When you apply this story to the Dhamma, it becomes a lesson worth remembering. If you’re not loyal to your meditation object or to yourself, if you forget the breath you’re meditating on with buddho, buddho, and let your mind go wandering off in thoughts and concepts, it’s as if you’ve abandoned the monk you’re supposed to look after. You don’t follow him; you don’t act the role of his student as…

Throughout the day it is helpful for us to recollect that we are a community of alms mendicants. We rely on what is offered to us as gifts of goodwill: robes, alms food, shelter, and medicine—the four requisites. Traditionally, in Thai monasteries, the monastic community brings the requisites to mind as part of its formal morning and evening chanting. The chants encourage the monastics to ask them…

If it so happens that while we’re trying to maintain that sense of ease in the heart, disturbances come in to interfere, making the mind distracted and restless, we should remember that we don’t have to look for that lost sense of ease anywhere else. Remember: wherever there’s restlessness is where there is stillness. We have to be alert to the preoccupations that have put the mind out of shape. W…

Yesterday at teatime, we were talking about sampajañña, clear comprehension, which is a quality we can reflect on in our daily practice. When the Buddha speaks about mindfulness— sati—he rarely treats mindfulness as an isolated quality. It’s usually in conjunction with some other quality—particularly, clear comprehension, sati-sampajañña. Without clear comprehension, our mindfulness tends to b…

In learning to work with grasping – taking hold of opinions and views – we can learn to receive, accept and acknowledge another person’s mood, to know and be aware of it, but recognize in addition that we have a choice, a bridge we may or may not cross: ‘Do we choose to join in with that person’s mood or to leave it alone?’ It’s very helpful in these situations to develop body awareness, using our…

To reiterate: the main teaching on conceptual proliferation or papañca, the process where the mind runs away and how that happens, is in Sutta 18 of the Majjhima Nikāya, the Madhupiṇḍika Sutta. The sequence begins with a sense-contact: there’s a physical sensation or a thought floats into the mind. That contact leads to feeling, vedanā, which in Buddhism is not an emotion, but more like the ra…

The Buddha set forth the ideal of a righteous king—a Dhamma-raja—who rules generously for the benefit of his people, in line with the Dhamma, and in return is widely loved by the people he rules. Interestingly, the Buddha never taught this ideal to actual kings. Instead, he taught it to people at large, perhaps in hopes that once the ideal became widespread in the culture, kings would voluntarily…

Take a moment to notice how you feel, the effects of your day so far: what you thought, what you felt, what you’ve heard and seen, the feelings of the body. Take a moment to simply attend, to look at them, to feel and notice them. Are you excited? Bored? Warm? Cool? Depressed? Inspired? Full of mixed feelings? Whatever it might be, notice that right now it’s like this. The body feels like this. Th…

‘I proclaim such a teaching that espouses non-contention with anyone in the world.’ Madhupiṇḍika Sutta (‘The Honeyball’) M 18.4 The phrase ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’ is the archetypal expression of our tendency to attach to views and opinions: ‘If I think it, it must be true, and if you think differently, sorry, but you’re wrong. You might be a good person, but you’re just wrong.’ This is the very…

Yesterday, in Vinaya class, we were talking about how we relate to rules. As monastics, we have so many rules that are a part of our lifestyle. There are countless rules that define the way we live and the way we do things. It’s interesting to see how Western monks like us often relate to the rules in a fearful way. There’s a sense of all these different rules in place, and we’re trying to control…