The Quotable Thanissaro

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Kusala
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by Kusala »

Close to the Heart http://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writ ... 0Heart.pdf

"Back when I was first ordained, Ajaan Fuang had me memorize the Divine Mantra, which, I must admit, struck me as kind of strange, as it centered on the six elements, a way of looking at things that felt very foreign. He had me chant it every evening. I was living alone up on the hill in Rayong, and would chant the Divine Mantra every evening just after dusk. After doing this for a while it became less of a weird aspect of Thai Buddhism and more of a friend as I sat there through the night, all by myself.

Finally, one evening it really hit me. I was going through the six elements, and when I finally got to the chant on consciousness I realized that I wasn't chanting about some foreign, abstract idea of consciousness. I was chanting about my own awareness, my own mind, my own heart, right here, right now. I felt as if a huge block of ice inside me just shattered. I was able to open up and realize that the meditation wasn't some strange foreign thing I was doing to myself. I hadn't consciously thought that it was, but subconsciously, deep down inside, there was a feeling that it was alien, something from another culture. That night it became mine: my awareness of my mind, my awareness of things really deep inside. The Dhamma was no longer a foreign mold that I was trying to impose on the mind. It became a message pointing to my deepest awareness. And I became aware of a real tenderness deep down - a tenderness not in the sense of being nice or fuzzy, but in the sense of having been wounded, of needing some help. There was a need for some healing there, and the meditation
was what it needed."
"He, the Blessed One, is indeed the Noble Lord, the Perfectly Enlightened One;
He is impeccable in conduct and understanding, the Serene One, the Knower of the Worlds;
He trains perfectly those who wish to be trained; he is Teacher of gods and men; he is Awake and Holy. "

--------------------------------------------
"The Dhamma is well-expounded by the Blessed One,
Apparent here and now, timeless, encouraging investigation,
Leading to liberation, to be experienced individually by the wise. "
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tiltbillings
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by tiltbillings »

>> Do you see a man wise [enlightened/ariya] in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.<< -- Proverbs 26:12

This being is bound to samsara, kamma is his means for going beyond. -- SN I, 38.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” HPatDH p.723
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Kusala
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by Kusala »

At the Door of the Cage http://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writ ... 20Cage.pdf


"The Buddha's strategy in teaching us to let is to give us better and better things to hold onto. For example, he gets you to hold onto states of good concentration. Then when you turn around and look at things that would normally incite your lust, your anger, your desire or passion, you realize that they're not worth it. You'd much rather hold onto the stillness, the state of satisfaction, the state of wellbeing that comes with your concentration.

So you burn your bridges behind you and hold onto concentration as your only true happiness in life. Only then, when the Buddha has you cornered like that, does he have you think of the drawbacks not only of things you've already left behind but also of the concentration you're holding onto.

Only when you see the drawbacks of concentration can you realize that the only alternative is the Deathless. The only thing that would really appeal to you at that point is the Deathless. That's when the door opens."
"He, the Blessed One, is indeed the Noble Lord, the Perfectly Enlightened One;
He is impeccable in conduct and understanding, the Serene One, the Knower of the Worlds;
He trains perfectly those who wish to be trained; he is Teacher of gods and men; he is Awake and Holy. "

--------------------------------------------
"The Dhamma is well-expounded by the Blessed One,
Apparent here and now, timeless, encouraging investigation,
Leading to liberation, to be experienced individually by the wise. "
dhammapal
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:What's striking about the Buddha's standard for wisdom is how direct and down to earth it is. This might come as a surprise, for most of us don't think of Buddhist wisdom as so commonsensical and straightforward. Instead, the phrase "Buddhist wisdom" conjures up teachings more abstract and paradoxical, flying in the face of common sense — emptiness being a prime example. Emptiness, we're told, means that nothing has any inherent existence. In other words, on an ultimate level, things aren't what we conventionally think of as "things." They're processes that are in no way separate from all the other processes on which they depend. This is a philosophically sophisticated idea that's fascinating to ponder, but it doesn't provide much obvious help in getting you up early on a cold morning to meditate nor in convincing you to give up a destructive addiction.

For example, if you're addicted to alcohol, it's not because you feel that the alcohol has any inherent existence. It's because, in your calculation, the immediate pleasure derived from the alcohol outweighs the long-term damage it's doing to your life. This is a general principle: attachment and addiction are not metaphysical problems. They're tactical ones. We're attached to things and actions, not because of what we think they are, but because of what we think they can do for our happiness. If we keep overestimating the pleasure and underestimating the pain they bring, we stay attached to them regardless of what, in an ultimate sense, we understand them to be.
From: The Integrity of Emptiness by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
With metta / dhammapal.
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suriyopama
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by suriyopama »

Dear all, thank you for the contributions

Anyone knows where can I find/order a copy of the book Wings of Awakening in Thailand?
I don't want to bother Metta Forest Monastery to send it from the USA.

Thank You
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gavesako
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by gavesako »

You can get it from Wat Pah Nanachat easily.
:reading:
Bhikkhu Gavesako
Kiṃkusalagavesī anuttaraṃ santivarapadaṃ pariyesamāno... (MN 26)

Access to Insight - Theravada texts
Ancient Buddhist Texts - Translations and history of Pali texts
Dhammatalks.org - Sutta translations
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suriyopama
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by suriyopama »

Thank you, I will write them a letter.
dhammapal
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:Sometimes you hear that the Buddha's teaching on not-self is a teaching on non-ego. This is actually a misunderstanding and it has two unfortunate consequences. The first is that, for those who like the idea of non-ego, it becomes an excuse for self-hatred and for the practice of spiritual bypassing. An example of spiritual bypassing is this: Suppose you have troubles in your life and you don't want to engage in the difficult business of trying to become more mature in dealing with others or negotiating the conflicting desires in your own mind. Instead, you simply go and meditate, you do prostrations, you do chanting, and you hope that those practices will magically make the problems in your life go away. This is called spiritual bypassing — an unskillful way of clinging to habits and practices. As you can imagine, it's not very healthy — and not very effective. People often come back from meditation retreats and they still have the same problems they had before.
From: The Ego on the Path by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
With metta / dhammapal.
mal4mac
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by mal4mac »

"Ajaan Fuang rarely allowed his talks to be taped, and he was even more adamant about not allowing anyone to tape his conversations. Somehow, though, the following conversation was taped with his permission. In it, he's giving advice to some of his students — young women in their late twenties and early thirties — who were being pressured by their parents to settle down, get married, and start having children. There were other occasions on which, when asked, he gave advice on how to lead a happily married life to any of his students who were planning on marriage, but it's easy to see from this discussion where his heart really lay."

The controversy, here, is not really in the quote, but in the document referred to:

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/thai ... ingle.html

"The Buddha taught that the five aggregates are a heavy burden, but if you get married, all of a sudden you have ten to worry about, and then fifteen, and then twenty. And that's not the end of the matter. As soon as a child is born, it comes down with this, then comes down with that. It's not the case that from the moment it pops out it doesn't need to take medicine, that we can just leave it alone and it'll grow day and night. Oh, all the things you have to do for it until it's grown! It starts out so small and can only lie there. Then think of what it needs until it can sit up, and then what it needs until it can stand, and then what it needs until it can walk. When was it ever an easy thing, raising a child? And that's not all. As soon as you want to lie down for a little rest, it cries. You lie down for a little bit and it cries. There's nothing wonderful about it at all." - Ajahn Fuang
- Mal
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Kusala
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by Kusala »

The Dhamma Doesn't Change

"Life changes, cultures change, civilizations change, but the Dharma doesn't. It's the same Dharma now as it was during the time of the Buddha. As he said it, previous Buddhas taught the same Dharma. There's a reassurance that comes with this, that regardless of the ups and downs in life, there something steady, something of real value. There's a peculiar belief around that, there is no essence to the Dharma because the Buddha question our idea of self, and question even our sense of the world outside, that he was against any essence at all, everything was just free floating.

For people who want to make up their own Dharma, that's the thought they use to justify it. But, that's not what the Buddha said. He said, there is an essence, the essence is 'release'. And everything else has contact with that essence to the extent that it leads us to release. That's why there is true rest, that's why there is true shelter for the mind. That chant we have, says again and again, 'the world offers no shelter'. That's the world, the Dharma, however, does offer shelter..."
"He, the Blessed One, is indeed the Noble Lord, the Perfectly Enlightened One;
He is impeccable in conduct and understanding, the Serene One, the Knower of the Worlds;
He trains perfectly those who wish to be trained; he is Teacher of gods and men; he is Awake and Holy. "

--------------------------------------------
"The Dhamma is well-expounded by the Blessed One,
Apparent here and now, timeless, encouraging investigation,
Leading to liberation, to be experienced individually by the wise. "
rohana
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by rohana »

I feel these words are particularly important these days with all the Buddhist-Muslim conflicts going on in a number of places:
  • There are, however, writers who try to find evidence in the Pali Canon for a Buddhist theory of just war, not in what the Buddha said, but in what he didn't. The arguments go like this: When talking with kings, the Buddha never told them not to engage in war or capital punishment. This was his tacit admission that the king had a justifiable duty to engage in these activities, and the kings would have understood his silence as such. Because these arguments cite the Pali Canon and claim a historian's knowledge of how silence was interpreted in the Buddha's day, they seem to carry more authority than the others. But when we actually look at the Pali record of the Buddha's conversations with kings, we find that the arguments are bogus. The Buddha was able to communicate the message to kings that they shouldn't kill, but because kings in general were not the most promising students of the Dhamma, he had to bring them to this message in an indirect way.

    Getting the Message
"Delighting in existence, O monks, are gods and men; they are attached to existence, they revel in existence. When the Dhamma for the cessation of existence is being preached to them, their minds do not leap towards it, do not get pleased with it, do not get settled in it, do not find confidence in it. That is how, monks, some lag behind."
- It. p 43
dhammapal
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:If you've ever been in an introductory course on Buddhism, you've probably heard this question: "If there is no self, what does the action and what receives the results of the action?" Our discussions this week show that this question is misconstrued in two ways.

The first is that the Buddha never said that there is no self, and he never said that there is a self. The question of whether a self does or doesn't exist is a question he put aside.

The second reason for why the question is misconstrued is because it has the framework backwards. It's taking the teaching of not-self as the framework and kamma as something that's supposed to fit inside the framework. Actually, the relationship is the other way around. Kamma is the framework, and the teaching of not-self is meant to fit in the framework. In other words, the Buddha takes the teachings on skillful and unskillful kamma as his basic categorical teaching. Within that context, the question on self and not-self becomes: When is a perception of self skillful kamma, and when is a perception of not-self skillful kamma? And when are they not skillful?

So to get the most use out of the teachings on self and not-self, we have to approach them with these questions in mind. The Buddha is not trying to define what you are. He's not trying to fit you into a box. He's more concerned with helping you. He tries to show you how you define yourself so that you can learn how to use that process of self-definition in a way that leads to the ultimate goal of his teaching: the end of suffering and the attainment of ultimate freedom, ultimate happiness. In this way the teachings on self and not-self are part of the answer to the question, "What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?"

In this context the Buddha talks about the process of what he calls I-making and my-making, with the purpose of showing you how to engage in these actions in a skillful way. Normally we engage in these processes all of the time. We create a sense of "I" in two ways: (1) around what we can control in order to attain happiness and (2) around the aspects of our experience — our mind, our body — that we hope will taste happiness. In other words, we have a sense of our self as the agent or producer of happiness, and our self as the consumer of happiness.
From: Self, Not-self, & Beyond by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
With metta / dhammapal.
dhammapal
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:Almost any book on Buddhism will tell you that the three characteristics — the characteristic of inconstancy, the characteristic of stress or suffering, and the characteristic of not-self — were one of the Buddha's most central teachings. The strange thing, though, is that when you look in the Pali Canon, the word for "three characteristics," ti-lakkhana, doesn't appear. If you do a search on any computerized version of the Canon and type in, say, the characteristic of inconstancy, anicca-lakkhana, it comes up with nothing. The word's not in the Pali Canon at all. The same with dukkha-lakkhana and anatta-lakkhana: Those compounds don't appear. This is not to say that the concepts of anicca, dukkha, and anatta don't occur in the Canon; just that they're not termed characteristics. They're not compounded with the word "characteristic." The words they are compounded with are perception, sañña — as in the perception of inconstancy, the perception of stress, and the perception of not-self — and the word anupassana, which means to contemplate or to keep track of something as it occurs. For instance, aniccanupassana, to contemplate inconstancy, means to look for inconstancy wherever it happens.

Now, it's true that you'll frequently find in the Canon the statements that all things compounded or fabricated are inconstant, that they're all stressful. And all dhammas — all objects of the mind — are not-self. So if that's the way things are, why not just say that these are characteristic features of these things? Why make a big deal about the language? Because words are like fingers, and you want to make sure they point in the right direction — especially when they're laying blame, the way these three perceptions do. And in our practice, the direction they point to is important for a number of reasons.

One is that the Buddha's concern is not with trying to give an analysis of the ultimate nature of things outside. He's more interested in seeing how the behavior of things affects our search for happiness. As he once said, all he taught was suffering and the end of suffering. The suffering is essentially an issue of the mind's searching for happiness in the wrong places, in the wrong way. We look for a constant happiness in things that are inconstant. We look for happiness in things that are stressful and we look for "our" happiness in things that are not-self, that lie beyond our control. The three perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self are focused on our psychology, on how we can recognize when we're looking for happiness in the wrong way so that we can learn to look for happiness in the right places, in the right ways. The contemplation of these three themes, the use of these three perceptions, is aimed at finding happiness of a true and lasting sort.
From: Three Perceptions by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
With metta / dhammapal.
dhammapal
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:...one of the central features of the Buddha's strategy as a teacher was that even though his primary focus was on the mind, he nowhere defined what the mind is. As he said, if you define yourself, you limit yourself. So instead he focused his assumptions on what the mind can do.
From: Freedom From Buddha Nature by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
With metta / dhammapal.
Sylvester
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by Sylvester »

dhammapal wrote:
Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:Almost any book on Buddhism will tell you that the three characteristics — the characteristic of inconstancy, the characteristic of stress or suffering, and the characteristic of not-self — were one of the Buddha's most central teachings. The strange thing, though, is that when you look in the Pali Canon, the word for "three characteristics," ti-lakkhana, doesn't appear. If you do a search on any computerized version of the Canon and type in, say, the characteristic of inconstancy, anicca-lakkhana, it comes up with nothing. The word's not in the Pali Canon at all. The same with dukkha-lakkhana and anatta-lakkhana: Those compounds don't appear. This is not to say that the concepts of anicca, dukkha, and anatta don't occur in the Canon; just that they're not termed characteristics. They're not compounded with the word "characteristic." The words they are compounded with are perception, sañña — as in the perception of inconstancy, the perception of stress, and the perception of not-self — and the word anupassana, which means to contemplate or to keep track of something as it occurs. For instance, aniccanupassana, to contemplate inconstancy, means to look for inconstancy wherever it happens.
With metta / dhammapal.

How odd. The compounds may not occur, but the semantic equivalent to the concept is conveyed by the words aniccata, anattata and dukkhata, all of which are used frequently in the suttas. In fact, in the last case, we even have it in the plural dukkhatā - ie dukkhadukkhatā (the 'sufferingnesses' of suffering), saṅkhāradukkhatā (the 'sufferingnesses' of formations) and vipariṇāmadukkhatā (the 'sufferingnesses' of change) : DN 33.

We even have a case where we are asked to contemplate jhana as being anicatta, anattata and dukkhata in MN 64 -
Whatever exists therein of material form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness, he sees those states as impermanent, as suffering, as a disease, as a tumour, as a barb, as a calamity, as an affliction, as alien, as disintegrating, as void, as not self.

So yadeva tattha hoti rūpagataṃ vedanāgataṃ saññāgataṃ saṅkhāragataṃ viññāṇagataṃ te dhamme aniccato dukkhato rogato gaṇḍato sallato aghato ābādhato parato palokato suññato anattato samanupassati.
Looks like characteristics to me.
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