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:
Every time you look or listen — and this is something you’re doing all the time — be careful about which states of mind are giving the directions and which ones are being nurtured by what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. If anything unskillful comes up, try to nip it right in the bud. It’s a lot easier to deal with when you nip it in the bud rather than letting it grow. All too often our attitude is, “It’s just a little tiny thought of greed. It’s not much of a problem.” Or even just the thought that you’d like to think a thought of anger, you’d like to think a thought of lust: It comes and whispers and then it goes away. And if you don’t immediately counteract it, you’ve let it lay the seed for a defilement to suddenly grow. So you’ve got to be on your guard all the time.

From: Scribe Knowledge, Warrior Knowledge by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
If each person in this world would mind his or her own business, clean up his or her own house, there wouldn’t be any trouble or conflicts in the world. Our problem is that we leave our own immediate responsibilities and start worrying about other people: what they’re doing, what messes they’re creating for us, or what messes they’re creating for other people.

From: Minding Your Own Business by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
Our human mouth is very special. As the Buddha said, when you’re born, you’re born with a sword in your mouth. It can cut both ways. You can cut through a lot of problems by the way you speak. But you can also cut your own throat or stab other people with the way you speak.

So you have to be very careful. This sword of the tongue is a very sharp weapon. If you use it well, it becomes an instrument for good. It’s like any kind of knife: Things that need to be cut, you can cut through them very clearly. You’ve got something good there.

So you’ve got this human mouth. It’s much better than any other mouth that there is. So make sure that you use it well, maintain it. You went to a lot of trouble to become a human being, now make sure that you maintain your human status and don’t lose this treasure.

From: To Gain Inner Wealth by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
What are the perceptions lying in the back of the mind? Again, if it’s a perception of having borne up with the situation for a long time and facing a long time down the line, ask yourself, “Why do you have to hold that in mind? Can’t you just be with this breath, this breath?” Here in the present moment there are opportunities. The perception of a bleak future closes off opportunities, but you can open them right *here*.

And whichever part of the mind belittles your skillful intentions in the present moment, remember that the Buddha would not think in those ways. He said that even just the intention to do something skillful, *in and of itself,* is a skillful thing. So keep giving rise to that intention, and it’s in this way you can give yourself more energy to get back to the breath.

From: A Cure for the Sluggish Mind by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
A lot of naïve thinking about insight comes in, telling us, “Well, you just learn how to accept things, because there’s nothing better than this.” That’s not what the Buddha taught at all. There’s something *much* better than what you’ve been doing. It’s through human effort that a totally unfabricated happiness, a totally free dimension, can be attained. And once that’s been attained, then everything else pales by comparison.

Even the first taste of the deathless allows you to reorder all your priorities and all your ways of looking at things, because you realize that what the Buddha said was true. That kind of happiness is possible. At the moment, though, that happiness is simply news, but at least allow it to be the dominant news in your heart. Allow that possibility to have a big role in the discussion as to what’s worth doing and what’s not, where the voices say, “What’s next? What to do next? What to do next? Let’s go in that direction.” Try to get all the voices together so that ultimately they’ll say, “The deathless: That’s the direction we want to go.”

From: Poison Your Fantasies by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
There’s a story about Somdet Toh. A young monk came to see him one evening and said, “This monk came up and hit me. I hadn’t done anything to him at all. He just came up and hit me.” And Somdet Toh said, “No, you hit him first.” They argued over this for a while, and then the young monk, frustrated, went to find another senior monk to complain about Somdet Toh, who he said wasn’t listening to reason. So the senior monk came and asked Somdet Toh, “What’s this all about?” And Somdet Toh said, “Well if this monk hadn’t had any kamma with that other monk in the past, the other monk wouldn’t have come up and hit him.”

But then of course that raises the question, why did the first monk hit the second monk, or who hit who first? When you trace it back and back and back, that question becomes meaningless. And the funny thing is, is that making it meaningless takes a lot of sting out of it. The part of the mind that says, “I’ve got to right this wrong,” that holds on to old wounds, gets weakened. The part that gets shamed by having been engaged in a bad back and forth can take some comfort in the fact that everybody’s been engaged in bad back-and-forths. This is why we’re here in the human realm. It’s a realm of good kamma and bad kamma all mixed together.

From: The Buddha's Safe Space by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
When you see that you’re creating suffering for yourself anywhere, you want to look into it. We talk about seeing things in terms of the four noble truths, and it sounds kind of exotic and formal. But it’s actually something very close to what we do a lot of the time with other things that we find are problems. We try to figure out what the problem is and then what’s the cause. And is it possible to solve it? If so, what can you do to solve it? That’s the structure of the four noble truths. It’s simply that now we apply it to the suffering you’re causing yourself right here, right now.

From: To Strengthen the Path by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
Virtue, in Buddhism, is expressed in the five precepts. Of the five, truthfulness is said to be the highest virtue because it’s only through truthfulness that you’re in a position to admit your mistakes and to learn from them. There are passages in the Canon called the Jātaka tales, which tell the stories of the Buddha in previous lifetimes. And it’s obvious from some of the stories that he’s still learning the ropes, because sometimes he breaks the precepts: Sometimes he kills, sometimes he steals, sometimes he has illicit sex, sometimes he takes alcohol. But he never lies. Ever. For him, that’s the most important precept. Because after all, if you lie to someone, the misunderstanding you create can have a bad effect not only in this lifetime but also into future lifetimes. And as the Buddha says, if you feel no shame at telling a deliberate lie, there’s no evil you’re incapable of doing.

From: The Five Faculties: Putting Wisdom in Charge of the Mind by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
I was reading recently a book saying that we get these ideals in our head that enlightenment is going to be a perfect happiness, but that’s just an archetype. It’s superhuman. When we don’t let ourselves get too carried away by ideals like this, then we have room for human kindness, i.e., we let ourselves have a nice easy path, rather than pushing ourselves too hard. And we’re nice and easy on others. Well, that’s not kindness at all. True kindness is when you point out the fact: This is the way to true happiness. It’s going to be demanding, and you’ve got to be careful. If you don’t follow this path, you’re just setting yourself up for a lot more suffering. That’s not being unkind or superhuman, or too demanding, it’s just pointing out the fact: This is the way things are. That’s the kindness there, in that it reminds you that you really do have to do this work, but it’s going to be rewarded. There is this possibility.

From: Stern Kindness by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
No matter how much you feel that your desire to straighten other people out is a good desire, you’re looking in the wrong place. Remember the acrobats. You have to maintain your balance and in doing so, you help other people maintain theirs. If you’re reaching over to straighten out their balance, you’re leaning over. And of course, when you’re leaning over, it causes other people to lean over as well, and everybody falls down. Always remember that the problem is inside.

From: Look at Yourself by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
Realize that you don't have to straighten out the world before you're going to be able to gain Awakening or before you're going to be able to sit down and meditate. The principle of karma is at work here. Often, when people have made up their minds to straighten out the world, the things they do to straighten out the world tend to get very unskillful and they end up making things worse. They don't like other people's greed, anger, and delusion, yet in the course of trying to straighten them out, they inflict them with their own greed, anger, and delusion. They simply compound the problem.

So your only responsibility to the world is to focus on doing what's skillful. That's all you have to take care of. As for the working out of everybody else’s karma, that will work out on its own without your having to get involved. Just make sure that your own present karma is skillful.

One thing you can do that’s skillful right now is to allow the mind to settle down with the breath. There’s no unfinished business with other people that you’ve got to take care of right now. Your unfinished business is to see how skillful you can be in the way you direct your mind, for if you want true happiness this is what you’ve got to do. You’re not going to find true happiness by straightening out the world, but you CAN find true happiness by straightening out the mind. Doing skillful things, saying skillful things, thinking skillful things: This is how your world is going to become a better world.

From: A Load of Straw by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
As you start meditating, you find that with your increased powers of concentration and your greater time alone, you can get obsessed with things. You can be very right about them and yet you suffer. This is where you have to step back and ask yourself, “Okay. What is this activity that I’m doing? Where is this taking me?” It’s another function of the establishing of mindfulness: looking at the activities of the mind and asking yourself, “Where does this particular activity fit in the framework that the Buddha gives for dealing with skillful and unskillful thoughts?” And “unskillful,” here, doesn’t necessarily mean wrong. You can be very right about something but you can hold onto your rightness in the wrong way. You have to be especially careful when your increased powers of concentration get you more and more obsessed.

So directed thought and evaluation really do mean thinking about things. They’re not just an unfortunate wobbling of the mind, as one teacher once described them. They serve a real purpose in getting the mind into concentration and keeping it there. They also help take the mind to higher levels of concentration, when you use them to analyze a particular level of concentration to see what’s still causing unnecessary stress in that level, so that you can drop the cause. And they help to protect the mind if it slips off and starts getting into what Ven. Ananda called the jhana of anger, the jhana of lust, or the jhana of fear. These *are* kinds of jhana, but when you evaluate the effect they’re having on the mind, you realize that they’re not on the right path.

So as you’re practicing concentration, you have to learn to raise questions, i.e., evaluate what you’re doing, what the results are, so that you can peel yourself away from the causes of suffering that are especially attractive: The ones where you’re right, but the rightness doesn’t get you anywhere.

When the Buddha talks about right view, it’s all about what you’re doing that’s causing suffering right now. As for the rightness of issues out in the world, those are put aside. What can you do to put an end to the suffering you’re causing yourself? That’s what right view is all about. In this way, everything gets brought back inside.

From: Vitakka & Vicara by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
There’s a lot to be covered in training the mind. It’s not just a matter of mastering one single technique. I was once asked the question, “How does someone who’s mastered meditation overcome the problem of pride?” After all, you’ve been able to master this technique; you’re pretty sharp. Well, that happens mainly in places where everything is reduced to *a* meditation technique, in meditation centers where the people who meditate don’t have anything else to do. Everything gets channeled into that one shoot at the end of the banana tree. Things may happen fast, but there’s no shade. It’s an incomplete training.

The complete training has to go all around. It has to deal with the way you treat other people, how you handle difficult situations. Your whole life is part of the training, and in the course of the whole-life aspect of the training, you need to learn how to see how you’ve been sloppy, how you’ve been stupid, how you’ve been ignorant, how you’ve been thoughtless and careless. If you don’t see those things, you’re not going to learn anything. The experience is chastening instead of pride-inducing. When the training is complete, every aspect of the mind has been trained, so that you’re skilled at all kinds of activities, with an attitude nicely balanced between humility and pride.

From: Cleanliness is Next to Mindfulness by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
You look in the texts and you see that breath meditation and the development of the goodwill, the brahmavihāras, are listed as separate techniques, but in practice they really come together. In the process of working with the breath, you’re learning lessons in how to make yourself happy, how to develop a sense of pleasure within. Once you have that sense of pleasure, that sense of well-being, then it’s a lot easier to spread thoughts of goodwill [mettā] in an unlimited way. Because if you’re feeling put upon, feeling simply the desire to run away, it’s hard to wish happiness for anybody, much less happiness for all living beings unconditionally.

Once you develop the sense of pleasure, the lessons in happiness that you can learn from the breath are that, one, you understand what happiness is all about, and, two, you’ve got it. You’re in a position where you want to share. You also understand what you’re doing when you wish happiness for other beings. You wish that they, too, could develop their inner resources.

From: Lessons in Happiness by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
Ajaan Lee often taught that the breath is your best home base; the other topics are like tools you bring in when you need to work on specific issues. But you always need the breath as your default mode, as the home to which you return. And having a safe place like this, a sense of being strong and having this as your territory: That makes you safe to other people as well, because when your actions come from a sense of strength, you don’t lash out. You don’t react in fearful ways. You know you’ve got your home here, and nobody can take it from you.

From: At Home with the Breath by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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