The Quotable Thanissaro

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dhammapal
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
If you can develop some goodwill [mettā] for yourself, goodwill for the people who’ve been doing wrong, then there’s some hope for the world. After all, you probably don’t have all your wrong actions tallied up and punished. And you’re probably glad that that’s the case. Well, try to develop the same attitude toward other people and see what you can do to develop some health in your mind.

From: When Your Will is Ill by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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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 his intentions before he does or says or thinks anything. I’ve heard a lot of people say, “Gee, that’s an awful lot of attention to something like that,” because 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 often the results 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
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
Dhammo have rakikhati dhammacāriṃ: The Dhamma protects those who practice the Dhamma. Sometimes it seems like those that practice the Dhamma are at a disadvantage. Other people get to lie, but we don't. Other people can push for their own advantage without any scruples, but we have to stick by our principles. But those principles are what protect us. The advantage that people gain by harming themselves, harming other people, doesn't last very long. It's good to remember that, because we're here for long-lasting well-being. That's what wisdom is all about. Which means that we have to train the mind to be patient.

From: The Dhamma Protects by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
You don’t think about people deserving your goodwill [mettā]. You give it as a gift and in that way you free yourself. The more free the gift, the more free you become.

From: Goodwill for Free by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
There was a teaching current in the time of the Buddha to the effect that the only real things in the world are the basic elements: earth, water, wind, fire. They had a few other elements as well, but the elements were the only things that existed. Actions were non-existent. Thoughts were non-existent. This also meant that there was no basis for precepts. As they said, when a knife went through somebody’s neck, it just went between the atoms, so there was nobody there to be killed, and the movement of the knife was unreal. Only permanent things were real.

The Buddha’s teachings are the other way around. Your actions are what are real, that have the most reality. The world out there is not the issue. The world that you experience comes from your actions. Your actions are more solid, more powerful than your experience of earth, wind, water, fire, and all the other elements. That’s a pretty radical statement. This is why the Buddha keeps focusing back on what you’re doing right now because what you’re doing right now is the big shaping force in your experience.

From: So Little Time by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
So if you’re using visualization as part of your goodwill [mettā] 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 Brahmavihāras by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
So the emphasis here is on noticing what you’re doing, noticing the results of your actions [karma]. As for other things that are going on in the present moment right now, you can leave those alone. You don’t want to notice too many things, because if you do, your attention gets scattered, you lose focus, and you miss what’s really important about the present moment, which is how you’re shaping the present moment.

From: A Meditator's Vocabulary by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Question: I’ve come to meditation to help me bear the atrocities of the world. What is awakening? Is it a moment of conscience when one embraces all the sorrows of the world, and in that case means hello to all sorrows or is it on the contrary a state of total forgetfulness and egotism, in that case it would be hello to guilt? So, which is it?

Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Neither. Remember the image of feeding. Ordinarily, we feed on the world, both physically and mentally, in order to gain happiness and maintain our identity as beings. But when you gain full awakening, the mind no longer needs to feed because it already has enough in terms of its own happiness. When you’ve reached that state, you can engage in the world without having to feed on it. You can help those whom you can help, and you don’t have to suffer in cases where you can’t help. In this way, you’re neither embracing the sorrows of the world nor are you running away from them. Instead you have a different relationship to the world entirely. You bring gifts to the world without needing to ask anything from it.

From: The Karma of Mindfulness: The Buddha's Teachings on Sati and Kamma by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
People sometimes misunderstand the Buddha’s teachings on equanimity, thinking that it means an attitude that doesn’t really care about anything, one where you’re indifferent or have no preferences. That’s the equanimity of a lazy person who has no goals in life. The Buddha, of course, has you take on a goal: the goal of freedom from suffering. So he’s teaching you the equanimity of a person with a goal.

Think of a warrior trying to win a battle. The warrior has to be very stable, with a mind that’s on an even keel, that doesn’t get upset by things, so that he or she can figure the way out of a particular difficult situation. In other words, it’s equanimity for the sake of victory.

From: Worldly Equanimity & Its Uses by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
Now, in doing an action and learning from it, you have to take responsibility for it. After all, the Buddha said, if you felt simply that things were happening on their own without any input from yourself, that would make a path impossible. Whether it came from a creator god or simply past actions or random fate, if you chalked all your experience of pleasure and pain up to something totally apart from what you’re doing right now, there would be no path possible.

That goes against a teaching you hear every now and then, that if you come to the path with the attitude, “I am going to do the path,” you’re coming from wrong view, and that taints everything you’re trying to accomplish. You have to have the attitude there’s nobody here doing anything; the path is just developing out of causes and conditions. There is simply awareness, seeing things arising and passing away. That’s all there is there.

That’s the enlightened way to approach the path, we’re often told, but what happens with an attitude like that is that whatever definition of self you might have goes underground. You start identifying with the awareness. You start identifying with what you think is an awakened awareness. In that way, you can let go of what may have been a neurotic self, but it turns into an overblown but very vague self.

One of the whole points of the practice is to see exactly where your sense of self comes in — when it’s skillful, when it’s not — and how to train your unskillful self to be more skillful. Of course, the emphasis is not focused on the self, but it’s always there in the background.

From: Self Bypassing by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
Even though there are miserable people in the world — and by that I mean people acting in miserable ways — not all human beings are like that. There are human beings who have been shining examples. You can take them as an example and you’ll benefit. That was one of the Buddha’s discoveries: By being good — in other words, developing really skillful qualities of the mind, qualities that are harmless, qualities that strengthen the mind in a good direction — you can find true happiness. And it’s not the happiness simply of patting yourself on the back that you were good, but you open up to a dimension that’s totally other, totally free from suffering.

From: To Gladden the Mind by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
Are we supposed to not think? Of course we’re supposed to think. The Buddha thought a lot. He set down guidelines for how to think. He didn’t say not to think. He said to think in terms of appropriate attention, to think in terms of the four noble truths. Ask yourself questions as to what’s skillful and what’s not. Put things to the test, evaluate them. There’s a lot of thinking in following the path.

From: The Equanimity that Doesn't Give Up by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
The Buddha never taught a theory of "just war"; no decision to wage war can legitimately be traced to his teachings; no war veteran has ever had to agonize over memories of the people he killed because the Buddha said that war was okay. These facts are among the glories of the Buddhist tradition, and it’s important for the human race that they not be muddied in an effort to recast the Buddha in our own less than glorious image.

From: Getting the Message by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
I was talking to someone in New York this spring who was saying, “There’s no one right description of reality, and that means there’s no one right interpretation of the Dhamma, because every interpretation is a map, and all maps distort.”

Well, think about the map on the door of a hotel room to tell you where the fire escape is. It may distort the building but it gives you precisely the information you need. The fact that it’s uncluttered makes it all the more useful. And that’s what the Dhamma is. It’s a map, a map to release. It contains all the essential features of the path to release and it cuts away unessential information. If those fire escape maps had all the architectural details of the building and told you what color the hallway was and what color all the rooms were, and filled you in with all the details about the hotel, they’d be useless as maps. When a fire comes, you want something that gives you just enough information to get to safety. And that’s what the Dhamma does.

From: Perception by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
[A fully awakened person] feels sympathy for others and seeks their well-being, experiencing a sense of satisfaction when they respond to [his/her] teachings, but otherwise [he/she] stays equanimous, untroubled, mindful, and alert. This passage shows that the even-mindedness of a fully awakened person is an attitude not of cold indifference, but rather of mental imperturbability. Such a person has found true happiness and would like others to share that happiness as well, but that happiness is not dependent on how others respond. This is the ideal state of mind for a person who truly works for the benefit of the world.

From: The Wings to Awakening by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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