Chapter 2

Appamada Vagga
Heedfulness

11. Appamadarato bhikkhu
pamade bhayadassi va
Samyojanam auum thulam
daham aggi'va gacchati. 31.

THE HEEDFUL ADVANCE

11. The Bhikkhu 13 who delights in heedfulness, and looks with fear on heedlessness, advances like fire, burning all fetters 14 great and small. 31.

Story

A monk, failing in his meditation in the forest, was coming to see the Buddha. On the way he saw a forest fire advancing, burning all things great and small. This sight induced him to think that he too should advance burning all the fetters, great and small, by the fire of the Noble Eightfold Path. The Buddha read his thought and, radiating a ray of light, advised him accordingly.

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“Mendicants, in some past lives the Realized One was reborn as a human being. ... Due to performing those deeds he was reborn in a heavenly realm. When he came back to this place he obtained this mark: he is golden colored; his skin shines like lustrous gold.

On this it is said:

“Fixated on good will, he gave gifts. In an earlier life he poured forth cloth fine and soft to touch, like a god pouring rain on this broad earth.

So doing he passed from here to heaven, where he enjoyed the fruits of deeds well done. Here he wins a figure shining like honey-yellow gold, like Indra, the finest of gods.

If that man stays in the house, not wishing to go forth, he conquers and rules this vast, broad earth. He obtains abundant excellent cloth, so fine and soft to touch.

He receives robes, cloth, and the finest garments. if he chooses the life gone forth. For he still partakes of past deed’s fruit; what’s been done is never lost.”

Partial excerpts from DN 30 : Pathikavagga

Free Buddhism Dharma ebook

Small Boat, Great Mountain
Theravadin Reflections On the Natural Great Perfections Dzogchen
By Amaro Bhikkhu


Free download here:

https://ftp.budaedu.org/ebooks/pdf/EN395.pdf
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Free Buddhism Dharma ebook

Small Boat, Great Mountain
Theravadin Reflections On the Natural Great Perfections Dzogchen
By Amaro Bhikkhu

One of the delights of Small Boat, Great Mountain is that Ajahn Amaro has enumerated many of references and provided clear and compelling explanations of the deathless nature of the intrinsic awareness or the mind. In orthodox circles in Burma and Sri Lanka, however, this notion is frankly contradictory, since awareness (or consciousness, vijnana) is considered impermanent.
The issue is of particular interest at the current time. Over decades, many Western vipassana teachers and students have sought teachings from Dzogchen masters. Among the Tibetan teachers who have been especially helpful to vipassana seekers have been the late Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, his son Tsoknyi Rinpoche, and the late Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche. Having been inspired by the profound view and techniques of this lineage, many vipassana practitioners are grappling to reconcile Dzogchen understandings with their Theravadan backgrounds.
Ajahn Amaro’s talks as recorded in this book are a very important contribution to this dialogue. As such, a few words about the occasion on which they were given may be of interest.

In the lineage of Ajahn Chah, a teacher is not supposed to prepare much for a Dharma talk. Rather the teacher is encouraged to trust in his or her sense of the moment and to intuit from the setting and the audience what words are most appropriate. I believe that Ajahn Amaro followed this guideline during the retreat with Tsoknyi Rinpoche, and that we are most fortunate to have this record of the extraordinary talks that the situation evoked. In their erudition, humor, and profundity, they are a unique and accurate transmission of the atmosphere of that special retreat. May their message lead all those who read them directly to their own Buddha-nature and to the vast freedom of the Natural Great Perfection Dzogchen.

Free download here:

https://ftp.budaedu.org/ebooks/pdf/EN395.pdf
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Buddham Saranam Gacchami
Dhammam Saranam Gacchami
Sangham Saranam Gacchami

I go to the Buddha for refuge.
I go to the Dhamma for refuge.
I go to the Sangha for refuge.

बुद्धं शरणं गच्छामि। धर्मं शरणं गच्छामि। संघं शरणं गच्छामि।

Chapter 2

Appamada Vagga
Heedfulness

12. Appamadarato bhikkhu
pamade bhayadassi va
Abhabbo parihanaya
Nibbanass'eva santike. 32.

THE HEEDFUL ARE IN THE PRESENCE OF NIBBâNA

12. The Bhikkhu who delights in heedfulness, and looks with fear on heedlessness, is not liable to fall. 15 He is in the presence of Nibbana. 32.

Story 32: A monk was frugal and contented. The Buddha attributed those characteristics to the monk's close association with Him in the past and remarked that monks of his type were already in the presence of Nibbana.

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The Brahma-viharas: Head & Heart Together

Thai forest monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu teaches us how to use wisdom to cultivate compassion

Part 1 of 3

The brahma-viharas, or “sublime attitudes,” are the Buddha’s primary heart teachings—the ones that connect most directly with our desire for true happiness. The term “brahma-vihara” literally means “dwelling place of brahmas.” Brahmas are gods who live in the higher heavens, dwelling in an attitude of unlimited goodwill, unlimited compassion, unlimited empathetic joy, and unlimited equanimity. These unlimited attitudes can be developed from the more limited versions of these emotions that we experience in the human heart.

The four brahma-viharas (sublime attitudes) are:

1) Goodwill (metta)
2) Compassion (karuna)
3) Empathetic joy (mudita)
4) Equanimity (upekkha)

Of these four emotions, goodwill (metta) is the most fundamental. It’s the wish for true happiness, a wish you can direct to yourself or to others. Goodwill was the underlying motivation that led the Buddha to search for awakening and to teach the path to awakening to others after he had found it.

The next two emotions in the list are essentially applications of goodwill. Compassion (karuna) is what goodwill feels when it encounters suffering: it wants the suffering to stop. Empathetic joy (mudita) is what goodwill feels when it encounters happiness: it wants the happiness to continue. Equanimity (upekkha) is a different emotion, in that it acts as an aid to and a check on the other three. When you encounter suffering that you can’t stop no matter how hard you try, you need equanimity to avoid creating additional suffering and to channel your energies to areas where you can be of help. In this way, equanimity isn’t cold hearted or indifferent. It simply makes your goodwill more focused and effective.

Making these attitudes limitless requires work. It’s easy to feel goodwill, compassion, and empathetic joy for people you like and love, but there are bound to be people you dislike—often for very good reasons. Similarly, there are many people for whom it’s easy to feel equanimity: people you don’t know or don’t really care about. But it’s hard to feel equanimity when people you love are suffering. Yet if you want to develop the brahma-viharas, you have to include all of these people within the scope of your awareness so that you can apply the proper attitude no matter where or when. This is where your heart needs the help of your head.

All too often, meditators believe that if they can simply add a little more heart juice, a little more emotional oomph, to their brahma-vihara practice, their attitudes can become limitless. But if something inside you keeps churning up reasons for liking this person or hating that one, your practice starts feeling hypocritical. You wonder who you’re trying to fool. Or, after a month devoted to the practice, you still find yourself thinking black thoughts about people who cut you off in traffic—to say nothing of people who’ve done the world serious harm.

This is where the head comes in. If we think of the heart as the side of the mind that wants happiness, the head is the side that understands how cause and effect actually work. If your head and heart can learn to cooperate—that is, if your head can give priority to finding the causes for true happiness, and your heart can learn to embrace those causes—then the training of the mind can go far.

This is why the Buddha taught the brahma-viharas in a context of head teachings: the principle of causality as it plays out in (1) karma and (2) the process of fabrication that shapes emotions within the body and mind. The more we can get our heads around these teachings, the easier it will be to put our whole heart into developing attitudes that truly are sublime. An understanding of karma helps to explain what we’re doing as we develop the brahma-viharas and why we might want to do so in the first place. An understanding of fabrication helps to explain how we can take our human heart and convert it into a place where brahmas could dwell.

The teaching on karma starts with the principle that people experience happiness and sorrow based on a combination of their past and present intentions. If we act with unskillful intentions either for ourselves or for others, we’re going to suffer. If we act with skillful intentions, we’ll experience happiness. So if we want to be happy, we have to train our intentions to always be skillful. This is the first reason for developing the brahma-viharas: so that we can make our intentions more trustworthy.

Some people say that unlimited goodwill comes naturally to us, that our Buddha-nature is intrinsically compassionate. But the Buddha never said anything about Buddha-nature. What he did say is that the mind is even more variegated than the animal world. We’re capable of anything. So what are we going to do with this capability?

We could do—and have done—almost anything, but the one thing the Buddha does assume across the board is that deep down inside we want to take this capability and devote it to happiness. So the first lesson of karma is that if you really want to be happy, you can’t trust that deep down you know the right thing to do, because that would simply foster complacency. Unskillful intentions would take over and you wouldn’t even know it. Instead, you have to be heedful to recognize unskillful intentions for what they are, and to act only on skillful ones. The way to ensure that you’ll stay heedful is to take your desire for happiness and spread it around.

The second lesson of karma is that just as you’re the primary architect of your own happiness and suffering, other people are the primary architects of theirs. If you really want them to be happy, you don’t just treat them nicely. You also want them to learn how to create the causes for happiness. If you can, you want to show them how to do that. This is why the gift of dharma—lessons in how to give rise to true happiness— is the greatest gift. In the Buddha’s most famous example of how to express an attitude of unlimited goodwill, he doesn’t simply express a wish for universal happiness. He also adds a wish that all beings avoid the causes that would lead them to unhappiness: “Let no one deceive another or despise anyone anywhere, or through anger or irritation wish for another to suffer.” (Sutta Nipata 1.8) So if you’re using visualization as part of your goodwill practice, don’t visualize people simply as smiling, surrounded willy-nilly by wealth and sensual pleasures. Visualize them acting, speaking, and thinking skillfully. If they’re currently acting on unskillful intentions, visualize them changing their ways. Then act to realize those visualizations if you can.

A similar principle applies to compassion and empathetic joy. Learn to feel compassion not only for people who are already suffering, but also for those who are engaging in unskillful actions that will lead to future suffering. This means, if possible, trying to stop them from doing those things. And learn to feel empathetic joy not only for those who are already happy, but also for those whose actions will lead to future happiness. If you have the opportunity, give them encouragement.
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When they give him almsfood, he should lift his upper robe with his left hand, stretch out his bowl with his right hand, and receive the alms while holding the bowl with both hands. He shouldn’t look the donor in the face. He should be attentive to whether they wish to give curry or not. If they take hold of a serving spoon or a vessel, or they tell him to wait, then he should assume they wish to give, and he should wait. When they have given alms, he should cover the bowl with his upper robe, and leave carefully and without hurry.

Partial excerpts from Kd 18 : Chapter on Proper Conduct

Manopubbangama dhamma
manosettha manomaya
manasa ce pasannena
bhasati va karoti va
tato nam sukha manveti
chayava anapayini.

All mental phenomena have mind as their forerunner; they have mind as their chief; they are mind-made. If one speaks or acts with a pure mind, happiness (sukha) follows him like a shadow that never leaves him.

Dhammapada Verse 2 : Matthakundali Vatthu

The Brahma-viharas: Head & Heart Together

Thai forest monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu teaches us how to use wisdom to cultivate compassion

Part 2 of 3

But you also have to realize that no matter how unlimited the scope of these positive emotions, their effect is going to run into limits. In other words, regardless of how strong your goodwill or compassion may be, there are bound to be people whose past actions are unskillful and who cannot or will not change their ways in the present. This is why you need equanimity as your reality check. When you encounter areas where you can’t be of help, you learn not to get upset. Think about the universality of the principle of karma: it applies to everyone regardless of whether you like them or not. That puts you in a position where you can see more clearly what can be changed, where you can be of help. In other words, equanimity isn’t a blanket acceptance of things as they are. It’s a tool for helping you to develop discernment as to which kinds of suffering you have to accept and which ones you don’t.

For example, someone in your family may be suffering from Alzheimer’s. If you get upset about the fact of the disease, you’re limiting your ability to be genuinely helpful. To be more effective, you have to use equanimity as a means of letting go of what you want to change and focusing more on what can be changed in the present.

A third lesson from the principle of karma is that developing the brahma-viharas can also help mitigate the results of your past bad actions. The Buddha explains this point with an analogy: If you put a lump of salt into a glass of water, you can’t drink the water in the glass. But if you put that lump of salt into a river, you could then drink the water in the river, because the river contains so much more water than salt. When you develop the four brahma-viharas, your mind is like the river. The skillful karma of developing these attitudes in the present is so expansive that whatever results of past bad actions may arise, you hardly notice them.

A proper understanding of karma also helps to correct the false idea that if people are suffering they deserve to suffer, so you might as well just leave them alone. When you catch yourself thinking in those terms, you have to keep four principles in mind.

First, remember that when you look at people, you can’t see all the karmic seeds from their past actions. They may be experiencing the results of past bad actions, but you don’t know when those seeds will stop sprouting. Also, you have no idea what other seeds, whatever wonderful latent potentials, will sprout in their place.

There’s a saying in some Buddhist circles that if you want to see a person’s past actions, you look at his present condition; if you want to see his future condition, you look at his present actions. This principle, however, is based on a basic misperception: that we each have a single karmic account, and what we see in the present is the current running balance in each person’s account. Actually, no one’s karmic history is a single account. It’s composed of the many different seeds planted in many places through the many different actions we’ve done in the past, each seed maturing at its own rate. Some of these seeds have already sprouted and disappeared; some are sprouting now; some will sprout in the future. This means that a person’s present condition reflects only a small portion of his or her past actions. As for the other seeds, you can’t see them at all.

This reflection helps you when developing compassion, for it reminds you that you never know when the possibility to help somebody can have an effect. The seeds of the other person’s past bad actions may be flowering right now, but they could die at any time. You may happen to be the person who’s there to help when that person is ready to receive help.

The same pattern applies to empathetic joy. Suppose that your neighbor is wealthier than you are. You may resist feeling empathetic joy for him because you think, “He’s already well-off, while I’m still struggling. Why should I wish him to be even happier than he is?” If you find yourself thinking in those terms, remind yourself that you don’t know what your karmic seeds are; you don’t know what his karmic seeds are. Maybe his good karmic seeds are about to die. Do you want them to die any faster? Does his happiness diminish yours? What kind of attitude is that? It’s useful to think in these ways.

The second principle to keep in mind is that, in the Buddha’s teaching, there’s no question of a person’s “deserving” happiness or “deserving” pain. The Buddha simply says that there are actions leading to pleasure and actions leading to pain. Karma is not a respecter of persons; it’s simply an issue of actions and results. Good people may have some bad actions squirreled away in their past. People who seem horrible may have done some wonderful things. You never know. So there’s no question of a person’s deserving or not deserving pleasure or pain. There’s simply the principle that actions have results and that your present experience of pleasure or pain is the combined result of past and present actions. You may have some very unskillful actions in your past, but if you learn to think skillfully when those actions bear fruit in the present, you don’t have to suffer.

A third principle applies to the question of whether the person who’s suffering “deserves” your compassion. You sometimes hear that everyone deserves your compassion because they all have Buddha-nature. But this ignores the primary reason for developing compassion as a brahma-vihara in the first place: you need to make your compassion universal so that you can trust your intentions. If you regard your compassion as so precious that only Buddhas deserve it, you won’t be able to trust yourself when encountering people whose actions are consistently evil.

At the same time, you have to remember that no human being has a totally pure karmic past, so you can’t make a person’s purity the basis for your compassion. Some people resist the idea that, say, children born into a war zone suffering from brutality and starvation are there for a karmic reason. It seems heartless, they say, to attribute these sufferings to karma from past lives. The only heartlessness here, though, is the insistence that people are worthy of compassion only if they are innocent of any wrongdoing. Remember that you don’t have to like or admire someone to feel compassion for that person. All you have to do is wish for that person to be happy. The more you can develop this attitude toward people you know have misbehaved, the more you’ll be able to trust your intentions in any situation.

The Buddha illustrates this point with a graphic analogy: even if bandits attack you and saw off your limbs with a two-handled saw, you have to feel goodwill starting with them and then spreading to include the entire world. If you keep this analogy in mind, it helps to protect you from acting in unskillful ways, no matter how badly provoked.
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Part 1 of 3:

https://news.1rj.ru/str/wordsofbuddha/3899


Part 2 of 3:

https://news.1rj.ru/str/dhammapadas/2761


Part 3 of 3:

https://news.1rj.ru/str/lorddivinebuddha/3194

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Chapter 3

Citta Vagga
Mind
(Text and Translation by Ven. Narada)



1. Phandanam capalam cittam
durakkham dunnivarayam
Ujum karoti medhavi
usukaro'va tejanam. 33.
2. Varijo'va thale khitto
okamokata ubbhato
Pariphandati'midam cittam
Maradheyyam pahatave. 34.

STRAIGHTEN YOUR FICKLE MIND

1. The flickering, fickle mind, 1 difficult to guard, difficult to control - the wise person straightens it as a fletcher straightens an arrow. 33.

2. Like a fish that is drawn from its watery abode and thrown upon land, even so does this mind flutter. Hence should the realm of the passions be shunned. 2 34.

Story

A monk was overcome by evil thoughts. The Buddha admonished him to subdue his mind.
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“Monks, if while walking, a thought of sense desire or ill will or harmfulness arises in a monk, and if he allows it to stay and does not reject it, does not quickly abandon it, does not get rid of it, and does not bring it to an end, that monk— lacking in energy and unafraid of wrongdoing—is often and continually called lazy and weak in his effort.

Whether walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, a monk who has evil thoughts related to sense pleasures is following a wrong path. Infatuated with delusory things, he is not capable of achieving supreme enlightenment.

Whether walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, a monk who overcomes evil thoughts and delights in the stilling of thoughts is capable of achieving supreme enlightenment.

Partially excerpted from Itivuttaka 110 : Carasutta