The Quotable Thanissaro

A discussion on all aspects of Theravāda Buddhism
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
As the Buddha said, winning out over your self is better than winning out over thousands of other people, because when you win out over other people it’s never resolved. If they don’t get killed off they’re going to plot their revenge, plot their return. If you do kill them off, they come back as your children — and then you’ve got a real problem! Karmic debts with your own kids.

Victory over other people, victory outside, victory in war — even if it’s not victory in war but just everyday back-and-forth — never resolves anything. Even when issues get settled in court in the most fair and just way; well, there will always be some people who feel mistreated, and they’ll find some way to get back. This is the way of the world. Nothing gets settled really. The only way to reach any kind of closure is to disentangle yourself. And this is your way out: through training the mind.

From: Outside of the Box by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
Of the various forms of wrong speech and wrong action, the Buddha regarded the telling of lies as the most serious and most destructive — perhaps because if you cause your listeners to misunderstand the truth, it can cause them to act unskillfully not only in this lifetime, but also in future ones as well. Furthermore, as he said in Itivuttaka 25, if a person feels no shame at telling a lie, there is no evil that that person will not do.

From: Right Speech & Right Action by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
The Buddha says that if you think there is a creator god who is responsible for the pleasure and pain you experience, you can’t really practice the Dhamma. You have to realize that the important issues are the things that YOU create. When you solve the issue of your own creations, then you’re done with the problem.

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:
It is possible to create a good society. Whenever one gathers around the principle that true happiness comes from being harmless, being helpful, training the mind — that’s empowering. And you don’t need to have political power in the world outside. You have the power to create your own world right here, right now through your actions.

From: In Charge of Your World by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
A step in the direction of a genuine culture of dāna would be to declare a moratorium on all dāna talks at the end of retreats, and on references to the Buddhist tradition of dāna in fundraising appeals, so as to give the word time to recover its dignity.

On retreats, dāna could be discussed in a general way, in the context of the many Dhamma talks given on how best to integrate Dhamma practice in daily life. At the end of the retreat, a basket could be left out for donations, with a note that the teacher hasn’t been paid to teach the retreat. That’s all. No appeals for mercy. No flashcards. Sensitive retreatants will be able to put two and two together, and will feel glad, inspired, and gratified that they were trusted to do the math for themselves.

From: No Strings Attached: The Buddha’s Culture of Generosity by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
[The Buddha] says that we provide a refuge for ourselves by practicing the Dhamma, and particularly by developing the establishings of mindfulness, but there’s more to it than just that. First we have to have conviction in the Buddha’s teachings about action: that what we experience in the present moment is partly determined by the past — but largely determined by our actions right now.

That’s a point we can’t prove yet, but we take it as a working hypothesis. It’s part of having conviction in the Buddha and the Dhamma that we take it on. When that conviction becomes dominant in the mind, the Buddha calls that the faculty of conviction. The Pali word indrīya, which is commonly translated as faculty, means dominant factor. When that conviction is dominant in your mind, then you’re protected, but the protection is not totally solid unless you develop the other faculties as well.

From: A Refuge in Quiescence by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
Instead of dealing in grandiose notions of going out to save people, you work on the problem that you’re creating for yourself here inside. In doing that, you’re taking a burden off the world as well.

So there’s nothing selfish about this practice. It deals with the problem where the problem is caused, and it solves the problem from within. There’s no other way the problem’s going to get solved.

From: Opening Your World by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
You want to bring an attitude of goodwill [mettā] to everybody around you. When the Buddha talked about goodwill in the brahma-viharas, it wasn’t ordinary, everyday goodwill. It was goodwill all around, without limit. That’s not easy. It doesn’t come naturally to us. We tend to have goodwill for certain people, and not so much for other people. As a result, our actions very easily turn unskillful. It’s very easy to do harm to the people we don’t care about or who aren’t on our list of people who deserve to be happy. And it’s also easy to drop people from the list when the mood strikes us, to treat even the people we love in unskillful ways.

So to protect yourself from that kind of unskillful action, you’ve got to learn how to make your goodwill all-around, 24/7. That doesn’t mean creating a cloud machine that sends out billowing clouds in all directions to hide your lack of goodwill. When you start spreading thoughts of goodwill, first you spread it to people who are easy — the people you already love and like — and then to people who are harder. Even though you don’t like them, you can ask yourself: “Why would I not want this person to be happy?” After all, when people aren’t happy, they can do cruel and miserable things. The world would be a better place if everyone could find true happiness inside, regardless of whether you like them or not, or whether they’ve been good or not, or whether they’re on your list of the “deserving.” And besides, who made you the National Bureau of Standards? Why should your likes and dislikes rule the world? In this way, goodwill meditation is meant to be a challenge for you to really think through why you’d want to limit your goodwill, and to remind yourself of why it’s good to have goodwill for everyone. You can’t act on harmful intentions if your goodwill is all around. This is why it’s called a guardian meditation.

From: Guardian Meditations by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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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.

After all, you’re going to be having goodwill for spiders and snakes, for people for whom it’s very hard to have a warm feeling. And those are actually the cases where goodwill is most necessary — as a protection for yourself, so that you don’t do anything unskillful around those beings. You don’t dismiss them, saying, “Well it doesn’t matter what I do with them.” You have to take everybody into consideration, and “everybody” includes animals as well as people, and bad people as well as good.

We don’t pretend that there are no bad people out there. We don’t turn a blind eye to their bad habits, but we keep remembering that *we* need our goodwill — that’s why we do it. We don’t give it only to people who deserve it. We give it to everybody. If the question of deserving comes up just ask yourself, “Do *you* deserve goodwill?” And the answer may be “No,” if you look at your behavior. But then, that’s still no reason not to have goodwill. The question of deserving shouldn’t get involved.

You want your goodwill to have an independent source inside, one that’s independent of other people’s goodwill and other people’s goodness. Because again, it’s your protection, and you want to be protected on all sides.

From: Goodwill in Heart & Mind by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Question: You’ve said that mindfulness is to always keep something in mind. I thought that mindfulness was to be aware of the present moment, but if I’m keeping something in mind, I might not be aware of the present moment. I get a little confused. Could you say more about it?

Thanissaro Bhikkhu: There is mindfulness and there is right mindfulness. Mindfulness in general means keeping something in mind. Right mindfulness means remembering which qualities are skillful, which ones are unskillful, and remembering to be alert and ardent about recognizing and developing skillful qualities in the present moment.

~ Good Heart, Good Mind: The Practice of the Ten Perfections
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
That’s the best use for this concentration, because when you stop creating suffering for yourself, you don’t feel inclined to create suffering for anybody else. The reason we make life miserable for other people is because we feel threatened, along with this attitude: “As long as I’m suffering, let everybody else suffer too.” Or: “If I’m suffering, I don’t have the strength to do the right thing to help other people, it’s just beyond me.” It’s because you’re burdening yourself down with tons of bricks. How can you lift up a brick for someone else? If you can learn to put down your burden, then it’s no problem lifting up a whole load of bricks for other people.

This is the elegance of the Buddha’s teachings: You focus on this one problem — the suffering you create for yourself — and you find that all other problems in your life get solved. Either you realize that they’re not genuine problems anyhow, or else you see that they were caused by the fact that you weren’t mindful, weren’t alert. You were too busy creating suffering for yourself to really do the right thing. Once that old habit is gone, though, then you find it a lot easier to deal with whatever comes up. And there are no problems in the mind. The problems in the world stay in the world. You help where you can and you realize where you have to let go, but the world doesn’t make inroads on the mind.

From: Maintaining Goodwill 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 you, that would make a path impossible. Whether it came from a creator god or 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, you would be left defenseless, and there would be no path to the end of suffering.

That goes against a teaching you hear every now and then, that if you come to the path with the attitude, “I’m going to do the path,” you’re coming from wrong view, and that wrong view will taint everything you’re trying to accomplish. You have to have the attitude that there’s nobody here doing anything; the path is just developing out of causes and conditions. There’s 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 that sort of attitude is that any sense 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 a vague and overblown self.

One of purposes of the practice is to see exactly where your sense of self as an action 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, it’s on the action, but self is always there in the background.

Sometimes it’s explicit. Think of the Buddha’s instructions to Rahula, when he told him to reflect on his actions before, during, and after doing them. In each case, Rahula was to take responsibility for his actions.

“This action that I want to do”: That’s how you think beforehand. “This action that I’m doing”: That’s how you think when you look at the action as you’re doing it. “This action that I have done”: That’s your reflection afterward. The “I” is there in every case because you’re taking responsibility. And this way of thinking is not just a sop for a small child’s mind.

When the Buddha says that discernment begins with the question: “What having been done by me will lead to my long term harm and suffering? What having been done by me will lead to my long term welfare and happiness?” there’s still an agent there, there’s still a “me” and an “I.” The whole point of this line of questioning is to get this agent to take responsibility, to see how to improve his or her actions.

When people deny that there’s an agent there from the very beginning, you might call it “self-bypassing,” like “spiritual bypassing.” An important element is being missed, skipped over. The actual path is one of taking responsibility for your actions, reflecting on them, and taking responsibility for improving them. As you develop the skills needed to do that, you cultivate a more skillful sense of self. You don’t let go of your sense of self until it has no more use. But it has many uses on the path, and you don’t let go of it until it’s been trained to serve those uses.

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

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
Traditionally they didn’t have such things as meditation retreats. You went to monasteries. And in monasteries, there was time to meditate, but there were also other duties in the course of the day. There was work to be done. You had to interact with the other people in the monastery to at least some extent. And in the course of that work and those interactions, you learned a lot about the Dhamma: the Dhamma of generosity, the Dhamma of virtue, the Dhamma of patience, equanimity, goodwill — all these other virtues that are an essential part of training the mind.

The idea of creating meditation retreats came basically in the late 19th or early 20th century, the same time when the assembly line was invented, breaking jobs down into little tiny parts that you do repetitively. This approach to physical work was efficient and effective, so it became the model for a lot of meditation retreats and for the methods taught on those retreats. You take one method and you just apply it again and again and again. But a lot gets left out in that approach. It’s like exercising only one muscle in your body, so that the muscle gets strengthened all out of proportion to the rest of your body. And that can’t be healthy.

It’s better to think of meditation as a training for the whole mind, as exercise for the whole mind. You have to train the whole mind in all the virtues of maturity and heedfulness.

From: Working at Home by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
There are a lot of people who say, “Well, the Buddha was okay for his time and place, but now we live in a modern world and there are certain assumptions we have to hold to as part of being modern people.” I never knew that I had checked in to the human world on the condition that I had to accept a modern worldview. One of the facts of the modern world is that we’re exposed to lots of different teachings. And so we have the right to choose our assumptions, what we’re going to assume is a well-lived life, what we’re going to assume is a good example for how we live.

We have the choice. And there’s nothing that commits us to an otherwise modern worldview. So there’s no need to say, “We have to strip away the Buddha’s teachings,” in the same way you might pluck a chicken, leaving only the parts that fit into a modern worldview.

After all, the modern worldview is one that’s creating a lot of suffering for us. If you believe that all you are is a body and that your consciousness is just an epiphenomenon, as they call it — a side effect of there being a body — then you can’t really believe that by training the mind you’re going to have any impact on anything at all — because in the materialist view, the only reality is physical reality. Yet if you believe that the physical reality is the only one, it makes you miserable. What can you do? You’re stuck.

Now some people like to be stuck. It lets them off the hook; they don’t have to be responsible for their choices. But that’s a miserable place to be stuck.

Just look at your mind. What does your mind deal in? It deals with meanings. Someone can say a word and it will have a huge impact on what goes on in your mind. Now, physically, the word itself is what? Sound waves hitting the ear, that’s it. We can take the same word, so that the sound waves are the same, but if you put it in one language, it means one thing; if you put it in another one it means something else. And if everything were just physical, how could that be? How could there be meanings? The mind deals with meanings. So take on the meaning of what the Buddha said, that it is possible to find a true happiness and it’s possible to do it from within: in other words, by changing your mind with your mind.

Now that doesn’t fit in with a lot of modern materialist assumptions, but again, why are we committed to, say, a materialist assumption just because we’re born in this time and place? We have the right to choose any assumptions that help alleviate suffering now and on into the future.

From: Recollection of the Buddha by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
I received a phone call from someone who was doing a thesis on using Buddhist teachings and practices in the workplace. He wanted to ask me some questions as part of his thesis. One of the things that bothered me about his questions was that he would ask first about Buddhist teachings and then about Buddhist practices, as if they were two different things. But they’re not. Everything is part of the practice. Even the more abstract and theoretical teachings are meant to be used for pragmatic purposes when appropriate. After all, right view is part of the path. It’s something to do, to develop, to be applied. When it’s done its work, you let it go.

From: The Practice of Right View by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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