notes on the Dhamma

 Jain's Jhāna scripture excerpted from Gabriel's article Why should we assume that Jains practiced a meditation with thought and investigation?  Arbel (2016, 34) observes that of the Buddhist meditation vocabulary   only vitakka and vicāra appear in ancient Jain texts.  The Jain Tattvārtha Sūtra, describing different kinds of dhyāna (Pāli Jhāna), says in sutras 9.43-44 that  vitarka (Pāli vitakka) is scriptural knowledge (śruta) and that  vicāra is a shifting between the object, its word, and its activity (Tatia 1994, 242).  In 9.42 it also states, however, that there is meditation without vicāra.  It has not been sufficiently researched how old the ancient Jain literature is,   but this could be another hint that meditation with vitakka and vicāra   were common among ascetics of the Buddha’s time. Frank comment That's exactly how it works in the EBT. sati ("mindfulness") remembers Dharma scriptural language in the form of...

Ven. sabbamitta wrote on sutta central: https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/are-the-topics-for-recollection-just-recollections/32184 I remember that Bhante @sujato—I don’t remember in which thread—mentioned something along the lines that usually laypeople are taught just the topics for recollection like those on the Triple Gem etc. And I was wondering about the word “just”. Especially when reading AN 5.179, I doubt that these recollections are just such a simple practice. There, they are called “blissful meditations in the present life belonging to the higher mind”—a phrase normally used for the jhānas. Does that mean that the recollections are here equated to the jhānas, or does it at least mean that they, when well developed and perfected, lead into jhāna? I am also curious what Venerables @Sunyo and @Vaddha think about this. (I often enjoy reading your discussions, and just would like to thank you here for these! :heart:)   frankk responds (on my blog, I'm not a member on sutta...

  KN Dhp 183 – (do good, no evil, clean mind) ♦ sabba-pāpassa a-karaṇaṃ, To avoid all evil, kusalassa upasampadā . to cultivate good, ♦ sa-citta-pariyodapanaṃ, and to cleanse one’s mind— etaṃ buddhāna sāsanaṃ. this is the teaching of the Buddhas. https://suebrewton.com/2016/01/31/no-that-is-not-what-abraham-lincoln-said/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email excerpt: ✓ “When I do good I feel good, when I do bad I feel bad, and that’s my religion.” Unknown Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life , volume III, chapter XIV William H. Herndon and Jesse William Weik According to Herndon (Lincoln’s friend and law partner), Lincoln attributes this quote to an old man named Glenn in Indiana.  Since there have been multitudes of people named Glenn in Indiana and no other identifying information is provided, we can only attribute this quote to unknown. 

  In case anyone else uses libre office calc or Microsoft excel spreadsheet to do pali + english translation (so things are lined up neatly side by side) I frequently will cut an entire column (for example English) and paste into a text editor like notepad++ (plain text editor but with richer regex)  do some editing in notepad++ then copy that back into the spreadsheet. The bug is,  the English text I have in the sample above, somehow either the brackets (), {},  [], or *********, or perhaps tabs or some other invisible characters,  or some combination of all of the above causes the copy buffer clipboard, when moving from notepad++ back into excel spreadsheet, Will read that entire block of 12 lines back into the spreadsheet as ONE single line. Which screws up the pali + english side by side alignment for the entire file. I have the entire AN 5 collection of suttas (hundreds) at  8000+ lines of pali + english, and it was a nightmare to figure out what was t...

  https://www.reddit.com/r/theravada/comments/19edw82/is_there_gonna_be_absolute_lack_of_awareness_of/ level 5 lucid24-frankk · just now Imagine you wear permanent googles filled with muddy water. If you pacify your movements, the mud settles down and you can see clearly. How can you ever do vipassana/insight if you can't see clearly? The Buddha's definition of first jhāna is the pacification of body and mind needed to be able to lucidly see, to the extent that chasing objects of sensual desire leads to suffering, and that letting go of that desire leads to physical and mental joy. It's a huge milestone in seeing the inherent suffering in existence and how most beings pursue happiness. Non-Buddhist and corrupt Buddhist definitions of jhāna do not address that problem. You can be a yoga master who can stay in a disembodied frozen stupor for 8 hours at a time, but when you emerge, you still have your cravings, delusions, anger, etc. Many monks who mastered this kind of disemb...

  Posted by u/TheWayBytheway 4 days ago 4Foundations of mindfulness(clarification needed) Question Although the explanation of 4foundations is simple, I am not sure if I understand it correctly. “Awareness of the mind in the mind”. Why is it not said just “Awareness of the mind.” ? If they are not the same thing, what would make them different? Also, “awareness of phenomena of the mind in the mind”. I need the same clarification. I also need to understand the difference between awareness of “objects of the mind(phenomena)” and awareness of “the mind” itself. Everything the mind perceives is an object. Isn’t it? So when we say “awareness of the mind” we are actually referring to its objects. So what is the difference? Please either explain to me or introduce me a good video or book that targets my questions. Thank you. level 1 lucid24-frankk · 3 days ago this short explanation with sutta references clears up many of the misconceptions on the topic: https://lucid24.org/tped/l/lll/ind...