmless thing.
From: May I Be Happy by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

Most of us tend to think of ourselves as passive recipients, victims of a particular pain attacking us. There doesn't seem much we can do about it. That's because we have a habitual way of reacting to pain. Unless we can change that habit, we're not going to see much improvement in the issue of why we're suffering, of how we suffer.

But if you really look at a physical pain, you realize that while part of it comes from something wrong with the body, another part comes from what the mind is doing to manage the experience of pain: the way it paints a mental picture of the pain, the way it latches onto that mental picture, what it's doing to maintain the pain in a particular way or to move it in a particular direction. That's going on all the time, yet we're not really aware of how much we're contributing to our own pain. That's the big issue. That's the first noble truth: the pain we're creating through our clinging, craving, and ignorance.
From: Mastering Causality by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

Tonight is Visakha Puja, the night that marks the full moon day in the month of Visakha, which straddles May and June. The Buddha was born on the full moon day in Visakha, and thirty five years later on the same night he gained awakening, and forty five years after that on the same night he passed away into total nirvana. So we’re commemorating a lot of events tonight, and there are a lot of things to keep in mind in connection with those events. But one very useful teaching connected with them comes from the Buddha’s last words before he passed away: “Obtain completion in the practice through heedfulness.” He could have ended his teaching career with some nice platitudes about emptiness or nirvana, but instead he emphasized heedfulness as the essence of the practice, the most essential part of the practice. When you look back through the Canon, you find many places where he said that heedfulness is the quality that underlies all the other skillful qualities you develop in the mind.

Heedfulness, appamada, can also be translated as vigilance, wariness, non-complacency. In other words, it’s the realization that there are genuine dangers in the world and you have to be careful about them. The most important dangers are the ones you create for yourself. Now, this emphasis on being careful is an interesting thing to think about. It means that our actions really do make a difference: You have to be very careful that you don’t do things that pose a real danger to yourself. And because your actions come out of your intentions, you have to look at the qualities in your mind that shape your intentions. Those are the real dangers in life.

So, you can’t even trust your own mind, or rather, you can’t trust everything that comes into the mind, let’s put it that way. The question, then, is who can you trust then? It’s interesting the Buddha didn’t say to trust him or trust his teaching without testing it. In fact his response to the fact that a sense that there is danger in life and that there are dangers inside your own mind is to give you guidelines on how to test your own mind.
From: Heedfulness is the Path by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

Something comes up in the mind and it may seem really convincing, but if you realize that it’s having a bad impact on the mind, there must be something wrong with it, you need to be able to doubt that it’s true.

Have your conviction instead in the breath; have your conviction in the Dhamma. Make that kind of conviction as strong as you can, because that helps you get past all the perceptions in the mind that are going to pull you away from the practice or lead to all kinds of unfortunate mental states that could get you worse and worse and worse.

So use your breath to return to your place of normalcy, a place to return to your senses, whenever your perceptions are getting strange.
From: Don't Believe Everything You Think by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

....use your imagination here — not to wander away in fantasy worlds, but to explore some of the possibilities in the present moment. Try to think of some impossible ways of breathing and then try them — because you can learn a lot about your body that way: what’s really possible and what’s not. It’s like reading about quantum physics. Some of the things they’ve noticed in their experiments, as far as they can tell, can be explained only by allowing for the idea that certain particles go backwards in time. That explanation required a real leap of the imagination. There’s so much out there in the world that’s counter-intuitive. Your sense of the body here in the present moment has a lot of counter-intuitive potentials as well. If you only go with your normal intuition, that’s all you see: what you expect to see. See if you can surprise yourself with new ways of thinking about the breath.
From: Gladdening the Mind by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

So it’s important to be clear on our assumptions as we meditate here. The idea that we’re simply going to watch things, and that objective truth is going to appear when we’re very non-interfering: You’ve got to call that into question, because the truth may be appearing, but how are you going to know what’s connected with what? After all, causation is the basic issue of right view. Right view is not about inconstancy, stress, not-self. Those are the three characteristics. Right view is about the four noble truths. You’re looking for the stress, trying to comprehend it, until you can understand the cause. When you see the cause, you abandon it. The causal connection is what’s important there. Similarly with the path: The path doesn’t cause the end of suffering but it takes you there.
From: The Science of Meditation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu