Meat Stuck in Your Teeth Sensual desire is something hard to escape from. It's no different from eating meat and getting a piece of meat stuck in your teeth. Boy, does it hurt! Even before you finish the meal, you have to take a toothpick to get it out. Once it's out you feel relieved for a while
A Hypodermic Needle ...This is suffering. Ordinary suffering is one thing; suffering above and beyond the ordinary is something else. The regular pains of this bodily fabrication — pains when you're standing, pains when you're sitting down, pains when you're lying down: This sort of thing is or...
Why It's Heavy When suffering arises, you have to see that it's suffering, and to see what this suffering arises from. Will you see anything? If we look at things in an ordinary way, there's no suffering. For example, while we're sitting here, we're at ease. But at another moment we want this spit
Orphaned Our mind, when there's no one looking after it, is like a child without parents to look after it — an orphaned child, a child with no protector. A person without a protector suffers, and it's the same with the mind. If it's not trained, if its views aren't straightened out into right v...
Colored Water Our heart, when it's at normalcy, is like rainwater. It's clean water, clear, pure, and normal. If we put green coloring in the water, yellow coloring in the water, the color of the water turns to green, turns to yellow. The same with our mind: When it meets with an object it likes,
Leaves When we sit in a quiet forest when there's no wind, the leaves are still. When the wind blows, the leaves flutter. The mind is the same sort of thing as leaves. When it makes contact with an object, it vibrates in line with its nature. The less you know of the Dhamma, the more the mind vib
The Beginning Is the End When we're born we're already dead, you know. Aging and death are the same thing. It's like a tree. Part of it's the base; part of it's the end at the tip. When there's a base, there's an end. When there's an end, there's a base. When there's no base, there's no end. When
The King of Death We live like a chicken who doesn't know what's going on. In the morning it takes its baby chicks out to scratch for food. In the evening, it goes back to sleep in the coop. The next morning it goes out to look for food again. Its owner scatters rice for it to eat every day, but i
The Tail of the Snake We human beings don't want suffering. We want nothing but pleasure. But actually, pleasure is nothing but subtle suffering. Pain is blatant suffering. To put it in simple terms, suffering and pleasure are like a snake. Its head is suffering; its tail is pleasure. Its head con
Children, Bullets A gun shoots its children — its bullets — outward. We shoot ours inward, into our heart. When they're good, we're shot in the heart. When they're bad, we're shot in the heart. They're an affair of kamma, our children. There are good ones, there are bad ones, but both the goo...
A Block of Ice If you place a large block of ice out in the open sun, you can see it deteriorate — in the same way the body ages — bit by bit, bit by bit. After only a few minutes, only a few hours, it will all melt into water. This is called khaya-vaya: ending, deterioration. The deteriorati...
Wagon Wheels, Wagon Tracks The cycle of rebirth is like a wagon wheel. An ox is pulling the wagon. If it keeps on pulling the wagon without stop, the wagon tracks will keep on erasing the ox tracks without stop. The wagon wheels aren't long, but they're round. You could say that they're long, but
The Lost Wallet It's as if you leave home and lose your wallet. It fell out of your pocket onto the road away back there, but as long as you don't realize what happened you're at ease — at ease because you don't yet know what this ease is for. It's for the sake of dis-ease at a later time. When...
The Roots We're like a tree with roots, a base, and a trunk. Every leaf, every branch, depends on the roots to absorb nutrients from the soil and send them up to nourish the tree. Our body, plus our words and deeds, our senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and feeling, are like the branches, l
Elephants, Oxen, & Water Buffaloes Training the mind well is a useful activity. You can see this even in draft animals, like elephants, oxen, and water buffaloes. Before we can put them to work, we have to train them. Only when they're well trained can we use their strength and put it to diffe
It's All Right Here The Buddha is the Dhamma; the Dhamma is the Buddha. He didn't take away the knowledge he awakened to. He left it right here. To put it in simple terms, it's like the teachers in schools. They haven't been teachers from birth. They had to study the course of study for teachers b
Groundwater The Buddha is the Dhamma; the Dhamma is the Buddha. The Dhamma the Buddha awakened to is something always there in the world. It hasn't disappeared. It's like groundwater. Whoever digs a well down to the level of the groundwater will see water. It's not the case that that person create
To the Ocean The streams, lakes, and rivers that flow down to the ocean, when they reach the ocean, all have the same blue color, the same salty taste. The same with human beings: It doesn't matter where they're from — when they reach the stream of the Dhamma, it's all the same Dhamma.
Your Real Home Your external home isn't your real home. It's your supposed home, your home in the world. As for your real home, that's peace. The Buddha has us build our own home by letting go till we reach peace.
Tanda Keberhasilan Ketika Amerika Serikat sedang mencari bentuk sebagai sebuah bangsa, Andrew Bradford memiliki kontrak bisnis yang membuat iri perusahaan-perusahaan lain. Perusahaan milik Bradford diberi tanggung jawab mengerjakan semua pencetakan resmi untuk negara bagian Pennsylvania. Perusahaa