now_know

VIP免费

2024-12-22 0 0 133.26KB 54 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

E-mail: bdea@buddhanet.net

Web site: www.buddhanet.net

Buddha Dharma Education Association Inc.

Ven. Ajahn Sumedho

Now is the Knowing

For FREE Distribution

Publications from Amaravati are for free

distribution. In most cases this is made possible

through offerings from individuals or groups, given

specifically for the publication of Buddhist

teachings. Further information is available from the

address below.

Sabbadānaü dhammadānaü jināti

‘The gift of Dhamma surpasses all other gifts.’

Several editions of Now is the Knowing have already

been published, under the direction of the Sangha

of the forest monastery Wat Pah Nanachat in

North-East Thailand. This edition was retypeset and

reprinted in Britain in I989.

Published by

Amaravati Publications

Amaravati Buddhist Centre

Great Gaddesden

Hemel Hempstead

Hertfordshire

HP1 3BZ

England

ISBN I 870205 05 7

Print management by

Personalised Print, Basingstoke, England

Tel. (0256) 52434

CCOONNTTEENNTTSS

Buddha Dhamma Sangha 4

Anapanasati 18

Happiness, Unhappiness and Nibbana 32

The Buddha said that the greatest gift is the gift

of Dhamma. This small book represents the wish of

some of those fortunate enough to have received

Dhamma teachings from Venerable Ajahn

Sumedho to share them with others.

A certain amount of editing of the talks was felt

necessary so as to translate the free form of direct

speech into a more ordered printed record. This

was always done judiciously and with great respect.

The second section, ‘Anapanasati’, is in fact

composed of passages from three or four different

talks on the subject of mindfulness of breathing. It

seemed very useful to have so much pertinent

advice gathered in a single place.

It is by sincerely using the Ajahn’s teachings as

‘tools to reflect on the way things are’ that we can

begin to repay our great debt of gratitude to him.

May we all constantly do so.

The Sangha, Wat Pah Nanachat

When people ask, ‘What do you have to do to

become a Buddhist?’, we say that we take refuge in

Buddha Dhamma Sangha. And to take refuge we

recite a formula in the Pali language:

Buddham saranam gacchami

I go to the Buddha for refuge

Dhammam saranam gacchami

I go to the Dhamma for refuge

Sangham saranam gacchami

I go to the Sangha for refuge.

As we practise more and more and begin to

realize the profundity of the Buddhist Teachings, it

becomes a real joy to take these refuges, and even

just their recitation inspires the mind. After

twenty-two years as a monk, I still like to chant

‘Buddham saranam gacchami’ — in fact I like it

more than I did twenty-one years ago — because

then it didn’t really mean anything to me, I just

chanted it because I had to, because it was part of

the tradition. Merely taking refuge verbally in the

Buddha doesn’t mean you take refuge in anything: a

parrot could be trained to say ‘Buddham saranam

gacchami’, and it would probably be as meaningful

to a parrot as it is to many Buddhists. These words

are for reflection, looking at them and actually

investigating what they mean: what ‘refuge’ means,

what ‘Buddha’ means. When we say, ‘I take refuge

in the Buddha,’ what do we mean by that? How can

we use that so it is not just a repetition of nonsense

syllables, but something that really helps to remind

us, gives us direction and increases our devotion,

our dedication to the path of the Buddha?

The word ‘Buddha’ is a lovely word — it

means ‘The one who knows’— and the first refuge

is in Buddha as the personification of wisdom. Un-

personified wisdom remains too abstract for us: we

can’t conceive a bodiless, soul-less wisdom, and so

as wisdom always seems to have a personal quality

to it, using Buddha as its symbol is very useful.

We can use the word Buddha to refer to

Gotama, the founder of what is now known as

Buddhism, the historical sage who attained

Parinibbana1 in India 2,500 years ago, the teacher of

the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path,

teachings from which we still benefit today. But

when we take refuge in the Buddha, it doesn’t mean

that we take refuge in some historical prophet, but

in that which is wise in the universe, in our minds,

that which is not separate from us but is more real

than anything we can conceive with the mind or

experience through the senses. Without any

Buddha-wisdom in the universe, life for any length

of time would be totally impossible; it is the

1 The dissolution of the Five Aggregates, in common

parlance the ‘death’, of an enlightened one.

Buddha-wisdom that protects. We call it Buddha-

wisdom, other people can call it other things if they

want, these are just words. We happen to use the

words of our tradition. We’re not going to argue

about Pali words, Sanskrit words, Hebrew, Greek,

Latin, English or any other, we’re just using the term

Buddha-wisdom as a conventional symbol to help

remind us to be wise, to be alert, to be awake.

Many forest bhikkhus in the North-East of

Thailand use the word ‘Buddho’ as their meditation

object. They use it as a kind of koan. Firstly, they

calm the mind by following the inhalations and

exhalations using the syllables BUD-DHO, and then

begin to contemplate, ‘What is Buddho, the ‘one

who knows’?’ ‘What is the knowing?’

When I used to travel around the North-East of

Thailand on tudong I liked to go and stay at the

monastery of Ajahn Fun. Ajahn Fun was a

much-loved and deeply respected monk, the

teacher of the Royal Family, and he was so popular

that he was constantly receiving guests. I would sit

at his kuti [hut] and hear him give the most amazing

kind of Dhamma talks, all on the subject of

‘Buddho’— as far as I could see, it was all that he

taught. He could make it into a really profound

meditation, whether for an illiterate farmer or an

elegant, western-educated Thai aristocrat. The

main part of his teaching was to not just

mechanically repeat ‘Buddho’, but to reflect and

investigate, to awaken the mind to really look into

the ‘Buddho’, ‘the one who knows’ really

investigate its beginning, its end, above and below,

so that one’s whole attention was stuck onto it.

When one did that, ‘Buddho’ became something

that echoed through the mind. One would

investigate it, look at it, examine it before it was said

and after it was said, and eventually one would start

listening to it and hear beyond the sound, until one

heard the silence.

A refuge is a place of safety, and so when

superstitious people would come to my teacher

Ajahn Chah, wanting charmed medallions or little

talismans to protect them from bullets and knives,

ghosts and so on, he would say, ‘Why do you want

things like that? The only real protection is taking

refuge in the Buddha. Taking refuge in the Buddha

is enough.’ But their faith in Buddha usually wasn’t

quite as much as their faith in those silly little

medallions. They wanted something made out of

bronze and clay, stamped and blessed. This is what

is called taking refuge in bronze and clay, taking

refuge in superstition, taking refuge in that which is

truly unsafe and cannot really help us.

Today in modern Britain we find that generally

people are more sophisticated. They donÆt take

refuge in magic charms, they take refuge in things

like the Westminster Bank — but that is still taking

refuge in something that offers no safety. Taking

refuge in the Buddha, in wisdom, means that we

have a place of safety. When there is wisdom, when

we act wisely and live wisely, we are truly safe. The

conditions around us might change. We can’t

guarantee what will happen to the material

standard of living, or that the Westminster Bank will

survive the decade. The future remains unknown

and mysterious, but in the present, by taking refuge

in the Buddha we have that presence of mind now

to reflect on and learn from life as we live it.

Wisdom doesn’t mean having a lot of

knowledge about the world; we don’t have to go to

university and collect information about the world

to be wise. Wisdom means knowing the nature of

conditions as we’re experiencing them. It is not just

being caught up in reacting to and absorbing into

the conditions of our bodies and minds out of habit,

out of fear, worry, doubt, greed and so on, but it is

using that ‘Buddho’, that ‘one who knows,’ to

observe that these conditions are changing. It is the

knowing of that change that we call Buddha and in

which we take refuge. We make no claims to

Buddha as being ‘me’ or ‘mine’. We don’t say, ‘I am

Buddha,’ but rather, ‘I take refuge in Buddha.’ It is a

way of humbly submitting to that wisdom, being

aware, being awake.

Although in one sense taking refuge is

something we are doing all the time, the Pali

formula we use is a reminder — because we forget,

because we habitually take refuge in worry, doubt,

fear, anger, greed and so on. The Buddha-image is

similar; when we bow to it we don’t imagine that it

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

eBUDDHANET'SBOOKLIBRARYE-mail:bdea@buddhanet.netWebsite:www.buddhanet.netBuddhaDharmaEducationAssociationInc.Ven.AjahnSumedhoNowistheKnowingNowistheKnowingForFREEDistributionPublicationsfromAmaravatiareforfreedistribution.Inmostcasesthisismadepossiblethroughofferingsfromindividualsorgroups,givenspec...

展开>> 收起<<

now_know.pdf

共54页,预览11页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

now_know

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: