The Quotable Thanissaro

[dhammapal]

To begin with, the practice is essentially a practice, and not a theory to be idly discussed. Even the theoretical or philosophical aspects of the Buddha’s teachings are there to be used as tools in aiding in the escape from all suffering and stress. It’s because of this fact that the Buddha’s primary metaphor for his teachings was a path: the noble eightfold path, composed of all the “right” factors mentioned above. It’s also why right view, the theory behind the path, is part of the path, and doesn’t stand outside it.

Also, because right view serves as a guide to action, it doesn’t present a full picture of reality, just as a fire-escape map posted on a hotel door doesn’t give complete information about the construction of the hotel. If it did, you’d have trouble figuring out which parts of the map would be useful in the event of a fire. That, in turn, would actually prevent you from making a quick escape. It’s for this reason that right view leaves unanswered many questions about the cosmos and the self, and directs your attention to what needs to be done to escape from the ravages of suffering.

At the same time, right view labels some attitudes about suffering and its end as definitely wrong, just as certain wrong attitudes about fires and escapes would leave you trapped in a burning hotel. Suppose, for instance, that you found messages posted on the hotel room door saying that, in the case of a fire, there is no escape, or that you should wait in your room until a heavenly being saved you, that the fire won’t burn you if you accept and embrace it, or maybe fire isn’t really fire. You’d be wise to distrust those messages, even if they were signed by the hotel management. In the same way, if you’re heedful of the dangers of the fires of the mind, you’d be wise not to fall for messages — even within the Buddhist tradition — that are at odds with the message that it is possible to escape from the suffering that the mind creates for itself, that you can reach this escape through your own efforts, and that it’s the most worthwhile thing you can do in life.
From: On the Path: An Anthology on the Noble Eightfold Path drawn from the Pali Canon by Thanissaro Bhikkhu (2017, 463 pages)

[dhammapal]

Again, regardless of whether you’re going to [pick up things of the world] after the meditation or not, for the time being create a little freedom in here. It’s almost like you’re erasing your history, erasing any lines of communication or lines of connection with anything outside at all. It’s important that the mind have this space that’s really its own space, even though it may just be part of the day, where it can let go of all the responsibilities and worries and cares of the rest of the day. Remember that time, right now, is either a memory or anticipation. It’s just like regarding the world as just sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, ideas. Try to reduce things to a very minimal terms like this, so they’re easier to let go of. If you allow there to be long complicated stories or very elaborate theories about who you are, what kind of person you are, or what troubles you have, you just weigh the mind down. Even if you can’t sort out or solve your problems right now, at the very least you can put them down for the time being. Just allow there to be the awareness of the breath energy, right here, right now.
From: Free for the Time Being by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

Our culture is a funny one: It tends to distrust people who try to get away from sensual attachments — partly because the economy would collapse and partly because of the old Judaic-Protestant prejudice that people who try to abandon sensual attachments must be weird. The truth of the matter, though, is that there's a part of the mind that flourishes when it's not burdened with sensual attachments. When it's really secluded from sensual attachments, it blossoms. And part of the practice is learning to appreciate that very still center of the mind, the sense of wellbeing that comes from dropping all those attachments. Even though we're not yet letting go of them for good, we at least drop them for the time being.
From: Rites of Passage by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

These sublime attitudes [goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity] are measuring sticks against which you can measure what's actually going on in your mind. In other words, you're not just smothering all the unskillful thoughts in your mind with these nice warm fuzzy clouds of goodwill. You're using these skillful thoughts as measuring sticks. These are the attitudes that put people into jhana. These are the attitudes that brahmas, who live in jhana, actually dwell in. This is why they're able to stay in jhana. So how do your attitudes measure up against theirs? If you find that your attitudes don't measure up, try to reason with yourself until they do. You can't force yourself without reasoning.
From: A Load of Straw by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

Someone was asking why it is that we keep focusing on the problems inside. Aren’t there problems outside? Of course there are problems outside, but the reason why your mind is weighed down is because of the problems inside. And those are problems you can do something about. If you haven’t straightened out the problems inside, you probably have a pretty messy idea of how to straighten out things outside. Sometimes, in your efforts to straighten out outside things, you make them worse. So you want to be confident that you’re coming from a good place: a place of strength, a position of strength, a position of well-being. That’s why we look inside to see where there’s stress and what can be done about it. Then all the good parts of the mind become strong.
From: Strength for Stillness by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

Reflection on other people’s mind states is also a good reflection for fairness. When you see other people acting on their unskillful mind states, it gives you a chance to see what you look like when you act on yours. It’s not a pretty sight. For example, we all have a tendency to want to straighten other people out. We want this person to be that way and that person to be this way. But when other people try to straighten you out, how do you feel? The Thais call this putting other people’s heart in your heart, and your heart in theirs: in other words, realizing that what you feel is what other people feel. If you ever want to straighten anything out, well, you’ve got your heart here that need straightening out, first. And so focus right here — because this is where you really can do the work.
From: Bodies & Minds Outside by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

“Let no one deceive another
or despise anyone anywhere,
or through anger or resistance
wish for another to suffer.” — the Buddha (Khp 9)

Thanissaro Bhikkhu: So if you’re using visualization as part of your good will 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.
From: Head & Heart Together: Bringing Wisdom to the Brahmaviharas by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

Even though the Buddha talks a lot about suffering and stress, the unattractiveness of the body, the lack of control you have over things, it's not for a negative or pessimistic purpose. It's to focus your desire for happiness in another direction. In effect he says, "Look, you can't find true happiness in these places. You've got to look someplace else." This is the theme underlying all of his teachings: that true happiness really does matter. It's important. It's worth giving yourself over to. The desire for true happiness is worth taking seriously because it actually leads to true happiness if you follow through with it skillfully.

So although sometimes we may resist his teachings — because they seem to threaten our ideas about what we need to do and to believe in order to be happy — it's good to step back and question our assumptions. There are many, many people who have followed the Buddha's way and found that, yes, it does lead to a true happiness — and that the happiness you get from following other paths doesn't nearly compare.

When you see fear in your practice, remember: There is skillful fear and unskillful fear. Skillful fear focuses on the harm and suffering that comes from doing unskillful things. Unskillful fear comes from holding onto things that you know are going to change. Once you understand this, you can work on refining your sense of self and ultimately learn to adopt the teaching on not-self as well. When you learn how to use these teachings skillfully — at their appropriate times, in the appropriate places — and you find they really are conducive to happiness, then you see that there's nothing to criticize in the Buddha's teachings. They're there to help us find the happiness we want. He's not forcing them on anybody. There's no power play involved here at all. He offers his teachings out of compassion. He's found that these practices work for him, and they work for other people as well. It's simply a question of whether we understand them properly and learn how to use them skillfully. When we do, there are no more issues.
From: Strategies for Happiness by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

Try to be sensitive to what you’re doing and the results that you’re getting. Understand that you’re not here waiting for the future or anticipating things in the future to come, but paying very careful attention to what you’re doing right now. If you lose that focus, then you’ve lost the focus of the meditation. If you’re sitting and anticipating, remember that right anticipation is not one of the factors of the path — it’s certainly not one of the factors of concentration. Just focus on what you’ve already got.
From: The Four Bases of Success by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

So learn how to be a good storyteller, telling yourself the right stories, stories that will bring you into the present with a sense of confidence in your own abilities, with a sense of wellbeing, a sense of the importance of stilling the mind. No matter what the stories are — no matter what other people have done, no matter what you've done — there's a way of looking at them that can put the mind at rest. To try to find that way: This is what all the teachings on kamma, all the teachings on the sublime attitudes, are about.
From: The Story-telling Mind by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

I’ve been counseling some people in a Dharma study program. And their experience with retreats up to this point had been that you go in, you don’t talk to anybody, and you go home. So as you’re sitting there in the retreat hall meditating, everybody else looks so calm and still, and yet you’re fighting with your hindrances, with your defilements. You seem to be the only person who is suffering that way. But when these people come on a study retreat, they get a chance to talk with one another and they discover that everybody goes through the same thing. Everybody has the same problems. And instead of being discouraging, it’s actually encouraging. You realize that even though things may take a lot longer than you had hoped, the fact that they take long doesn’t mean it’s hopeless. It’s the common pattern throughout the world.
From: Goodwill First & Last by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

Samvega is when you see how disillusioned you are in life and you also have a sense of being trapped. You want something better than this but you can’t see any way out. That’s because there are still things there in the world that you’re feeding on or that you’d like to feed on, in terms of relationships, in terms of power, whatever: the things we emotionally feed on in terms of other people, other things. The reason we feel trapped is because part of us is still in there and we can’t let it go.

It’s like that famous monkey trap where they put a hole in a coconut and then into the coconut they put a little bit of fruit that the monkey wants. It can reach its hand in through the hole, but once it has its hand wrapped around the fruit, it can’t get its hand out. It’s trapped by its own greed.

That’s samvega. You look around and there’s nowhere in the world that you can see any way out. Everybody’s fighting over what little bit of food there is, emotional or physical. The Buddha’s image was of fish fighting over that last gulp of water in a dwindling puddle before they’re all going to die. And it’s terrifying.

That’s what samvega literally means: terror. It’s sometimes translated as dismay, sometimes as urgency, but the word originally comes from a sense of terror. You’re trapped. You need a way out.
From: Samvega vs. Dispassion by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

You may have money in your pocket, but it's not really yours. It's printed by the government. You look at the money and see: Does it have your name written on it? Well, no, it's got other people's names. Even with a credit card that does have your name on it: The bank's name is also on it, and the bank's name is bigger. It's in charge of what you can and can't do with the card. As for the value of the money, the government and the banks can change it whenever they want. If they wanted to call it back, they could do it. In the meantime, while you've got it, you use it. And you try to use it as wisely as possible, with the realization that it's not really yours to keep; it's a part of the world.
From: A Well-Thatched Roof by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

If thinking weren’t involved in the practice, if your views weren’t important in the practice, Dhamma talks wouldn’t serve any function. You’d have to teach by example by not saying anything at all. But meditation doesn’t work that way. You have to learn how to think in the right way as you come to meditation. This is a thinking cure.
From: The Thinking Cure by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

Sometimes we fall into an ironclad notion that only certain kinds of awareness count as mindfulness. We feel that we’re strapped there and can’t function. There are reports of people who go for long retreats where they’ve been working on only one kind of mindfulness for three months and when they come out they can’t function. It takes them a couple of days to readjust to being in the outside world. Well, the Buddha didn’t have us practice so that we couldn’t function, couldn’t adjust, couldn’t adapt. He simply wants you to be conscious and deliberate about the way you adapt: the different levels, the different layers, the different frequencies you‘re tuning in to. If you can shift levels mindfully, you’re okay.
From: Varieties of Mindfulness by Thanissaro Bhikkhu