Essays
An essay a day... will show you the way!
If you get into a habit of reading these essays regularly, over time you'll notice your perspective changing and thereby your life.
If you get into a habit of reading these essays regularly, over time you'll notice your perspective changing and thereby your life.
This is a compilation of essays authored anonymously by a highly venerated Buddhist monk―a forest monk―residing mostly in secluded forest kuṭis. (The ones grouped under the title Noble Eightfold Path are based on an interview with him.) The essays provide guidance for correcting oneself, making adjustments to one’s path of practice, and realigning it with the true middle-path that can bear fruit. Most importantly, they offer practical tips on how the foremost ‘letting go’ should be pursued in the strictest sense of the term. The essays coming under Giving Up 2 and 3 profoundly try to reinforce our understanding of some of the constituent steps of the Noble Eightfold Path, in particular Right View.
Editorial note: Where essays and the book-version are both available, we recommend that you give preference to the essays, for they, with latest editorial revisions by translator, are the most up to date, whose book-version may be rendered obsolete.
How to enter the Noble Eightfold Path (4-5 minutes)
How to embark on Right View (4-5 minutes)
1. The confidence, the faith (10-12 minutes)
2. The belief in rebirth after death in accordance with phenomena of causality (4-5 minutes)
3. The belief in the causation of actions and their results, aka karma and karma-results (4 minutes)
4. The belief in rewards of generosity and morality (4-5 minutes)
5. The belief in the worthy qualities of the mother and father (3-4 minutes)
6. To believe there are spontaneously born beings―born without the instrumentality of parents (3-4 minutes)
7. To believe there have been noble venerated beings who attained the ‘fruits of the path’ (2-3 minutes)
The difference between Right View and Supermundane Right View (7-8 minutes)
Right Thought (6-7 minutes)
Right Speech (5-6 minutes)
Right Bodily Action and Right Livelihood (6-8 minutes)
Right Effort (4-5 minutes)
Right Mindfulness (4-5 minutes)
Right Concentration (4-5 minutes)
Practical Tips on Developing the Eightfold Path (9-12 minutes)
How a schoolchild can practise the Noble Eightfold Path (9-11 minutes)
Let there be no distance between nature and yourself (9-12 minutes)
Duties of a Layman (9-11 minutes)
The free environment (18-22 minutes)
Being the last one is invaluable (6-8 minutes)
Acquire an object for contemplation even from a sprat (4 minutes)
Accessories of Māra (5-7 minutes)
Māra Paṭipadā (the unenlightening way of practice) (8-10 minutes)
Hunger, too, is a blessing (7-9 minutes)
What the truest form of review and reflection means… (7-9 minutes)
Which path are we on? (15-19 minutes)
If the mind had lingered before her tears… (7-8 minutes)
The friend who gives you suffering (11-14 minutes)
Cannot swim holding hands with one another (2-3 minutes)
The book of paritta-discourses (2 minutes)
The beard and the mirror (5-6 minutes)
A stable future for the novice-monk! (1-2 minutes)
Take meditation instructions from the Buddha himself: See the mind as impermanent and let go! (16-21 minutes)
Rather than reconditioning this body, let’s perceive it with insightful understanding (18-23 minutes)
What’s the point in making the body run when the mind can’t be stopped? (14-17 minutes) NEW!
Rather than going in search of places well suited, abide well in all places (6-7 minutes)
Look mindfully. The Dhamma is right beside you. (7-9 minutes)
If the story elongates... (6-8 minutes)
Either escape from the fourfold hell or let it be death (12-15 minutes) NEW!
For those poor old souls caught in the clutches of ‘planets’ (10-12 minutes)
Kill the suffering! Otherwise, even if you die, the suffering won’t (7-9 minutes) NEW!
If you don’t view life according to saṅkhāra… (11-13 minutes) NEW!
Pick up where you left off in previous life (10-13 minutes) NEW!
Like the plough trailing behind the bull… (12-15 minutes) NEW!
More on adversities of cruelty (16-21 minutes) NEW!