The Buddha didn’t say nibbana is the ultimate equanimity. He said it’s the ultimate happiness. Equanimity is a byproduct.

"We hear about awakened people who are extremely equanimous. But it’s not the case that the equanimity is the essence of their attainment. After all, the Buddha didn’t say nirvana is the ultimate equanimity. He said it’s the ultimate happiness. But the fact that awakened people have a basis for their happiness that doesn’t depend on conditions: That allows them to look at conditioned reality with a lot more equanimity. They’re not trying to feed on it anymore; they don’t need it for their happiness. So the equanimity is a byproduct."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Equanimity Isn't Everything"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha talks about dispassion, disenchantment, equanimity — and to us it sounds cold. But everything in the Buddha’s teachings is put in the service of freedom.

"About a year after I returned to America, I was teaching meditation to a group up in Orange County and I gave my first interviews. One of the people in the retreat started her interview out by saying, “Buddhism: It’s all about love isn’t it?” I was taken aback. I said, “Well, no, it’s all about freedom.” She was taken aback. We come from a culture in which love is very highly valued — not only as a social virtue, but also as a religious one. So it’s a little shocking when we come to another tradition where it’s not valued so highly. The Buddha talks about dispassion, disenchantment, equanimity — and to us it sounds cold. But everything in the Buddha’s teachings is put in the service of freedom. As the Buddha once said, all of his teachings have a single taste: the taste of release. This means that all of his teachings on goodwill on the one hand, and equanimity, dispassion, disenchantment on the other, are all put in the service of freedom — realizing, on the one ha...
Read more

If you were to wait for the world to be happy and peaceful, with everybody behaving nicely, and only then you would meditate, or then you would be able to get your mind to settle down, you would die first.

"So for the sake of your own freedom, you’ve got to let go of any ill will based on the horrible things that people have done. You remind yourself that it’s for your own true well-being that you’re developing these thoughts [of mettā]. You want to be able to trust yourself so that you don’t do or say or think unskillful things around people who are difficult. After all, you live in a world where almost everybody is difficult one way or another. If you were to wait for the world to be happy and peaceful, with everybody behaving nicely, and only then you would meditate, or then you would be able to get your mind to settle down, you would die first." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Heart Set on Goodwill"
Read more

Ajahn Chah story: The Equanimity of a Water Buffalo

"There’s a story they tell about a monk who once stayed with Ajaan Chah during the rains retreat. Half of the roof of his hut blew off in a rain storm, and as Ajaan Chah was later walking around the monastery to check on the storm damage, he noticed that half of the roof had blown off and that the monk was simply sleeping in that half of the hut that was still roofed. Ajaan Chah asked him, “Why are you doing this? Why aren’t you fixing your hut?” The monk said, ”I’m trying to practice equanimity.” Ajaan Chah’s response was: “That’s not the equanimity that the Buddha taught, that’s the equanimity of a water buffalo,” or we in English would say, it’s the equanimity of a cow. The point here is that the Buddha didn’t teach us just to be passive about things, or just to accept things. The basic concept of the path is the difference between skillful and unskillful, and there are times when simple equanimity is not skillful." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Equanimity of a Cow...
Read more