The Quotable Thanissaro

A discussion on all aspects of Theravāda Buddhism
dhammapal
Posts: 2646
Joined: Sun Nov 01, 2009 9:23 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:[In late 2019] I was in Thailand. While I was there I went to pay my respects to Ajaan Uthai, a student of Ajaan Funn. When I arrived, there was already a group of laypeople visiting with him. He asked me a couple of questions about life here at Wat Metta. And one of them was, “When Westerners come to the monastery, what do they come for?” He’d been talking about virtue and generosity to the laypeople, so I mentioned that a lot of people don’t come thinking about generosity and virtue at the very beginning. Their first motivation for coming is to find peace of mind. One of the people in the other group said, “Ah, Westerners, they go straight to the top, right from the very beginning.” And Ajaan Uthai’s response was, “What do you mean straight to the top? Even common animals want peace of mind. If you want to be a human being, you have to develop virtue, good qualities of the mind, good qualities of the character. That’s what differentiates us from common animals.”

So what are those good qualities? There’s a list called the ten perfections. They include discernment, which is primarily a quality of the mind, but the other nine are all qualities of the heart: generosity, virtue, renunciation, persistence, endurance, truth, determination, goodwill, and equanimity.

From: For Goodness' Sake by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
User avatar
Dhamma Chameleon
Posts: 584
Joined: Sun Feb 04, 2018 10:55 am

Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by Dhamma Chameleon »

Thank you dhammapal for maintaining this thread! :anjali:
dhammapal
Posts: 2646
Joined: Sun Nov 01, 2009 9:23 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:So if you’re using visualization as part of your goodwill practice, don’t visualize people simply as smiling, surrounded willy-nilly by wealth and sensual pleasures. Visualize them acting, speaking, and thinking skillfully. If they’re currently acting on unskillful intentions, visualize them changing their ways. Then act to realize those visualizations if you can.
From: Head & Heart Together: Bringing Wisdom to the Brahmaviharas by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
dhammapal
Posts: 2646
Joined: Sun Nov 01, 2009 9:23 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:When the Buddha talks about focusing on the present moment, it’s always in the context of mindfulness of death: the fact that there’s work to be done, and if we don’t do it now, it’s not going to get done. After all, we have no idea when death will come, and where our karma’s going to take us afterwards. We try to do our best to make skillful choices here in this lifetime, but there are some possibilities of unskillful choices we’ve made in the past that might get in the way.

So you want to do your best as soon as possible to put yourself in a place where the mind is really safe. From the Buddha’s point of view, that’s the point where the mind has seen the deathless. At that point you can guarantee you’re not going to fall, and you can begin to breathe a little bit easily.

So the question is, are you there yet? If not, there’s work you’ve got to do. And you don’t know how much longer you’re going to have to do it, but you *do* know that you have right now. So focus on *right now*, and what can be done *right now*. And if it so happens that you’re still going to live for a much longer time, well, you keep creating good *right nows* all along. And it’s all to the good. The effort that goes into training the mind, the effort that goes into trying to be as skillful as possible in what you do and say and think is never wasted. It’s your wealth. It’s your investment in the future.

So here it is, the present moment. You’re right here. Alert. Mindful. Ardent. Trying to make the best use of what you’ve got. We’re not here simply to enjoy the present moment. The present moment has possibilities that we can develop, so we’re here to develop those possibilities.

In that way, the moment becomes auspicious, and many moments altogether make up an auspicious day. Many days make up auspicious weeks, and so on into larger and larger frames of time. But they all start right here. And they’re all made up of these individual moments. So if you want an auspicious life, this is where it’s done. When you take care of what needs to be taken care of in the present moment, you’ve got all your bases covered. Just keep at it. It’s your persistence that helps makes you mindful, and your mindfulness that stitches all these present moments together into something of real worth.
From: An Auspicious Day by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
dhammapal
Posts: 2646
Joined: Sun Nov 01, 2009 9:23 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:I’ve heard many people complain that they can think thoughts of goodwill [mettā], but they don’t get any warm feeling out of it. Well, it’s not necessary to have the warm feeling, as long as you think about other people’s well-being and take that into consideration as you plan your actions. That’s an awful lot right there.
From: Goodwill in Heart & Mind by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
dhammapal
Posts: 2646
Joined: Sun Nov 01, 2009 9:23 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:So happiness is going to have to come from actions — which means that if you have goodwill [mettā] for yourself, you’re going to have to get your actions in order. This is one of the reasons why we meditate: Actions come out of the mind, so the mind has to be trained.
From: Undefeated Goodwill by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
dhammapal
Posts: 2646
Joined: Sun Nov 01, 2009 9:23 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:It’s good to appreciate the fact that there are people out there who *want* to do good. There are people out there who find happiness in doing good. And that should make us happy.
From: Appreciation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
bpallister
Posts: 662
Joined: Sat Aug 07, 2021 2:13 am

Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by bpallister »

Thanissaro is my favorite teacher at the moment
dhammapal
Posts: 2646
Joined: Sun Nov 01, 2009 9:23 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:So you want to work on developing a sense of pleasure in the form of the body as sensed from within, rather than in visualizing the attractive details of the human body’s appearance. In other words, you take your sense the body as you inhabit it right here, right now: How do you relate to it? How can you find pleasure simply in sitting here and being aware of the fact that you’re inhabiting this body?
From: Lust by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
dhammapal
Posts: 2646
Joined: Sun Nov 01, 2009 9:23 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:Anyone who has dealt with psychologically damaged people knows the damage that can come from having impossible standards to live by. If you can give people standards that take a little effort and mindfulness but are possible to meet, their self-esteem soars dramatically as they find themselves actually capable of meeting those standards. They can then face more demanding tasks with confidence.
From: The Healing Power of the (Five) Precepts by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
dhammapal
Posts: 2646
Joined: Sun Nov 01, 2009 9:23 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:When an intention comes up to do or say or think something, you want to know what that intention is. It's a teaching that the Buddha teaches his son Rahula, to look at his actions and look especially at his intentions before he does or says or thinks anything. Now I've heard a lot of people say, "Gee, that's an awful lot of attention to something like that,” and they have so many other things they have to pay attention to. Well, it turns out that the other things you're paying attention to are the results many times of your own past actions. It's much better to start at the very beginning to make sure that the new intentions coming out are well-formed.
From: Straightened Intentions by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
dhammapal
Posts: 2646
Joined: Sun Nov 01, 2009 9:23 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:Sometimes we hear, especially from Thailand, that you can make a determination and it’s like a prayer. Part of the confusion is that when Christianity went into Thailand, they took the word for determination — adhiṭṭhāna — and they used that for the word for prayer. That got everybody all confused.

Genuine determination is when you make up your mind you want to do something good, and you want to stick to that determination. You can’t determine, “May my wealth not go away, may my health not go away, may my relatives be all safe, may my relatives all have right view.” You can’t determine that. But you can determine, “May I not lose my virtue, may I not lose my right views.” Because you lose these things only through your own choices — and you have to realize how serious that would be.
From: Virtue & Right View by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
dhammapal
Posts: 2646
Joined: Sun Nov 01, 2009 9:23 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:The suffering you’re feeling right now, whatever stress or strain or sense of burden or disturbance in the mind: It comes from what you’re doing. The things that are coming in may be the raw material for creating that suffering, but you don’t have to create suffering out of them. Now, some people don’t like to hear this. It makes them think that they’re being blamed for their sufferings. But it’s not so much a question of blame, it’s just noticing where the cause is and how you can do something about it. And it actually puts you in charge. You accept responsibility so that you can do something about it. This empowers you.
From: Own Your Actions by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
dhammapal
Posts: 2646
Joined: Sun Nov 01, 2009 9:23 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:One good place to look always, of course, is at your speech. The easiest way to break the precepts is with your mouth, saying things that you realize afterwards that you shouldn't have said. There's one precept that governs speech and that's speech against lying. In other words, everything that comes out of your mouth is a truth. You don't fudge the facts. You may not have to reveal all the details of a situation. When someone asks you how you are, you don't have to tell everything about how you are. And if there's a situation where someone tries to get information from you that you know that they're going to abuse, you try to do everything you can to not to give the information. But at the same time you don't lie. That's the precept.

But there are other standards for right speech as well. There's a standard of right speech that you try not to speak in a divisive way. In other words, you try to speak in ways that create harmony in the group. You don't try to speak in ways that are harsh, in other words, meaning to hurt people's feelings. And you don't engage in idle chatter, in other words, speaking without any real reason at all, just opening your mouth and seeing what's going to come out. A lot of damage can be done in these forms of wrong speech. Now, it's impossible to have precepts against these, because there are times when, for example, with divisive speech, you know that somebody's harmful and you want to warn somebody else about this harmful person — which technically would be divisive speech, but in this particular case it's for the genuine good of the person you want to talk to. Sometimes strong speech is required for people to understand how serious an issue is. But you want to make sure you don't engage in divisive speech or harsh speech just for the fun of it, just because you feel like it.

The whole point of controlling your speech is that you want to think about the effects of what you're going to say, the long-term effects. You don't just open your mouth and say whatever you feel like saying. Speech is not necessarily there for you just to express yourself. You want to express thoughts that are actually going to be helpful, information that's actually going to be helpful, things that actually lead to harmony within the group.

We look around us and we see all the divisive speech being thrown around on the web and everywhere else in the media right now. This is the kind of thing that tears the country apart. You don't have to shoot at people, all you have to do is say untrue things, or say harsh things or divisive things, and society becomes a much less pleasant place to be. We can't control the media out there, but you can control your contribution to the general atmosphere in the way you speak.

So you might want to think about how, for the next three months [of the rains retreat], you want to take a lot more care in how you speak: what you're going to say, how you're going to say it, when you're going to say it, to whom you say it. All these aspects of speech are really important. Words are cheap, but you don't want to use a lot of cheap words to cheapen society. You want your words to be valuable. And if you can't think of anything true to say or harmonious to say or something kind to say or something with a purpose, then it's probably better not to say it. Just be quiet. Let people think that you're wise. Don't just open your mouth and say whatever you feel like saying, because that way you damage yourself, you damage the people around you, you damage society.

So that's one suggestion for one thing you might want to do for the next three months: Tighten up your scrutiny on how you speak. Because after all, as Ajaan Suwat used to say, each of us has only one person — ourselves — that we're responsible for. And our mouth is one thing we've really got to be responsible for. So take this opportunity to get more skillful in your speaking, and see what benefit it has in your life and the situation around you."
From: Improving Your Speech by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
dhammapal
Posts: 2646
Joined: Sun Nov 01, 2009 9:23 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:Here in the West we have a problem with a society that doesn’t even give lip service to Buddhist values. It’s almost as if we were aliens surrounded by people who don’t understand us. If you go to Thailand, though, it’s not that much different. People do give lip service to Buddhism, but in the society in general you don’t have to scratch very deep to find a lot of misunderstanding — and a lot of values running contrary to what the Buddha taught. Really being serious about the practice is a counter-cultural thing everywhere. So you have to be very careful about what you pick up from your surroundings.

This is where restraint of the senses comes in. With the things you look at, the things you listen to, you have to ask yourself: “Why am I looking? Why am I listening? What am I getting out of the looking and the listening?” Of course, in some cases, things are right in your face, especially when there are people around you. But, again, you want to protect your sense of your own personal space. When you’re not feeling invaded by the other people, it’s a lot easier to step back and look at their attitudes as being their attitudes, and not necessarily something you have to pick up.

Stepping outside of the culture is a necessary part of the practice — especially when you look at our culture: There are a lot of neuroses, and a lot of other problems that you really do want to step outside of, that you don’t want to be part of. So, as Ajaan Fuang used to counsel his students, “Your body may be in the world, but your mind doesn’t have to be in the world. Your mind can stay with the Dhamma.” Although it may be disconcerting at first to have that sense of separation, you find that it is for the sake of your own true health, your own true happiness.

From: Skills to Take Home by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Post Reply