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:
Mindfulness of death [maranassati] is not simply a matter of constantly thinking, “Death, death, death, I’m going to die, die, die.” Its primary focus is on what needs to be done here and now to prepare for death, keeping in mind the Buddha’s analysis of what happens as death arrives. So instead of fostering fear and depression, this practice of mindfulness is meant to build on your confidence that there are things you can usefully do to prepare.

From: Undaunted: The Buddha’s Teachings on Aging, Illness, Death, & the Deathless by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
As the Buddha said, when you have this sense of peace and stillness inside, that’s what genuine happiness is. In fact, he says there really is no other happiness other than peace.

We might think of a lot of ways where we’re happy that are not peaceful at all. But you think about it for a while: The reason we’re happy with those things is because the mind can stay with them for a while before it gets pushed off. So it’s in this quality of being able to stay: That’s where the true happiness of the mind lies.

So try to make the mind stable with each breath coming in, going out. That way it gets to find some of the peace that leads to genuine happiness.

From: Safe from Ups & Downs by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
So no matter how bad things get, remember that the skills of meditation are there to make the best of a bad situation: How you can still find happiness in the midst of birth, aging, illness, death, and all the craziness that tends to go on around us. How you can maintain your sanity in an insane world. And having the confidence that no matter how bad it gets, there’s always an approach, there’s always a tactic, there’s always a strategy, there’s always a skill.

From: The Best of a Bad Situation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
We’re always worried about our relationships to people outside, but our relationship to ourself is very unskillful and that’s a lot more basic, and a much bigger problem. How do you relate to your own thoughts? How do you relate to your perceptions? Learn how to relate in more skillful ways.

From: Overcoming Complacency by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by dhammapal »

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 haven’t had all your wrong actions tallied up and punished. And you’re probably glad that that’s the case. Try to develop the same attitude toward other people and see what you can do to develop some health in your mind. When you know the way to make your mind healthy, then you’re in a better position to be a good example to others, so that they can make their minds healthy as well. In that way, we all benefit.

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

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Question: The precept against killing is often translated into adopting a vegetarian diet. Is this necessary? Aren’t you also killing these poor vegetables, stripping their skin off while they’re still alive and boiling them?

Thanissaro Bhikkhu: For the monks, our rule is that we’re not allowed to eat meat if we either know or suspect that it was killed for the purpose of feeding us. The precept against killing is specifically against either killing something on your own or telling someone else to kill. Now, if you want to take the precept further and adopt a vegetarian diet, that’s perfectly fine. But the precept doesn’t require it. Just make sure that when you go to a seafood restaurant and they have a fish tank with live fish, don’t choose any of the live fish.

As for vegetables, they don’t come under the concept of sentient being — they don’t feel pain — so the precept doesn’t cover them.

We’ve received several questions on the issue of the relationship between the first precept and a vegetarian or non-vegetarian diet. You have to remember that the precept is a training rule. It’s not a principle for trying to create a perfect society or a perfect world. Its purpose is to focus you on the things that you are directly responsible for doing.

Also, it doesn’t guarantee that, if you abide by the precept, you’re not going to have any bad kamma. In other words, the precept is phrased in such a way that eating meat does not go against the precept, but you still have the kamma of eating the flesh of the animal that had to die for that.

This is one of the reasons why monks have a reflection every day on the food they eat, which is that they’re incurring a debt and only through the practice can they get beyond that debt. You take the time to reflect on the fact that simply having a body requires that you place a burden on many other beings, which gives you a good motivation for trying to find a happiness that doesn’t need to feed. One of Ajaan Lee’s reflections is that when you’re about to die, the spirits of all the animals whose bodies you ate are going to come thronging around, asking for some merit. If you don’t have any merit to give them, they’ll take you with them. But if you have lots of merit to dedicate to them, they’ll be happy to take your merit instead.

Question: You said that eating meat does not break the precept against killing. How can you say that the consumer of the meat does not play any role in supporting the killing of the cow? How can this not be breaking the precept?

Thanissaro Bhikkhu: It’s not the case that eating meat does not support the killing of the cow. It does play a role in supporting that, but the precepts cover only two things: One is what you do yourself, and the other is what you give the order to do. That’s all that’s covered by any of the precepts. Beyond that, if you feel inspired not to support the cow-killing industry, then don’t eat meat. But that goes beyond the precept. We’re not trying to create an ideal society with the precepts. We’re trying to focus directly on what we’re doing so that our own personal behavior is conducive to getting the mind into concentration and then gaining the insight so that we don’t have to come back to this process that needs to keep on eating. Only when you train the mind to the point where it doesn’t need to feed can it can be really pure.

Question: We had a long question from a mother with a 14-year-old child who wanted to be a vegetarian. The child did not like the fact that his mother was not a vegetarian and was giving her many, many, many reasons for becoming vegetarian. No matter how she would argue with him, he wouldn’t listen to her reasoning. She wanted to know how I would reason with the kid.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu: I would basically say, “If you’re providing the food for the family, then you have the right to have a say in what kind of food is being fixed. Until you reach that point, the mother is the one making the decisions.”

From: Good Heart, Good Mind: The Practice of the Ten Perfections by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
dhammapal
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
I was listening a while back to someone saying that you shouldn’t try to fight the hindrances; you should try to learn from them — which is both right and wrong. You want to learn about them, but you can really learn about them only by fighting them. And in fighting them, you have to use a lot of skill.

This is where the mind part comes in. You have to strategize; you have to outwit them. As the Buddha said, when something like sensual desire comes along, first you have to watch for the origination. Why does it get sparked in the mind? What provokes it?

Sometimes it’s hard to see, but watch it while it’s there with the purpose of not feeding it, to see when it stops. As is the case with any mental phenomenon, it’s going to last for a while and then, if it’s not fed any more fuel, it’s going to disband. So you try to starve it of the fuel.

You have to get yourself on the side against the hindrance. In fact, that’s half the battle right there, because you’ll find that, in the committee of the mind, there are lots of members who want to go for it. They think a thought of sensual desire would be really attractive, a lot of fun, nourishing, refreshing, entertaining.

You want to see their reasons, so you set yourself up against the hindrance: Say, “I’m not going to go there.” It’ll go away, but then it’ll come back. That’s when you have to watch.

From: Learning from Sensual Desire by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
For most of us, whatever was the last big danger we had to face, that’s the fear we’re prepared for. But a lot of other things could go wrong.

Just look at your body. Every part of the body has at least one disease to go with it, sometimes more than one. It’s ready to fall apart, even though we do our best to keep it going. And the mind is even more changeable than that. So it’s no wonder that these are the things that grab our attention right away.

But, the Buddha says, those aren’t the things to be afraid of. The real thing to be afraid of is that you’re going to do something unskillful — particularly in trying to protect this identity you’ve taken on, to ward off whatever you think is going to be the next big danger to threaten it.

There are a lot of really horrible things that people do out of fear. And it turns out the horrible things are the things they really should be fearing more than the other fears they have.

This is why a large part of our training as meditators is to learn to see how our ordinary old fears are not nearly as scary as we think. Of course, the dangers are there — there’s instability, there are uncertainties built into the fact that we’ve taken on an identity. But the real determining factors as to how much we’re going to suffer come back to our intentions. If you act on unskillful intentions, you just make things worse. If you act on skillful intentions, though, there’s a way out.

So we train the mind. As we sit here and meditate, it’s probably *the* best way, the most direct way to train the mind. But all the aspects of the path, all the aspects of the practice, are training the mind to fear the right thing: to fear making unskillful choices — choices that are harmful for yourself, harmful for others, based on unskillful intentions, laced with greed, laced with anger, laced with delusion.

Notice that the Buddha doesn’t say that fear is necessarily unskillful. It *is* one of the wrong courses, or agati. You *can* go wrong based on fear. But not all fears make you go wrong. After all, as he said, if you’re afraid of doing something unskillful, that becomes compunction and that’s actually a virtue. If you realize that your actions will make the difference between whether you suffer or not, and you’re afraid of unskillful actions, that’s heedfulness, and that, too, is a virtue. In fact, as the Buddha said, that’s the basis for all skillful qualities.

So part of the training is getting a different sense of who you are, and how you are a product of your actions. That focuses your attention away from the “me” inside, and focuses it more on the agent and the choices that the agent is making. You want to get practice in good choices. This is why generosity and virtue play such a large role in the training of the mind, because they get you out of yourself. The focus is not so much on the form and feelings and perceptions and what-not that make up who you are, but more and more on the goodness and merit you can create through your actions.

This is an aspect of Buddhist practice that a lot of Westerners look down on. They say people trying to accumulate merit and amassing merit are grubbing, greedy, possessive, victims of spiritual materialism. But even though generosity and virtue are not the highest parts of the practice, they provide you with a really good foundation. And the fact that you’re thinking more about the goodness that you can create, and less about your identity, moves the focus in a healthy direction.

All kinds of things can happen to this body; all kinds of things can happen to your brain which will have an effect on what you can do. But if you’ve been amassing merit, something inside you knows you’ve got something good to depend on.

From: Fear & Insecurity by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
Most of us, when we first learned about Buddhism, the first thing we heard was the four noble truths, it starts with suffering. And back in the 50’s and 60’s, when anthropologists went over to Asia to study Buddhism, particularly in Southeast Asia, they would prepare themselves by reading up in the Pali Canon, and read a lot about suffering (in fact, that was back in the days when people believed that the Buddha taught that life *is* suffering.)

And they go over to Asia and they were surprised to find that Asian Buddhists were happy — and particularly in Thailand they seem to smile a lot. And the attitude was “Well, these people don’t REALLY understand Buddhism — if they really understood Buddhism they’d know better than to smile.”

And, of course, that comes from a misunderstanding. The Buddha never said that life is suffering. He said there is suffering in life, and the reason he focuses on suffering is because he had a path to put an end to it, a path to lead to happiness.

[....]

It’s not just — as some people used to believe — elementary Buddhism that you then graduated from, you started out happy and then you actually find out how glum things are and then you go to Nibbana. But it’s actually a consistent pursuit all the way through.

From: Happiness by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
[The ajaans] said to themselves, “We can learn to use our defilements in a skillful way.” For example, your desire for pleasure. You can use that desire to want yourself to have a pleasure that lasts. Your desire to be free from suffering is a really useful desire. Even though it may be desire and someday you’re going to have to abandon that, you abandon it only when the suffering’s actually gone. In the meantime, you use it.

From: Truthfulness by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
If you’re in a relationship, don’t worry that you’ll ruin it with this meditation [on the thirty-two parts of the body]. Only after a great deal of time and dedication can these perceptions — and the understanding you gain from them — eradicate sexual desire entirely. In the meantime, you can actually use these perceptions to strengthen your relationship as you apply them to anyone outside of the relationship who might tempt you to be unfaithful to your partner. They also help you to focus more attention on the aspects of the relationship that will give it a more substantial basis to last over time.

And don’t be afraid that this meditation will leave you listless and morose. The more you can free yourself from internalizing the gaze of others, the more liberated you feel. As you bring more humor to issues of the body’s appearance, the more you unleash the healthy energies of the mind.

From: Under Your Skin: The Buddha’s Teaching on Body Contemplation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

Post by samsarayoga »

Shame might be the most unbearable suffering of all.
reality is not shaped by your mind, if this was the case there won't exist right view and wrong view to begin with (doh)
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
Much of what we hear about sati or mindfulness as being a pure consciousness or a pure awareness actually is related to what the Buddha taught about equanimity. In other words, you’re trying to be as aware but calm as you can while watching things coming and going. As for mindfulness, that’s actually a quality of the memory. Now you might say, “Well, it doesn’t really matter what you call it, it’s just a matter of words.” The problem is that equanimity is not always skillful, but you always need mindfulness to direct the mind. Equanimity just says, “Okay, I will just let whatever happens, happen,” and sometimes that’s skillful and sometimes it’s not. But having good mindfulness is what helps you remember the lessons you’ve learned from the past as to when it’s good to let go, and when you have to be more proactive to change things.

From: Q & A by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
So the proper response when you’ve realized that you’ve made a mistake, you’ve harmed somebody, is not remorse. It’s heedfulness and samvega.

And it’s interesting that, in the Buddha’s analysis for both of our reasons for wanting to go for remorse, his antidotes for remorse in both cases are the brahmaviharas: attitudes of limitless goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity.

From: Remorse by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
Whenever talking about awakening, there are always two dangers. The first danger is thinking that awakening is so far away that you give up any hope of attaining it. The other danger comes from the fact that there are many stages of concentration that sound very similar to awakening, and if you attain one of those you may think that you’ve attained awakening when in fact you haven’t. You’re still stuck in a fabricated state. In both cases, the danger lies in giving up your pursuit of being more skillful in your actions. The path to the end of suffering exists, but you stop or turn around. One way to avoid these dangers begins with having a right understanding of both kamma and mindfulness.

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