The Vinaya lays down many detailed rules concerning our behaviour towards the material world. In the forest tradition we’re taught that the second expulsion offence can be incurred by theft of even the smallest object, something the value of one baht (about three US cents). In the formal announcements in the ordination ceremony, the preceptor teaches the new monk to take nothing whatsoever that do…

Faith is an essential part of our practice, and it’s not something that magically appears on its own. Rather, the arising of faith takes effort. We need to direct our attention toward it to frequently reflect on the arising of faith as a real possibility for us. As Westerners, most of us are not on familiar ground when we reflect on faith. But it is an important quality for balancing the different…

Buddhist cultivation covers more than what we would understand through reading books or even through meditation. For instance, although solitary meditation is what we see in the discourses, one of the main features in the Vinaya and of the Buddhist life is the practice of community. You can recognize this especially when there is a big gathering such as today’s alms-giving ceremony, the Kathina. T…

Before the monastery was established, I can remember Ajahn Amaro telling me that there was a Thai monk in Fremont, Ajahn Maha Prasert, who was keen to see a forest monastery succeed in the Bay Area. Since the founding of the monastery, Ajahn Maha Prasert’s support has been unfailing. Generally in Thailand at the beginning of the Rains Retreat or a bit earlier than that, most of the monks in monast…

Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there’s anything lying behind them. This mode is called emptiness because it’s empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience to make sense of it: the stories…

You asked why it was that you cannot explain Dhamma to other people. That ability is probably a matter of innate tendencies (most likely based on kamma), and I doubt whether you can do much about it. We read that Acharn Mun was superb at giving talks and explanations of Dhamma, but Acharn Sao (his teacher) would speak only a couple of sentences and go silent; and this despite the fact that he was…

“Protecting oneself, one protects others; protecting others, one protects oneself. And how does one, in protecting oneself, protect others? By the repeated and frequent practice of meditation. And how does one, in protecting others, protect oneself? By patience and forbearance, by a non-violent and harmless life, by loving-kindness and compassion. ‘I shall protect myself’, in that way the Attendin…

In Buddhism, what we call ‘mind’ (or ‘citta’) does not refer just to thinking and the brain. The mind has a much broader dimension. It includes thinking, but it also includes our perceptions, feelings, stories and memories. For example, when I perceive something, I already have an imprint in me, a memory that can help me recognize: ‘this is this; that is that.’ As we become more conscious of the w…

In the classical Buddhist teachings, there are four gradations or stages of enlightenment that are described over and over again. The first level is called ‘stream-entry’. This represents an irreversible breakthrough into a quality of psychological integration or self-actualization or ‘emotional intelligence’ that will necessarily result, eventually, in the ‘unshakeable well-being’ of full enlight…

If we are focused in samādhi with continuous mindfulness, then sometimes the state known as pīti will arise. Pīti is characterised by physical sensations of coolness or of a rapturous energy thrilling throughout the body – like waves breaking on the shore – which can cause the body to sway and the hair to stand on end. These sensations are accompanied by mental perceptions of physical expansive…