A guide to mindfulness and Vipassana meditation as taught by Luangpu Pramote
Yesterday, we lost another senior master, Luang Pu Haa. And earlier this year, Luang Pu Saeng passed away. The number of masters is declining, urging us to engage actively in mindfulness practice and become self-reliant. We must do this befoe there are no more masters for us to study under. The determination. It requires both …
You don’t need to press your hands together. Doing so for an hour would be tiring. While listening to Dhamma, we compose our mind. Long ago, I went to meditate with teachers at their temples. My younger friend and I would always go to visit meditation teachers together. When he meditated, when his mind converged …
Be careful how you live. Unexpectedly, tragic events like mass shootings can happen. We don’t know what will happen or when it will happen, so we ought to live a careful life. Violence is common these days. In the developed countries that I’ve visited, cities have both safe areas and dangerous neighborhoods and the whole …
Dhamma practice is not difficult. Be determined. Doing as if it were a game won’t do you good. Doing on and off won’t yield results. Be single-minded. Be persistent in practicing. As a layperson, this is what you need to do. When I was a layperson, I practiced dhamma every day: maintaining the five precepts, …
People in this generation are different from the previous generation of practitioners. In the past, when practitioners entered the temple, the first thing they did was request the precepts. But now, people come in wanting to learn how to develop mindfulness and wisdom right away. The starting points are different. Nowadays when people listening to …
I’ve been teaching meditation for over 30 years from when I was a layman and have taught countless students. Each meditation student aspires for something different. Most wish for happiness. Only few aspire to attain liberation. Wishing for happiness, requires one to perform good deeds such as being generous and keeping precepts. Is it good …
The reward for your practice is peacefulness. Nothing is more valuable or more blissful. External peace is easily obtained. You can stay alone at home and get it. You can easily gain verbal peace by refraining from being talkative and only speak when necessary. But inner peace is the hardest, because the mind is quick. …
These are easy things to talk about but hard to practice. Seeing the mind arise and fall so quickly sequentially. Asking, “The eye went to see, do you see that?” At that point so many mind moments have already passed. So let’s keep it simple. The Buddha taught cittanupassana. This is the practice for those who are not skilled in jhana, or deep concentration. Once we become quite skilled in observing the mind more and more and our mindfulness is sharp and with quality concentration, we will see the mind arising and falling at the senses. As we become an expert we will see clearly that all types of mind arise and fall. There aren’t any minds that arise and don’t fall. Seeing that the mind arises and falls we will gradually wash away wrong view of eternalism.
Keep practising and training. One day, we’ll see the truth, that these five aggregates are suffering. We’ll see this stage by stage. When we see it, we will release, and be liberated from suffering. In that moment, the mind will encounter true shanti, true peace, true happiness.
The term “natural phenomena” consists of only two departments, namely, the form and formless phenomena. Although there is another kind of phenomenon, which is called nirvāṇa or nibbāna, it is not accessible to a worldly person — thus, we should ignore this for now. We should continue observing the form and formless phenomena until we realize the Three Marks of Existence. We must observe them until the truth of the Three Marks of Existence is revealed. Therefore, what is critical in our observance lies in perceiving the underlying Three Marks of Existence within the form and formless phenomena.