Every winter at our monasteries two or three months are set aside as quiet retreat time – a time to focus more intensively on our inner work. The encouragement given during this time is towards cultivating a stiller, quieter space within the heart. For it is only through attention to this that we are able to observe all our skilful and less skilful habits, and to train the mind – making it into a…

The painful flaw of self-view is that it makes how I feel, and what passes through awareness, into who I am. So, as what comes up in awareness is often a mix of unresolved memories and impressions, this habit of identification gives rise to a hurt or flawed self who keeps rehashing old grudges and disappointments and regrets in an attempt to clear them. This self fixates on the details of ‘she sai…

The agenda of ‘self’ and the agenda of enlightenment are very different. As we develop our meditation and interest in the Dhamma, we keep bumping into the resistances of self. It would be nice to be enlightened and free, and as meditators and dhamma practitioners we put a lot of energy into this. But at the same time we can feel bewildered because there is also a lot of resistance, a lot of forget…

What we’re doing as we’re sitting here meditating is learning how to develop the skills for maximizing skillful kinds of pleasure, skillful ways of approaching the pleasure. There are even skillful forms of distress. The Buddha talks about household distress and renunciation distress. Household distress is when you’re not getting the physical feelings you want: You don’t see the sights you’d like…

Although the number of Dhammayut monks was relatively small (it has never exceeded a tenth of the Sangha as a whole), the lineage’s close links to the royal family ensured that within a short time it possessed formidable prestige, influence and resources. King Chulalongkorn, King Mongkut’s son and successor, appointed Dhammayut monks to the top administrative positions in the monkhood throughout t…

Fragmentation of the Sangha into a number of different orders has been a notable feature of Sri Lankan and Burmese Buddhism. In Thailand, however, the creation of new orders has been extremely rare. This anomaly is explained to a large extent by the fact that it is only in Thailand that the Sangha has enjoyed strong and uninterrupted royal support throughout its existence and has been spared the s…

Rain soddens what’s covered & doesn’t sodden what’s exposed. So open up what’s covered up, so that it won’t get soddened by the rain. Attacked by death is the world, surrounded by aging, beset by the arrow of craving, always obscured by desire. Attacked by death is the world, & encircled by aging, constantly beaten, with no shelter, like a thief sentenced to punishment. They encroach like masses o…

Thus it is important to learn how to fail well; to learn how to fail in a good way, to handle our tendency to get lost, be caught up and miss the point. It is important to learn how to work with that in a skilful way. I like to use the phrase: ‘We need to learn how to fail perfectly’ or ‘to know how to be perfect failures’. This doesn’t mean that we don’t try or that we are casual or careless abou…

[Question] And if one has practised to the last step of enlightenment, is it equanimity (upekkhā) that will arise – no matter what one gets into contact with, whether good or bad? If we’ve reached the end of the practice, in terms of the sense spheres or in terms of living with other people, there will be no experience of likes and dislikes anymore. Male and female – these are just aspects of conv…

Vitakka and vicara are two Pali words that mean thinking. They’re classified as verbal fabrication. In other words, you engage in these two activities—thinking of something first and then thinking about it, or directing your thoughts to a topic and then commenting on it—and then you break into speech. Without having had those verbal thoughts in the mind, there would be no external verbal action. T…