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Dhammapada - Buddha Dharma Teachings
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Daily teachings of the Dhammapada, beloved and favorite teachings of the Buddha
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The Blessings of Pindapata
By Bhikkhu Khantipalo

To those who live in lands where the teachings of the Lord Buddha have been long established, the sight of a bhikkhu (Buddhist monk) collecting food in the early morning, is a common one. But where the teachings are newly arrived, or where bhikkhus are few, the practice of giving food to wandering monks is known only by pictures or from written accounts.
Neither of these convey the real atmosphere of this giving and receiving to those interested in the Buddhist Way and yet live in countries where the Teaching is not the traditional form of religion. Even many Buddhists living in Northern Buddhist lands may know little of pindapatta for the practice of alms-gathering by bhikkhus there has, for various reasons which we need not here investigate, been largely discontinued and the traditional practice now survives only in Southeast Asian countries practicing the Theraváda Buddhist tradition.

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https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/khantipalo/wheel073.pdf

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Forwarded from Words of the Buddha
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Dhammapada Verse 241
Laludayi Vatthu

Asajjhayamala manta
anutthanamala ghara
malam vanaassa kosajjam
pamado rakkhato malam.

Verse 241: Non-recitation is the taint of learning; non-maintenance is the taint of houses; indolence is the taint of beauty; unmindfulness is the taint of one who keeps watch.

The Story of Laludayi

While residing at the Jetavana monastery, the Buddha uttered Verse (241) of this book, with reference to Thera Laludayi.

In Savatthi, people coming back after hearing the discourses given by Thera Sariputta and Thera Maha Moggallana were always full of praise for the two Chief Disciples. On one occasion, Laludayi, hearing their praises, said to those people that they would be saying the same about him after listening to his discourses. So Laludayi was asked to deliver a discourse; he climbed on to the platform but he could not say anything. So he asked the audience to let another bhikkhu take the turn first and that he would take the next turn. In this way, he put off three times.

The audience lost patience with him and shouted, "You big fool! When we praised the two Chief Disciples you were vainly boasting that you could preach like them. Why don't you preach now ?" So Laludayi ran away and the crowd chased him. As he was frightened and was not looking where he was going, he fell into a latrine pit.

When the Buddha was told about this incident, he said, "Laludayi had learned very little of the Dhamma; he does not recite the religious texts regularly; he has not memorized anything. Whatever little he has learned gets rusty by not reciting."

Then the Buddha spoke in verse as follows:
Verse 241: Non-recitation is the taint of learning; non-maintenance is the taint of houses; indolence is the taint of beauty; unmindfulness is the taint of one who keeps watch.

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Forwarded from Words of the Buddha
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Tathagata Tsal, Buddha park of Ravangla, Rabong monastery , Mount Narsing, Sikkim, India.
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Come & See, by Phra Ajaan Funn Ācāro. (revised July 8, 2019)

Three Dhamma talks on the importance of being in touch with the truths inside—the truths of the body and of the mind—so that the mind can be trained to bring about happiness, both on the personal and on the social level. Translated by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu.

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https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/Ebooks/ComeAndSee190708.pdf
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Forwarded from Words of the Buddha
Stepping Towards Enlightenment

How deep can your meditation go? Thai forest monk Ajahn Brahm traces the path from mindfulness to profound meditative states through the sixteen steps of anapanasati.
By Ajahn Brahm

Part 1 of 2

The essence of Buddhism is the enlightenment of the Buddha. Many centuries ago in India, the wandering monk Gautama remembered a childhood experience of jhana, mental or meditative absorption, and realized that jhana is the way to awakening. He went to a quiet stretch of forest on the banks of a great river, sat on a cushion of grass under a shady fig tree, and meditated. The method of meditation that he used is called anapanasati, mindfulness of the in and out breaths. Through this practice, he entered jhana, emerged, and quickly gained the insights of enlightenment. Henceforth he was called the Buddha, the Awakened One.

The Buddha continued to teach anapanasati for the remainder of his life. It was the method that had given him enlightenment, the meditation practice par excellence, and he imparted that same method to all his disciples both in the monastery and in the city. This foremost method of meditation is bequeathed to us today in the original Buddhist texts as part of many suttas, but most notably the Anapanasati Sutta.

The Buddha described the practice of anapanasati as consisting of preliminary preparations followed by sixteen steps. The first twelve of those steps are instructions for entering jhana, and the final four steps are instructions on what to do when you emerge.

Before giving instructions for experiencing the bliss and beauty of jhana, I will briefly cover the preliminary stages of meditation. If you pass through these initial stages too quickly, you may find that the preparatory work has not been completed. It’s like trying to build a house on a makeshift foundation—the structure goes up very quickly, but it may come down too soon! You would be wise to spend a lot of time making the groundwork and foundations solid. Then, when you proceed to the higher stories—the ecstatic states of meditation—they will be stable.

Foremost, the Buddha said, go to a quiet place where you will not be disturbed by people, sounds, or things like mosquitoes. Tough guys might want to meditate in mosquito-ridden jungles or in the middle of tiger paths, but this is more likely to build only endurance and not the ease of jhana. The Buddha instead praised pleasant places like orchards or parks similar to Bodh Gaya, where he gained enlightenment. Next, sit on a comfortable seat. You may sit on a cushion, on a bench, or even on a chair as long as it isn’t too comfortable. The comfort required for success in breath meditation is that level where your body can be at ease for long periods of time and also alert.

You are now asked to set up mindfulness “in front of you,” to give it priority. We establish this preliminary level of mindfulness by practicing present-moment awareness (giving up the baggage of past and future) and then silent present-moment awareness (refining your practice of being with every experience as it happens to the level where you do not have the space for inner speech). When you let go of the past, you will be free in the present moment. As for the future—the anticipations, fears, plans, and expectations—let that go too. Now you should proceed to the even more beautiful and truthful silence of the mind. A useful technique for developing inner silence is recognizing the space between thoughts. Attend closely with sharp mindfulness when one thought ends and before another begins—there! That is silent awareness! It may be only momentary at first, but as you recognize that fleeting silence, you become accustomed to it; the silence lasts longer. You begin to enjoy the silence and that is why it grows. But remember, silence is shy. If silence hears you talking about her, she vanishes immediately.
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Forwarded from Words of the Buddha
The mind can do wonderful and unexpected things. Meditators who are having a difficult time achieving a peaceful state of mind sometimes start thinking, “Here we go again, another hour of frustration.” But often something strange happens; although they are anticipating failure, they reach a very peaceful meditative state. My first meditation teacher told me that there is no such thing as a bad meditation. He was right. During the difficult meditations you build up your strength, which creates meditation for peace. We may want to spend much time—months or even years—developing just these first two preliminary stages, because if we can reach this point, we have come a long way indeed in our meditation. In that silent awareness of “just now,” we experience much peace, joy, and consequent wisdom.

WHEN YOU ARE SILENTLY AWARE of whatever it is that is happening right now, in front of your mind, then you have established the level of mindfulness required to begin progressing along the sixteen steps of anapanasati. In steps one and two the Buddha says to first experience long breaths and then experience short breaths. You do not need to control your breathing to fulfill the instructions; this will only produce discomfort. Instead, you are meant to simply observe the breath long enough to know whether it is long or short, or, as some practitioners note, deep or shallow, rough or smooth. This gives you more to look at, makes mindfulness of breathing more interesting so that you do not get bored.

The third step is experiencing the whole process of breathing. This is where your mindfulness increases its agility sufficient to observe every sensation involved in the process of breathing. You are aware of the in-breath from the very start when it arises out of the stillness. You see the sensations of in-breathing evolve in every moment, reaching its peak and then gradually fading away until it has completely subsided. You have such a degree of clarity that you even see the space, the pause between the in-breath and the next out-breath. Your mind has the attentiveness of a cat waiting for a mouse, as you wait for the next out-breath to begin. Then you observe the first stirrings of the out-breathing. You watch its sensations evolve, changing with every moment, until it, too, reaches a peak and then enters into its decline before fading into nothingness again. Then you observe the pause, the space between the out-breath and the subsequent in-breath. When the process is repeated breath after breath, you have fulfilled the third step, experiencing the whole breath.

When you are comfortably at one with the breath, it will calm down automatically. There is so little remaining to disturb your progress that you naturally experience the sensations in each moment becoming softer and smoother, like a piece of rough denim changing into fine satin. Such a refinement of attention is only achieved through a gentle and persistent letting go; it is never attained by the brute force of sheer willpower. At this fourth step you will not know whether it is an in-breath or an out-breath, beginning, middle, or end. As your breath calms down, your attention becomes so refined that all you know is this one moment of breath.

As your unbroken mindfulness watches the breath calming down, joy (step five) and happiness (step six) naturally arise like the golden light of dawn on an eastern horizon. This will happen gradually but automatically because all of your mental energy is now flowing into the knower and not the doer. In fact, you are not doing anything, only watching. The sure sign that you are doing nothing is the tranquility of your breath. Mental energy flowing into the knower makes mindfulness full of power, and energized mindfulness is experienced as happiness and joy. The breath at these fifth and sixth steps appears so tranquil and beautiful—more attractive than a garden in springtime or a sunset in the summer—that you wonder if you will ever want to look at anything else.
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Forwarded from Words of the Buddha
As the breath becomes ever more beautiful, as the joy and happiness grow in quiet strength, your breath may seem to completely disappear. This seventh step does not happen when you want it to but when there is enough calm.

A well-known passage from English literature might help clarify the experience of one’s breath disappearing. In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Alice is startled to see the Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of a nearby tree and grinning from ear to ear. Like all the strange creatures in Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat has the eloquence of a politician. Not only does the Cat get the better of Alice in the ensuing conversation, but it also suddenly disappears and then, without warning, just as suddenly reappears.

Energized mindfulness is experienced as happiness and joy.

Alice said, “. . . and I wish you wouldn’t keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy!” “All right,” said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone. “Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life.”

This story is an eerily accurate analogy for the meditation experience. Just as the Cheshire Cat disappeared and left only its grin, so the meditator’s body and breath disappear, leaving only the beautiful. For Alice, it was the most curious thing she ever saw. For the meditator it is also strange, to clearly experience a free-floating beauty with nothing to embody it, not even a breath.

TWO COMMON OBSTACLES occur after this seventh step: exhilaration and fear. In exhilaration, the mind becomes excited: “Wow, this is it!” If the mind thinks like this, then the jhana is unlikely to happen. This “wow!” response needs to be subdued in the eighth step of anapanasati in favor of absolute passivity. You can leave all the wows until after emerging from the jhana, where they properly belong.

The more likely obstacle, though, is fear. Fear arises from the recognition of the sheer power and bliss of the jhana, or else at the recognition that to go fully inside the jhana something must be left behind—you! The doer is silent before entering the jhana, but is still there. Inside the jhana, however, the doer is completely gone. Only the knower is still functioning. One is fully aware, but all the controls are now beyond reach. One cannot even form a single thought, let alone make a decision. The will is frozen, and this can be scary for beginners, who have never had the experience of being stripped of control and yet so fully awake. The fear is of surrendering an essential part of one’s identity.

This fear can be overcome in the eighth step through confidence in the Buddha’s teachings, and through recognizing and being drawn to the enticing bliss just ahead. The Buddha often said that the bliss of the jhana should not be feared but should be followed, developed, and practiced often. So before fear arises, offer your full confidence to that bliss, maintain faith in the Buddha’s teachings, and let the jhana warmly embrace you in an effortless, bodiless, ego-less, and blissful experience that will be the most profound of your life. Have the courage to fully relinquish control for a while and experience all of this for yourself. Maintain the causes of this bliss. Remain in the stillness, otherwise the bliss will go away.

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Dhammapada Verses 242 and 243
Annatarakulaputta Vatthu

Malitthiya duccaritam
maccheram dadato malam
mala ve papaka dhamma
asmim loke paramhi ca.

Tato mala malataram
avijja paramam malam
etam malam pahantvana
nimmala hotha bhikkhavo.

Verse 242: Sexual misconduct is the taint of a woman; stinginess is the taint of a giver; evil ways are indeed taints in this world as well as in the next.

Verse 243: A taint worse than these is ignorance (of the Truth), which is the greatest of taints. O bhikkhus, abandon this taint and be taintless.

The Story of a Man Whose Wife Committed Adultery

While residing at the Veluvana monastery, the Buddha uttered Verses (242) and (243) of this book, with reference to a man whose wife committed adultery.

Once, the wife of a man committed adultery. He was so ashamed on account of his wife's misbehaviour that he dared not face anyone; he also kept away from the Buddha. After some time, he went to the Buddha and the Buddha asked him why he had been absent all that time and he explained everything. On learning the reason for his absence, the Buddha said, "My disciple, women are just like a river, or a road, or a liquor shop or a rest house, or a water-pot stand at the roadside; they associate with all sorts of people. Indeed, sexual misconduct is the cause of ruin for a woman."

Then the Buddha spoke in verse as follows:

Verse 242: Sexual misconduct is the taint of a woman; stinginess is the taint of a giver; evil ways are indeed taints in this world as well as in the next.


Verse 243: A taint worse than these is ignorance (of the Truth), which is the greatest of taints. O bhikkhus, abandon this taint and be taintless.

At the end of the discourse many people attained Sotapatti Fruition.


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