Buddho

The word 'Buddho' is a word that you can develop in your life as something to fill the mind with rather than with worries and all kinds of unskilful habits. Take the word, look at it, listen to it: 'Buddho'! It means the one who knows, the Buddha, the awakened, that which is awake.

You can visualise it in your mind. Listen to what your mind says - blah, blah, blah, etc. It goes on like this, an endless kind of excrement of repressed fears and aversions. So, now, we are recognising that.

We're not using 'Buddho' as a club to annihilate or repress things, but as a skilful means. We can use the finest tools for killing and for harming others, can't we? You can take the most beautiful Buddha rupa and bash somebody over the head with it if you want! That's not what we call 'Buddhanussati', Reflection on the Buddha, is it? But we might do that with the word 'Buddho' as a way of suppressing those thoughts or feelings. That's an unskilful use of it. Remember we're not here to annihilate but to allow things to fade out. This is a gentle practice of patiently imposing 'Buddho' over the thinking, not out of exasperation, but in a firm and deliberate way.

- Ajahn Sumedho 'Mindfulness: The Path to the Deathless'

Porosity

Can you make your stillness so porous that disturbances can go through without running into anything, without knocking your center off balance?

- Thanissaro Bhikku

Ego Renunciation

...attachment to being right, measuring the success of your life by how many of your wants are met, being the star of your own movie.

- Phillip Moffit "Dancing with Life"

Unsatisfactoriness

On another occasion the Buddha explained his earlier statement that "whatever is felt is included within dukkha" to refer to the impermanent nature of all conditioned phenomena.

The changing nature of feelings, however, need not necessarily be experienced as "suffering", since in the case of a painful experience, for example, change may be experienced as pleasant. Thus all feelings are not "suffering", nor is their impermanence "suffering", but all feelings are "unsatisfactory", since none of them can provide lasting satisfaction.

That is, dukkha as a qualification of all conditioned phenomena is not necessarily experienced as "suffering", since suffering requires someone sufficiently attached in order to suffer.

- Ven. Analayo "Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization"

Insight does not depend only on effort or on strong concentration

If we concentrate on the pain to suppress the pain, this kind of mindfulness is the object of craving, rather than just observing the object.

This means that the proper mental factor for the middle path of mental balance is missing because our consciousness is turned toward our feelings of like and dislike. When we want pain to disappear, it is attachment, and when we dislike it if pain has not yet disappeared, it is aversion.

Should the pain disappear as we desired, there follows further attachment. Such practice is not the correct application of mindfulness, and the awareness is not seeing clearly the 'present' object because we wish it to be different in the future.

If it is not the 'present' object which we are aware of, then the practice is off the middle path. We can see that establishing the balance of the middle path is not easy.

For this reason, it is of extreme importance to have right understanding first. We must see that insight does not depend only on effort or on strong concentration.

Nor does it depend upon our wish to know or realize, but rather, it depends upon right awareness. If we do not achieve keen awareness, although we try to use much effort and concentration, wisdom still will not result.

- Ajahn Naeb "The Development of Insight"

Your next sense contact can only happen at 1 of 6 doors

One should dwell like the snake, which sees the mouse hide in an ant-hill with six openings! By lying rolled up on the anthill - constantly watching - the snake remains on the thought: Out of which hole may this mouse appear ?!

Even so one thinks: Through which sense door may the next contact appear ?!

- Unknown

Self, empty

You are a ramshackle collection of coincidences held together by a desperate and irrational clinging, there is no center at all, everything depends on everything else, your body depends on the environment, your thoughts depend on whatever junk floats in from the environment, your emotions are largely from the reptillian end of your DNA, your intellect is a chemical computer that can't add up a zillionth as fast as a pocket calculator and even your best side is a superficial piece of social engineering that will fall apart as soon as your spouse leaves with the kids and the money in the joint account or the economy starts to fail and you get the sack, or you get conscripted into some idiot's war, or they give you news about your brain tumor, to name this amorphous morass of self-pity, vanity, and despair SELF is not only the height of hubris but it is also proof (as if we needed any) that we are above all a deluded species (we are in a trance from birth to death). Prick the balloon and what do you get? Emptiness.

-- John Burdette "Bangkok Tattoo"

Removing enchantment

When seeing these types of kamma simply as events - rather than as raw material for delight - one is struck by how inconstant and evanescent they are, totally dependent on causes and conditions that are also inconstant and evanescent. This gives rise to a sense of disenchantment for them, thus making it easier to abandon progressively subtler levels of passion and delight for new kamma and the process of becoming, until ultimately the moisture for becoming is all gone.

- Thanissaro Bhikku - "The Paradox of Becoming"

Heap

To provide a practical illustration of the five aggregates: during the present act of reading, for example, consciousness is aware of each word through the physical sense door of the eye. Cognition understands the meaning of each word, while feelings are responsible for the affective mood: whether one feels positive, negative, or neutral about this particular piece of information. Because of volition one either reads on, or stops to consider a passage in more depth, or even refers to a footnote.

Ven. Analayo "Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization"

My kind of run-on sentence

"[Satipatthana] has the depth and the breadth, the simplicity and the profundity for providing the foundation and the framework of a living dhamma for all, or at least, for the vast, and still growing, section of humanity that is no longer susceptible to religious or pseudo-religious sedatives, and yet feel, in their lives and minds, the urgency of fundamental problems of a non-material kind calling for solution that neither science nor the religions of faith can give."

Nyanaponika Thera "The Heart of Buddhist Meditation"

In Touch With Ourselves

When we are well with ourselves, then whatever happens, it really doesn't matter, because we have equilibrium and stability. We don't feel any lack of confidence. If not, we're always on edge, waiting to see how someone reacts to us, what people say to us or think about us. Our confidence hangs on what people tell us about how we are, how we look, how we behave. When we are really in touch with ourselves, we know ourselves beyond what others may tell us. So these three qualities - a good heart, stability, and spaciousness - these are really what you could call basic human virtues.

-Sogyal Rinpoche Tricycle Summer 2008

Fast moving impermanence

The only reality we can be sure of is this particular moment right now; and this particular moment as you must be able to be aware of has already passed and this one has passed and the next one has also passed. See how they are all passing! That is the impermanence of it all. Each moment passes, but we cling, trying to hold on to them. Trying to make them a reality. Trying to make them a security. Trying to make them be something which they are not. See how they are all passing. We cannot even say it as quickly as they are doing it.

- Ayya Khema

My body may be sick, yet my mind will not be afflicted

"...This suggests a sense of dissociation from the experience of pain, as if the affected part of the body did not belong to one. Although one continues to be aware of the pain as an objective phenomenon, this act of dissociation or de-identification diminishes or even removes the affective impact of the pain on the mind."

Ven. Analayo "Sattipatthana: the Direct Path to Realization