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:
As the Buddha said, when you see people who have no good habits at all — the things they say, the things they do, the things they think are all corrupt — the attitude you should develop toward those people is the same as when you’re going across the desert and you see somebody lying on the roadside, sick, without any help. At the very least, you would want somebody to come and find that person and help them, even if you can’t do it yourself. That’s the attitude you should have.

Because when you’re wishing for other people’s happiness, one, you want it to be true happiness. And two, you realize that happiness, especially true happiness, has to come from understanding. People, to be happy, have to understand the causes of true happiness and be able to act on those causes.

You’re not saying, “Well, may this person who’s killing and stealing, etc., be happy killing and stealing.” You’re saying to yourself, “May they see the light, realize that the killing and stealing doesn’t lead to happiness so they can stop those things.”

So when you find it difficult to spread thoughts of goodwill [mettā] to other people or try to make thoughts limitless, you really have to stop and work on your understanding of goodwill. Otherwise it becomes make-believe. You sit there sending out pink rays in all directions, but it doesn’t really mean that much. When the meditation is over, you go back to your old prejudices or your old likes and dislikes. And you find yourself really wishing that someone else would suffer. That doesn’t accomplish the purpose of goodwill.

The purpose of goodwill is to establish a principle in the mind. The Buddha calls it a determination: that you’re going to have goodwill regardless. And it’s important to think about it in those terms. This is a determination that you’re going to act on goodwill regardless of how the other person is acting or speaking or thinking. You’re going to keep in the back of your mind the thought, “I want that person to understand the causes for true happiness.” That then becomes a part of your intention as you deal with that person.

From: Goodwill for Bad People by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
dhammapal
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
There are a lot of things in life that, if you thought, “This is your one lifetime, this is your one chance,” would strike you as very unfair. It would be hard to live with the idea that, say, someone smeared your name and you couldn’t get it un-smeared. Other people who don’t seem to have any right to power have taken over a lot of power. But if you take the long view of things, you realize that this is going to pass, and this is not your only chance. It makes it a lot easier to live with the things you can’t change, and focus on the ones you can.

From: Patience & Hope by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
So look out for any wrong views that would make you want to listen to what the world out there has to say about how you have to get back at certain people, or that you have to fight in an unfair way for what you think is right. The idea that ends justify the means is really destructive because there are no ends in samsara. It’s like a series of meadows I walked through one time near the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. You came across a meadow and you could see to the end of the meadow. But then when you came to the end of the meadow, it turned out there was a slight turn in the path, and there was another meadow. You saw to the end of that meadow and when you walked there, there was another meadow. It just kept going and going and going like that.

So remember: There are no “ends” out there in samsara, there are just “means.” They only real end is nibbana. You may not be sure whether you can attain any of the ends that you want, but you can be sure that your means are good. Those are the things you can be sure about. You can look directly at your intention and directly at what you’re actually doing. As for how the results will work out in the long term, there are a lot of factors beyond your control. So you focus on what is in your control: what you’re doing right now.

From: A Safe Space Inside by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Question: I’m new to meditation and struck by the idea of not simply emphasizing the observing side to the mind. It makes sense what you’re saying, but I’m just curious.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu: The issue is learning to deal with the breath skillfully. If you think of meditation as a lifelong practice, you’re going to have to learn how to deal skillfully with your breath, learning how to adjust it skillfully, learning when is the right time to simply sit and watch things happening, and when is the right time to do something proactive about them. That’s a long-term skill.

As for the whole question of the observing *self*, that’s going to be one of the last things you let go of as you practice. You have to teach your observing self to be a skillful observing self before you can let it go. If you say, “I’m not going to have a self,” the practice stops. There’s got to be some sense of self functioning in there: that you want to do something skillfully, you have a motivation to do it, you’re capable of doing it, and you’ll benefit from doing it.

What you try to do is to take your sense of observing self and turn it — through observing skillful actions and unskillful actions so that you can develop skillful ones and abandon unskillful ones — into a more skillful observing self. Then finally, it observes how to let go of itself — which is an extremely difficult skill, so first you need practice in other, more mundane, skills.

Some people think that you can short-circuit all of the problems by saying, “Oh, I’ll just let go of my sense of self and that’ll take care of everything.” The teaching is a raft, remember? That’s like saying, “I don’t need this raft! I’ll let it go!” while in the middle of the river. So learn to let go at the right time.

From: Antidotes to Anger by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
The Buddha started and ended his teaching with the issue of how to put an end to suffering, and it’s easy to agree with him that this is an important issue to address. Some people, though, wonder if that’s all he addresses. Just put an end to suffering? What else is there? Aren’t there bigger issues in life? Actually, it was a part of the Buddha’s genius to realize that if you put an end to suffering, you learn a lot of other things about the mind. If you focus on the issue of suffering, a lot of things are brought right there together. Because right where there’s feeling there’s also attention and intention, perception — particularly intention. And when these issues are solved, everything important gets solved as well.

From: The Choice Not to Suffer by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
Another group of people for whom it’s difficult to feel empathetic joy [muditā] are those who have good fortune and happiness, but either they did something unskillful to gain it or they’re abusing their positions of power and influence now that they’ve got it. But here, too, you have to think they created the causes someplace back in the past to gain that kind of happiness. Now look at what they’ve got. Not only is the happiness they’ve gained impermanent, and the things they’ve done to gain it are unskillful—at least, right in the present moment — but the happiness doesn’t prevent them from acting in unskillful ways.

This shows you that happiness is not all that safe. We may aspire to happiness of one kind or another, but it’s important that we think about the implications: What if we gain that happiness and we abuse it? We’re putting ourselves in a dangerous position. That blessing the monks chant — Āyu vaṇṇo sukhaṁ, balaṁ ― long life, beauty, happiness, and strength: Those things can be dangerous. Long life can be pretty miserable toward the end. Beauty: There are a lot of people who abuse their beauty and get abused because of their beauty. Happiness, if it’s worldly happiness, is no protection. And strength: Some people abuse their strength by bullying others.

So this reflection helps you reflect on what kind of happiness would be safe. It forces you to develop some equanimity toward the way kamma works itself out. Sometimes you work for happiness and, by the time it comes, you’ve changed. You’re a different kind of person. You thought you would use your happiness for good purposes but something’s happened in the meantime. As for people who are happy now, who have good fortune now, you have to be equanimous about that fact. But then from equanimity, you move into a sense of dismay and dispassion. You realize that if you want happiness that’s really true, really solid, it has to be more than just worldly happiness. This sense of dismay is what gets you on the path.

From: Happy for People You Don’t Like by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
dhammapal
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
There might be people who would pay you to lie for a million dollars, or to steal or kill or cheat for a million dollars. If you can say No, that means your virtue is worth more than a million dollars — because it really is worth more than a million dollars. No amount of money can erase the remorse and regret that come after you’ve done something really unskillful.

From: Investing in Noble Wealth by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
I’ve noticed over the years that when I teach in various places, the teaching that sets most people off is the teaching on rebirth. They regard it as totally irrelevant, but it’s not. You’re making decisions about what to do all the time based on how you calculate what the results of those decisions are going to be. If your calculation includes only this one lifetime, you’re really going to limit your sense of where the dangers are in the mind — what an act of desire or an act of attachment might do — which means that you end up with a lot of things in the mind that don’t get probed, don’t get investigated because they seem perfectly innocuous or perfectly fine.

You get a nice state of equanimity and you feel it’s going to take care of you. But as the Buddha points out, you can get stuck on equanimity. It leads to a long rebirth in a nice place, but even those nice places are places you’ll ultimately have to leave. When you leave them, the number of people who go on to other nice places is like a tiny bit of dust under your fingernail, whereas the number of people who fall into the realms of deprivation are like the whole Earth. So even equanimity has its dangers as something you have to probe into.

If you keep the perspective of rebirth in mind, on the one hand it reminds you of the dangers that are right here, and you can’t be complacent about any little thing that’s happening in the mind. But on the other hand, it reminds you that whatever effort you put in is not wasted. Even if your life were to end tonight, the fact that you’re on this trajectory keeps you going the right direction. It’s not all wiped out by the fact of death.

From: Being Your Own Teacher by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
Manopubbaṅgamā manoseṭṭhā manomayā: Phenomena are preceded by the mind, excelled by the mind, made by the mind. The people who put that statement first in the Dhammapada knew what they were doing, because it expresses a principle that holds all the way through the practice: The mind comes first; the heart comes first.

We live in a world where we have to put a lot of energy in. It’s through the energy the mind puts in that we reap the results, good or bad, depending on the energy. To begin with, this is a refutation of the principle of materialism, which is that the mind is just an epiphenomenon of material processes — or, in other words, that it’s the result, it’s on the far end of the causal spectrum, whereas the real causes are material. Somehow matter happens to be aware, but the matter is doing all the acting, not the awareness. The awareness is just coming along for the ride. That’s the material hypothesis.

The Buddha’s saying the opposite. The mind is what’s doing the acting. Physical processes may have their laws, but their laws are malleable, and you can learn how to shape your experience of the physical and mental world through your intentions. Which is why we’re sitting here meditating.

We’re not dosing the body with chemicals or magnetic waves to create a state of mind from without. We’re changing the mind from within, starting with our desire to escape suffering, and then trying to take that desire seriously, and working on it well.

From: It’s What You Give by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
dhammapal
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
Notice: Nowhere does [the Buddha tell his son Rahula] that the thought is to be judged by how it feels. Some unskillful thoughts can really feel bad, but there are also skillful thoughts that create a lot of stress, especially when you have a strong urge to do something that you know is unskillful, and it would be easy just to go along with the urge. But you’ve got to put up a fight, and that’s going to cause stress. It’s going to feel tense in your breath, tense in your breath energy. But that’s no gauge as to whether the thought is good or not. We can’t just relax our way into nibbana. It’s going to require some work.

From: Judging Your Thoughts by What They Do by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
We all have the potential for awakening. The qualities that the Buddha developed on the night of his awakening, or leading up to his awakening, are qualities that we all have in a potential form: mindfulness and alertness; heedfulness, ardency, and resolution. These things can be developed. If we think that we’re here just to accept the way we are, we’re not accepting the fact that we could develop these qualities.

From: Shame & Acceptance by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
Someone contacted me recently and wanted me to do a Zoom meeting with some people in Singapore. The person sending the email complained that with the other ajaans they’d had on these Zoom meetings, all they could talk about was the three characteristics and how you simply have to accept things and just take the world as it is. “Please say something that shows we can do something about the world, that we can do something about our minds,” the person said. And I thought, “It’s come to that.” The Buddha teaches a path that’s all about what you can do — the potentials you have within you — yet nowadays, saying that goes against a lot of what’s being taught as Dhamma.

Remember: We do have potentials. We’re here to look for them and to develop them. It’s in this sense that conviction in the Buddha’s awakening is helpful. He shows the potential of what a human being can do. Of course, he was a very special human being, but the qualities he had developed to make himself special are qualities we all have in potential form. Resolution, ardency, heedfulness: These are things that we already have to some extent and that we can learn how to develop — to make them more consistent, more all-around.

From: Potentials by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
dhammapal
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
We take refuge in the Buddha, not because we think he’s going to come and save us or do the work for us, but because we’re inspired by his example. Here’s a human being who was able to develop qualities in his mind that we all have in potential form in our minds. In so doing, he was able to find a happiness that was not only solid and secure but also totally unburdensome: It placed no burdens on anyone at all.

From: The Skill of Happiness by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
With a lot of truths about things outside, you never really know. For instance, there’s that whole issue: Does the world really exist outside the information we get through our senses? That’s one of those issues the Buddha said, “Don’t go there.”

What we *can* know though is what we directly experience in terms of suffering and stress. Ideally, you know when the mind is suffering, you can tell when it’s not.

From: Truth as Medicine by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
This is what mindfulness means: keeping something in mind. You keep the body in mind. You put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. Any world issues, you just put them aside right now. You don’t have to go there. If you go there, Mara will get you.

The Buddha talks about this being your ancestral ground, your safe place, your haven: right here the breath in and of itself. If you go out thinking about this issue or that issue outside, you’re leaving your safe place. The Buddha makes two comparisons here. One is of the quail who wanders away from his safe place, a field where clods of dirt and rocks are all turned up by the plow, where he has hiding places. He leaves that and goes out to a more exposed place, where a hawk gets him. And as the hawk is carrying him away, the little quail says, “Gosh, this is my own lack of merit. I shouldn’t have wandered away from my safe area. If I had stayed there, you wouldn’t have been any match for me.”

The hawk, being piqued a bit, says, “Well, what is your safe area?” The quail says, “It’s a field where the stones and clods of earth have been turned up by the plow.” So the hawk says, “Okay, I’ll let you go. You can go there if you want, but you still won’t be able to escape me.” And so the quail flies down and gets on top of a rock, taunting, “Okay, now, come get me, you hawk! Come get me you hawk!” And the hawk, without saying anything, folds his wings and dives down after the quail. As soon as the quail sees that the hawk is coming after him in full tilt, he slips behind the rock. The hawk crashes against the rock, and that’s the end of him.

In other words, see the body in and of itself as your safe place, where you can escape any issues that otherwise would overwhelm you. Just be very firm: “I’m going to stay right here. I’ll try to get as much ease and comfort out of the breath as I can so I can maintain this state. For the time being, I’m not going to go anywhere else.”

When you do this, you put the mind into concentration. After all, what they call the foundations of mindfulness, the establishings of mindfulness, or the four frames of reference: These are the themes of Right Concentration. If you stay here consistently enough, it turns into concentration in the mind. Then you can feed off the sense of ease and rapture that comes with the concentration: That’s your food for the mind. And the body gets nourished as well, because you let that sense of ease and rapture spread throughout the body.

This provides a basis for discernment to arise: the ability to look at those thoughts that were wounding and hurtful, the issues in the outside world that have you all upset, and to see them simply as thoughts arising and passing away. You have the choice: Do you want to go into that world, or not? If you feel obliged to go into that world, ask yourself why. “Am I ready for that world right now? Can I handle it?” If you’re not ready, try dismantling whatever values would lead you there. You’re not obliged to think about these things. And if you’re not ready to think about them, why burden the mind? Start questioning all the assumptions that would pull you out there, whether they’re pride or whatever.

From: The Wounded Warrior by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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