So here we are again, back for our daily Dhamma, daily Dhamma talk.
As I said, when I was first practicing, we had a weekly talk.
Every week we were able to listen to the Dhamma as meditators, which is good because we didn't know anything about Buddhism.
So coming for the first time to meditate, it's good to at least have once a week.
The problem, of course, it was entirely in Thai.
So it
it ended up being a torture session for us instead.
A chance to see how long we could sit.
As we would start meditating, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and then, and that was difficult, but then they'd have us sit through a dhamma talk in a foreign language for an hour, hour and a half.
good practice that was our dhamma we got but eventually we'll have we'll be able to meet every day we'll try to keep this going maybe once once a week we'll stop so on Sundays when we have a internet session we'll stop
Otherwise, we'll try to have a talk.
It's good to have daily guidance, not just for meditators, but even actually more so for the community.
Because the meditator already gets an interview every day, but for the rest of us, we don't have this interview.
and it's living in a cave or living in the forest, living without any distractions, it's easy to start to lose your mindfulness.
So when we come back together here, even especially for those of us not on course, it's good to bring us back.
It's also good, I find it useful for myself, to bring me back on track.
having to collect my thoughts and remind myself of the Dhamma.
So it's not that it's something unwelcome.
But on the other hand, it shouldn't be our sole focus either.
The wisdom we try to find is within ourselves.
It has to come from within.
So why I say this is because some people become quite attached to the Dhamma discourses.
I have people email me and say that they watched all my videos, some of them twice.
And I guess they think that should be kind of a compliment.
But it feels more like a bit of an insult that you didn't get the point of the first one, so you went and watched the second one and the second and third until you watched all 400 or 500 videos that are out there.
Not an insult exactly, but it's kind of embarrassing that...
The result is only wanting to hear more, wanting to see more.
The Buddha, when he talked, he taught thinking, what can I say that will make them go away the quickest?
This is what he said.
I remember reading it somewhere.
I hope I'm not misquoting him, but it was quite powerful.
He doesn't teach thinking, what can I say that will make them stick around and want to listen to my talks more?
He would think, what can I say that will make them go away the quickest?
I'm not very good at that, I guess.
Because it's not just about saying things that people want to hear.
sometimes you have to say difficult things things that people don't want to hear often people are not interested in the teachings on vipassana or insight meditation because it's not it's not full of stories or
magical or mystical things or spiritual objects.
Vipassana is all about the body, the feelings, the mind.
It's about very mundane things that we are not so interested in learning about.
We want something more, something new.
These things are old and mundane, uninteresting, and difficult to hear, difficult to listen to teaching on inside meditation if someone's not meditating.
So sometimes people don't like it because they're looking for something interesting.
the problem is when you teach interesting things people want to want more but I don't mean to complain or scold or anything because as I said we need to have this direction and this harmony that comes from meeting together
the direction and the harmony.
So harmony is important, but we also have direction.
So our center is based on a specific teaching.
People think, well, if you want harmony, why not just, you can just sit around and discuss the Dhamma and discuss ideas.
But the problem with discussion is that
Many ideas leads to many different directions.
So this is why they have the senior monk or the senior person will give the talk.
And no one else can give a talk without the senior monk's permission.
This is the nivinaya.
Because we want to have the same direction.
Every center should have the same direction.
Not just harmony, but also direction.
So the senior monk is in charge of the Dhamma talk.
Anyway, just some random thoughts about listening to the Dhamma.
The word listening to the Dhamma is a wonderful phrase for us to remember.
Listening to the Dhamma.
The real way that we listen to the Dhamma is through our practice.
It's really a description of the meditation, of Satipatthana meditation.
The Satipatthana are the Dhamma, body, feelings, mind, and Dhamma.
These are all Dhamma.
These are all realities.
They're all the teachings of the Buddha.
When we listen to them, listening to reality, this is where our mind should be.
so on with the blessings tonight I will go through more blessings I don't mean I didn't want to come up here and scold anyone I didn't mean to I don't mean any of this as something negative we're here to do positive things we're here to find peace and happiness for this reason we should talk about blessings we should
talk about good things the good things that we want to practice and we want to develop and we want to attain good things in Buddhism are not like candy many people when they think of good things they think of things like candy or games or so on even though we don't think of candy and games particularly we think of things that are like candy and like games even in meditation we're always interested in the candy and in the games
The candy means we're interested in pleasant experience.
And so we always have, vipassana meditators are always afraid of the pleasant experiences because we're always scolding meditators.
Don't cling to them.
So they think, you can become very afraid of that.
The teacher's going to scold me if I have a pleasant experience.
There's nothing worth scolding about a pleasant experience.
It's just candy.
The problem is that many meditators are expecting or looking for the candy.
This isn't what we mean by good things.
This isn't what we mean by blessings.
We'll have to see as we go through, but I think what we'll see is not one of the blessings is happiness.
Happiness is not a blessing.
I have to think about it.
Maybe it is one of the blessings.
Maybe it's in there somewhere indirectly.
We'll go through them all.
But I think we'll see quite clearly that all 37 of them, none of them is happiness.
It's not one of them.
As I explained in the introduction, the blessings are things that destroy evil.
Mangala.
Manga is evil.
La means they destroy.
These are medicines.
They're not candy.
They're medicines.
A true blessing is not a candy, not a pleasant thing.
It may be pleasant to practice the blessings, but it may also be unpleasant to practice them.
It may be difficult to practice because it forces us to give up our attachments and our views and our beliefs.
It forces us to see things objectively.
It forces us to change our mind, to destroy the evil in our mind
destroy even liking, you know.
As I said, liking, you have to be careful.
So, and games also.
Many people think of the good things in meditation as the games.
Games like remembering your past lives, or reading people's minds, or flying through the air,
Just to name the extreme ones.
We play all sorts of games in our meditation.
Even jnana, even knowledge that we gain from meditation, we have to give up.
Even knowledge of impermanence, knowledge of self, we have to give it up.
Once you get it, you get it, give it up.
Anything you learn, people who learn things about their lives,
This is an upakilesa, very strange, that knowledge should be an upakilesa.
People look at the upakilesa and they lose faith in this kind of teaching because these are all good things, the upakilesa.
They are good things, but they're not mangala, they're not blessings.
They're not good for anything.
They're good in a conceptual sense in terms of being positive, conceived as positive.
But they're not good for anything.
Even when you have some profound insight into reality or your life, it doesn't do anything.
Or it's not to be clung to.
It doesn't help you to...
It doesn't do anything for you in the next instance.
Even if you gain knowledge of impermanence or suffering or non-suffering, it did something, it helped you, but that's finished.
That knowledge is not going to help you now.
It has changed you.
But once it changed you, that was one moment.
And that moment is gone.
And why it arose?
It arose because of your practice.
So the Mangalas are the practice.
All of the good things that we get will come as a result of the Mangalas.
They aren't Mangalas themselves.
They aren't blessings.
The blessings are the practice that we undertake.
So we've gone through several of them already.
Now we go on to the third stanza.
To have much knowledge.
Much knowledge is considered to be a blessing.
and we hear a lot of Buddhists kind of talk about it as though it were a curse and I sometimes think of it as a curse as well because when you learn a lot then you have to teach it and so we complain and some people are even afraid of it and often are averse to it or deride it
when they hear about a monk who has much learning or so on they immediately think that it can't be someone who practices meditation and this is because often that's the case a monk who dedicates their life to learning will never have time for meditation and so
Because we start by thinking better to meditate than to study.
So study a little bit but meditate a lot.
But then it evolves into this idea that too much study is a bad thing.
And it's not really true.
If you study without practice it's a bad thing.
But studying is an incredible blessing.
It's not the blessing of practice for sure.
But to have someone who knows these things and to be someone who knows these things is a great blessing for yourselves and for other people.
And it gets a little bit hypocritical where we want to go and ask these questions from the monks who have learned, but we don't want to learn ourselves.
So we use these things.
We want to read Bhikkhu Bodhi's translations, but we never want to learn Pali ourselves.
That's a waste of time, right?
But if Bhikkhu Bodhi stopped translating these books, if he didn't know Pali, we would cry out and, oh, please, please, please.
Are you going to learn Pali?
No, no, no.
Waste of time.
I'm just, you know, Buddha taught practice.
It's not really...
In Buddhism, we look at it as there being two duties.
We have the duty of practice, insight, vipassana-dhura.
But there's also ganta-dhura, the duty of study.
It's our duty to study.
You can't expect
everyone else to do the studying for you and so you can read all the Buddha's teachings and not have to do any studying for yourself it's dishonest and it won't get you to where you want to go because it's dishonest you want all the benefits but no duties the point is that someone has to study this is why it's a great blessing to study
We just shouldn't expect that someone else does all the studying for us and we can do all the practicing, right?
You see that.
We want to buy all these books.
We think, well, he'll sell them and then we'll give him money for it.
But then you think, what does Bhikkhu Bodhi need money for?
You think he really wants the money?
Just an example.
Do you think these monks, are they ordained to get money?
Can you really replace practice with money?
We have to understand the blessing of study.
We understand it, but we understand it in the wrong way.
We think someone else will do it for us.
This is not correct.
Everyone should do the study.
Another problem with too much studying is if it's not done in the correct way or under a teacher, it can lead to great problems as well.
One of the things about expecting other people to do it for us is then we
the Dhamma becomes too available someone does all the work for us translating these suttas and it becomes so available that without any practice we can study without any practice we can learn the Buddha's teaching I was quite fortunate that I went to practice meditation without having done any studying I think now I'm very fortunate
It was unfortunate that I hadn't found Buddhism a lot earlier.
But having gone to the meditation center really, really totally ignorant, I didn't have a clue even about the five precepts.
And it was quite a shock to hear the first thing they wanted me to do at the meditation center was keep some precepts and even take a ceremony.
Well, not in a bad way, but it was like, oh, really?
You need morality to...
I can't smoke marijuana and meditate?
I can't kill if I'm going to meditate?
Just to...
I didn't have any clue about these things.
But the good side of it was that the learning that I did then was very much in line with the
meditation practice some people don't do that and they study a lot and so they get many ideas and they write books and they do too much studying and not enough practice and their monastic life or their Buddhist life is not based around the meditation practice or they do more studying than meditation
And so they get many ideas.
The big problem is that now there are many different ideas of how the Buddha taught.
So we have these commentaries in the Theravada tradition that are supposed to do that for us, that are supposed to give us an explanation of these things.
And maybe we disagree with them at times, or maybe we don't understand them at times, but follow them.
And I think this is incredibly important and I'm not sure exactly how to explain it, but the point is that study is not the goal and certainly arguing about the meaning is not the goal.
The goal is to practice to see what is the truth of the meaning.
And so if we argue and have views about these things, it's a waste of our time.
If in our practice we realize that something the commentary said is not according to our practice, then we have to take it up as an issue.
But for the most part, we have a very strong tradition of how does that mean?
Anyway, maybe this is a little bit off topic.
Really, for our meditation practice, bahusaccha means we have to have much knowledge of realities.
One example of this sort of thing is people read the suttas and do get a lot of knowledge, but they never focus on creating a path for themselves, or they never focus on the essence.
So you might read the suttas, but you never memorize the four foundations of mindfulness.
So when we come to practice meditation, we have to go the other way around.
We have to memorize and memorize what's most important.
We have to memorize the four foundations of mindfulness.
Our practice should be in this way.
It should be that we memorize like we memorize a map.
Here we are looking at the map and we memorize the way to go.
Because our intention is not to learn or to study or to think.
Our intention is to practice, is to follow, is to realize the truth for ourselves.
So Bahusaccha is doing things like memorizing the four foundations of mindfulness.
So that when we're in our practice,
we will be able to recognize right away this is body.
So we will remember this is how to practice walking meditation and sitting meditation.
That we don't just do walking, we have to know kacchantova gacchamiti bhajanati.
We have to know kacchami, I am walking.
When we sit, we have to know I am sitting.
We have to have a clear idea of the
the path that we're supposed to follow the Buddha called the four foundations of mindfulness like fence posts he said this is our range, our pasture we have to set them up like fence posts so we remember where our range is we have to know this is our boundary
Because he said like a quail, if it goes outside of its range, it will be caught up by an eagle.
But if it stays in its familiar grounds where it knows all of the places, then it won't get caught.
It will be able to dive into holes and not get caught by the eagle.
If we go outside, we'll get caught by Mara.
If we go outside the four foundations of mindfulness, we will get caught by Mahārāja.
And the meaning is we have to memorize these things and we have to keep them in our mind.
This is our practice.
Whenever we can, we have to remember these things.
Body, feelings, mind, this kind of thing.
And then we have to become full of the knowledge that comes from the practice itself.
Bahusaccha doesn't just mean book knowledge.
Though in the strict sense that's really what is being talked about.
The knowledge that we gain from thinking or the knowledge that we gain from books is really, I think it goes without saying, we all understand it's nothing compared to the knowledge that comes from meditating.
Because knowledge in books is this kind of knowledge that excites you.
It can create more craving, more views, more attachment, more mental activity.
Knowledge from meditation is exactly the opposite.
Even people who read the Buddha's teachings become so inspired and excited and actually attached to it.
People who listen to Dhamma talks
The Sri Lankan people are always listening to Dhamma talk.
In Thailand, in the West, no.
In the West, people will download hours and hours of Dhamma talk.
And because it's inspiring, it's exciting.
And meditation, when you practice meditation, it's not so inspiring.
The knowledge we get from meditation is too uninspiring
Everything in meditation will make you more and more uninspired.
This is really .
You become disenchanted with suffering.
You'll be disenchanted with everything.
All sankharas, everything is the same.
whether it's here in the forest or back at home, whether it's seeing or hearing or smelling, whether it's good things or bad things.
The knowledge that we gain from meditation is uninspired.
It's quite different from the knowledge that comes from learning and from thinking.
The knowledge is the knowledge that we gain right here from sitting.
It's the knowledge that you gain if you start listening to my voice as just sound.
Rising and ceasing.
As I said, not according to your desires.
You say hearing, hearing.
You see how jarring it is.
How stressful it is.
How stressful it is to cling, to expect, even expect the sound to be smooth and flowing.
Even to like the sound.
The knowledge of meditation is the knowledge of this, here, now.
It becomes quite uninspiring, because everything is changing and arising and ceasing.
Nothing is satisfying.
so why is this a blessing?
because this is what allows us to this is what cleanses our mind of our attachment as long as we see one thing or any one thing as special and try to cling to it or find happiness in it we'll never we'll never become our mind will never become pure we'll
We'll always be seeking, always be needing that.
Happiness is dependent on that.
So the more we can see, the more we can see that things are changing and unsatisfying and uncontrollable, the better.
The more
the more boredom that arises, the more excruciating it becomes, the better.
Because the more we'll let go, the less we'll depend on the external world.
We're trying so much to depend on, to make the world outside something we can depend on, to make our experiences something we can depend on.
So we're never independent.
We want to be able to depend on these things.
That they'll always be like this or like that.
One woman on Skype, she said, am I ever going to be happy?
I said, well, you might be happy.
But it won't make you happy.
If you want to be happy, you have to know you can't be happy all the time.
That's the only way.
You have to become independent.
The only way to become independent is to let go, to see some pretty uninspiring things, to become uninspired with impermanent experience.
Okay, so Bahu Satcha, we have to learn, we do have to study.
But our most important study is the study of reality.
It is meditation, Bahu Satcha.
Sipang.
Sipang means trade, a skill.
And so this is the kind of thing that you might attribute more to lay life.
Because it is a blessing to have a trade or to have a skill, to have something you can do, something that is useful.
But this isn't something that destroys evil things.
This destroys...
worldly discomfort and worldly troubles so if you're poor and then you apply your skill you can escape poverty but the word Sipa we can apply it to meditation even in meditation in the Buddha's teaching you need skill you need to be clever
Meditation isn't just about walking and sitting and applying the technique.
You have to be clever.
Sometimes when you're walking and you start to become distracted you have to know that you should sit.
Or even if sitting is too distracting you can lie down.
And you have to be clever about it.
You have to know the technique of it.
So walking isn't just walking back and forth.
One time, my teacher scolded me about this.
There was this forest monk who was a student of our teacher as well, but he was a little bit crazy.
He had his own ideas.
And so a friend of another monk, a young monk, he
He said, last night I went walking.
He did walking meditation with .. What's his name?
I don't know.
means stop.
I don't know.
And it was great.
We walked all night.
Oh, that sounds nice.
And so he said, come on.
Come with us.
And so we went with him.
And it turns out that what we did is we walked.
walked quite quickly back and forth, back and forth, long walks, from one end of the monastery courtyard to the other, walking and talking.
And it was quite fun, actually, because we weren't tired at all, and we could stay up all night and just walk back and forth.
He gave great energy.
And so I went and asked my teacher if this was a suitable sort of practice.
And he said, he thought that it was my idea or something.
And he said, oh, that's the way of foreigners.
He said, foreign style exercise, he said.
Just exercise.
He said, you have to have a technique.
Walking isn't to get somewhere.
Walking is to be aware of the dhatus.
Be aware of vayodhatu, tejodhatu, apodhatu.
Patvidhatu.
Not apodhatu, but patvidhatu.
The hardness of touching the ground.
The softness of your foot.
The heat.
When you lift your foot, it feels cool.
That's tejodhatu.
You move, it feels cool.
You put it down, it feels hot again.
You touch the ground, you feel the heat.
When you feel the movement, the pressure in the leg, that's the vayodhati.
The pressure coming up, lifting it up, the pressure releasing when you put it down, vayodhati.
So you need a technique to avoid mindful prostration.
Having a technique and having a knowledge of the technique of meditation.
If you see how inspiring this course is, how useful it is, how portable it is.
I've seen this same technique applied all over the world and it's quite portable.
If a person learns this technique, not only can they help themselves, but they can help others, but even just for yourself.
When I go off and do a retreat by myself, I know I won't get lost, because I know I have ten days, one, two, three, four.
And as long as I stick by that, I can't easily get lost, because I have a sipa, I have a technique, a skill.
So when you've learned the skill of this meditation technique, it's quite portable.
And it's something you'll find.
What was amazing was after I went to practice meditation and still had very little idea about Buddhism, there were a couple of people who heard that I had gone to practice meditation and wanted to learn something from me.
And I was actually able to lead two people
I said to them, look, I'm not a teacher and I don't really have an understanding of this, but I can go through the basics.
And so I led two people all the way through, all the way up to sixth walking step.
And it changed both of their lives.
They're both now quite strong in Buddhism.
I lost contact with both of them, but from my understanding, they're both very much into the practice.
This is sipa, having a technique.
And knowing the technique in the meditation.
It's a great blessing to not just think, I'm going to sit in meditation and learn my own way and become enlightened.
It doesn't really, it's not something that just comes to you naturally.
If you don't learn the technique and practice it, some technique, any technique, and apply it diligently.
Now this is, if you look in the Visuddhimagga, it's full of technique.
I've even heard people who practice the technique in the Visuddhimagga to remember their past lives and can actually verify that the technique works that they were able to remember their past lives as a result of the Visuddhimagga there are people who follow all the techniques in there these are tried and tested and if you learn these skills you can do a lot with them it's a great blessing because it keeps you on track and it helps you guide others as well which is a great blessing for them
To have a discipline that is well-trained, well-trained discipline.
So we talk about the Vinaya.
The Buddha said the Vinaya is the lifeblood of the Dhamma, or it's the support of the Dhamma.
The reason why he instated the Vinaya is in order to protect the Dhamma.
He said just like flowers on a raft, if you put flowers on a raft and set them adrift in the ocean,
Before long, the flowers are going to blow off the raft, blown by the wind.
But if you tie them up, you take a string and you tie them around the flowers into a bouquet.
And you can see, even though the wind, they get tossed about in the ocean,
In Thailand or in India, they put the flowers out on the river.
And you see, if you tie them together, they don't get blown away.
He said, in the same way, the Vinaya is for this purpose.
Because the Buddha told that in other times, there were Buddhas who didn't instate the Vinaya.
And as a result, the sasana of those Buddhas didn't last long.
Because even though there were arahants,
There was no way to develop a community.
There was no chance to develop a community.
Without the community rules, there was no development.
Many things we should understand in this way.
For the continuation of the sāsana, we need organization.
Lately we've been talking about our organization, our non-profit organization, our monastic organization.
And the discussion is kind of philosophical, just asking the philosophical question of what is the use of organizing?
This is the meaning of the Vinaya.
The reason it's a blessing is because it keeps us organized, it keeps us together.
The benefit is that this asana will last longer.
This asana will be a stay.
Not just for the benefit of others, but for our benefit as well.
We think we're just going to practice meditation and not pay attention to the rules or any sort of organization.
And then before we know it, we have nowhere to meditate.
We have no opportunity to meditate because we're tossed about in the wind.
We have no community.
This development of a community is not something easy.
We've tried many times and failed.
I've failed miserably.
It's something that takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of care to develop.
It requires harmony and discipline.
So discipline is something that works very much on a worldly level.
If our community can stay disciplined and stay focused,
and organized if everyone is on track and doing their part and not just expecting but also giving I was saying that if you expect to get teachings well you have to be careful because you'll be expected to give them eventually this isn't a bad this shouldn't be a scary thing it's something that we should take as our burden that we've
We've become a part of this organization.
So discipline plays a very important part in organizing because it creates harmony and it creates peace.
If you've ever been to a monastery where they don't have this, then you can see how crazy and how unorganized and how much strife and disharmony there is.
But this isn't the core of the Vinaya.
This isn't the core of the discipline that we are trying to attain.
So of course, in Buddhism, there's always these two levels, the worldly level and then the ultimate level.
On the ultimate level, we're trying to develop a disciplined mind.
Our mind is fickle.
Our mind is undisciplined.
And this is the reason why we suffer, the reason why we cause suffering, the reason why we are defiled in the mind, because of a lack of discipline.
So our training, one way of understanding our training is as a discipline.
Our minds will become more like a soldier, more straight, more clear, more precise, more disciplined, more skilled.
The idea is that our mind should become so disciplined, so skilled that it
has a very simple relationship to the rest of the world, to its experience.
That experience will just be direct.
When we see or hear or smell or taste or feel or think, it will be just what it is.
There won't be judging, there won't be liking or disliking.
There won't be any wants or needs or
dissatisfaction.
Our mind will become so perfect that we'll begin to just see things for what they are.
We have to be disciplined in order to do this.
We have to be skilled.
We have to work hard.
Part of the discipline is the discipline that brings us to this.
If we want to have a disciplined mind, well, we have to begin in a very disciplined way.
We can't get sidetracked by good things or bad things.
We can't become sidetracked by views or opinions or ideas of how things should be or could be or would be.
We can't get sidetracked by problems or complaints
We have to have a disciplined mind to not worry or concern ourselves with external affairs.
It's very difficult in organizing a community.
It's very easy to get sidetracked by administrative things and so on.
This is a good warning that we should be disciplined, and we should remember what is most important.
So, minna yo ca susikito.
And finally, subhasita jaya vaja.
So, I don't know whether any of this has been subhasita, but this is what is a blessing.
When we speak, that is what is well spoken.
We have to be very careful when we speak.
It's very easy to speak poorly spoken words.
It's much more difficult to speak well spoken words.
Whatever speech is well spoken, it's a blessing.
So in essence, the Buddha is explaining to us what sort of speech is a blessing speech.
A blessing speech or a good speech is that speech which is a blessing, that speech which purifies the minds of the people who hear it or purifies one's own mind.
And one should purify one's own speech
One's speech should be for the purpose of purifying one's own mind.
So we should train ourselves to engage only in speech that is good, speech that is pure.
Not so easy.
On a general level, Subhasita just means giving good advice.
So we can say that a Dhamma talk like this, in a general sense, we can say this was Subhasita, this Vajra, this teaching.
If it's something that's about the Buddha's teaching, this is good speech.
The Buddha said that when you meet together, you should either talk about the Dhamma or stay silent.
because this is the point of the speech.
Good speech is that speech which leads one closer to the Dhamma.
We shouldn't underestimate the power of the Dhamma.
We shouldn't underestimate the power of
of the teaching we shouldn't just the Buddha said listen to a thousand words and not get anything out of it even one word that gives us some meaning should be enough is the better speech meaning is when we shouldn't miss the blessing that comes in the speech we don't
Even just the four foundations of mindfulness.
One good example, I was teaching on Skype and I gave a very basic explanation of the three characteristics because it was clear that this person wasn't understanding them and asked, was that of any help?
And he said, no, not really.
because it seemed very basic what I was saying, so I had to explain again that, listen, don't ignore what's being said here.
It sounds very simple to say that everything inside us and the world around us is impermanent.
Very simple words.
Everything around us and the world, everything inside of us is suffering, is unsatisfying.
Everything around us and inside of us is
is not under our control.
It's non-self.
You can go in one ear and out the other ear.
So the Buddha was absolutely correct, of course, to point out that this is a blessing, that we should see the blessing in it.
We should see the power of speech, the power of words, the power of teachings.
the power of knowledge of the four satipatthana we shouldn't just take it as something to read and keep in our minds and read more and more and more or listen in once and listen more and more or so on we should find the meaning in it and put it into practice so these are some more blessings for us
The important point is that the biggest blessing is our practice, is the development of insight, whether it be the truth that comes from it, whether it be the skill that comes from it, whether it be the discipline that comes from it, or whether it be the teaching that comes from it, whether it be the
teaching itself.
All of these things, the important thing is the benefit that it brings for the practice.
Our knowledge should be for the benefit.
Our knowledge should be based on the practice.
Our skills should be applied to the practice.
Our discipline should be applied to the practice.
And our speech should be
put into practice for the development of insight and wisdom.
Anyway, that's all.
I apologize for being somewhat scattered because of the minor cold, but I think it's getting better.
Anyway, that's all for tonight.
So now we can go back and do our practice, continue on.
So everyone can go where they want to.