Anatta Teachings of ThaBarWa Sayadaw U Ottamasara (Part One)

Anatta Teachings of

ThaBarWa Sayadaw Venerable Ottamasara

အလိုျမဲ အၿမဲလို၊ အလိုကင္း အၿမဲပို။

When the desire is persisting, there is always need.

Freedom from desire increases merit and eradicates need.

အလိုႀကီးဖို႔ အေရးႀကီးရမွာမဟုတ္ဘဲ အလိုကင္းဖို႔ အေရးႀကီးရမယ္။

One should not emphasize to be greedy, but try to be free from greed.

အလင္း အေမွာင္၊ အမွား အမွန္၊ အေကာင္း အဆိုး၊ အေၾကာင္းအက်ိဳးေတြက ေတြ႕ႀကံဳဖို႔သက္သက္။

Light and darkness, right and wrong, good and evil, cause and effect are meant to be experienced.

နာမည္ခံဗုဒၶဘာသာျဖစ္ဖို႔ကေတာ့ ဘုရား တရား သံဃာကို ယံုၾကည္႐ံုပါပဲ၊

ဗုဒၶဘာသာ၀င္အစစ္ျဖစ္ဖို႕ကေတာ့ ဘုရားရွင္က်င့္ျပသြားတဲ့အတိုင္း က်င့္ႏိုင္ဖို႔လိုတယ္။

To be a namesake Buddhist, faith in Lord Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha will be sufficient.

To be a true devout Buddhist, you may need to practice what Lord Buddha had taught and practiced by showing the true path to wisdom.

မီးက အငန္းမရ၀ိုင္းတဲ့ ပိုးဖလံေတြလို၊ အာ႐ံုေတြကို အငန္းမရျဖစ္ေနတဲ့ ကိေလသာ။

Just as insects flutter to death around the fire at night, mankind also flutter greedily around craving and defilement (kilesa).

လိုအင္ဆႏၵ ... Desire

တျခားလိုအင္ဆႏၵေတြ အားလံုးကိုစြန္႔ၿပီး လုပ္ခ်င္တာျဖစ္ဖို႔လိုတယ္။

You need to be able to discard all carnal desires and concentrate on what is necessary to be done.

စြန္႔လြတ္ႏိုင္တဲ့စြမ္းအား အျပည့္ပါတဲ့ လိုအင္ဆႏၵနဲ႔ ျပဳလုပ္မႈျဖစ္ဖို႔လိုတယ္။

The endeavour to do what is necessary must have full energy and resolve to sacrifice. 

စြမ္းရည္သတၱိ ..... Courage

ေကာင္းမႈကုသိုလ္ျပဳလုပ္ျခင္းမွာ ေၾကာက္ဖို႔မလို၊ ရဲရင့္ဖို႔သာလိုတယ္။

You need to be brave to do good deeds, and not be afraid.

ကိုယ္လိုသူလို စြမ္းရည္သတၱိက အတု၊ ကိုယ္လိုသူလို စြမ္းရည္သတၱိကို စြန္႔လႊတ္ႏိုင္မွ

စြမ္းရည္သတၱိအစစ္ျဖစ္မယ္။

An average courage of common mankind is in fact not genuine, a counterfeit.

Only when you can discard the courage of the common man, you will attain true courage.

မလုပ္တတ္တာကို မျပတ္ျပဳလုပ္ေနျခင္းအားျဖင့္ လုပ္ႏိုင္တဲ့စြမ္းရည္သတၱိကို

တိုးျမႇင့္ေနရမယ္။

By doing constantly what you cannot do, you will need to continually develop capability and courage to do good.

ဘယ္လို ညာလိုဆိုတဲ့ သတ္မွတ္ခ်က္ေတြကို အဓိကထားေနမႈကို စြန္႔လႊတ္ႏိုင္တဲ့

စြမ္းရည္သတၱိနဲ႔ ဘယ္လိုညာလို ျပဳလုပ္တာျဖစ္ဖို႔ လိုတယ္။

By developing courage to sacrifice what and wherefore of common mankind, 
you will eventually develop true courage to move on with life. 

စိတ္ ... Mind, Mental Phenomenon of Existence

အမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳး သ႐ုပ္ေဖာ္တတ္တဲ့ စြမ္းရည္သတၱိရိွတဲ့စိတ္။

The mind or mental phenomenon (citta) has the capacity to create many things.

စိတ္ဆိုတာ သံုးဖို႕သက္သက္။

The function of mind is for using-only.

ၿပီးျပည့္စံုခ်င္ေနတဲ့စိတ္ကိုက မျပည့္စံုတဲ့စိတ္။

The desire of mind to have everything signifies the incomplete phenomenon of mind.

ေမွ်ာ္လင့္ခ်က္ရိွေနရင္ စိတ္မလြတ္လပ္ဘူး။

When you are overwhelmed with hope and expectation, want and desire, the mind will not be free.

အမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳးေသာသေဘာကိုေဆာင္တတ္တဲ့စိတ္ရဲ႕ဒဏ္ကို ခံႏိုင္ရည္ရိွမွ စိတ္ကိုသံုး႐ံုသက္သက္ မွန္မွန္ကန္ကန္သံုးတတ္လာမွာ။

Only when you can endure and overcome the many wiles of the mind, you will learn to truly apply the essence of the mental phenomenon.

တကယ္သံုးတတ္ရင္ စိတ္ေလာက္ သံုးလို႔ ေကာင္းတာ၊ အသံုး၀င္တာမရိွ။

When you know how to apply your mind with wisdom, there is nothing useful or beneficial.

မွန္ကန္တဲ့နားလည္မႈ မွ်ေ၀ျခင္း ... Sharing the True Insight and Wisdom

တူရာခ်င္းမယွဥ္ရဘူး။

You should not challenge or compare what is the same or identical.

အေမွာင္ကို အလင္းနဲ႔၊ အပူကို အေအးနဲ႔၊ အမွားကိုအမွန္နဲ႔၊ မတရားကို တရားနဲ႔၊

သတ္မွတ္ထားတဲ့အမွန္တရားကို အမွန္တရားအစစ္နဲ႔ အႏိုင္ယူရမယ္။

You shall conquer darkness with light; hot with cold; wrong with right; unlawful with lawful; and with original truth and created truth.

အမွားအမွန္၊ အေကာင္းအဆိုး၊ အပူ အေအး ဆန္႔က်င္ဘက္အေျခအေနတိုင္းကို လက္ခံႏိုင္ဖို႕ ႀကိဳးစားရမယ္။

You must strive to be able to differentiate and accept right and wrong, good and evil, hot and cold, all opposite phenomenon in its true nature.

အေကာင္းျမင္တိုင္း အဆိုးကို၊ အဆိုးျမင္တိုင္း အေကာင္းကို တြဲျမင္ႏိုင္ရမယ္။

When you see good, you must see the evil; 
when you see evil, you must also see the good in comparative phenomenon. 

To be continued .....

The Middle Way : Anatta Dhamma

The Middle Way

Anatta Dhamma Teachings of 
ThaBarWa Sayadaw U Ottamasara

Illustrated Anatta Teachings - 02

Anatta Teachings

Illustrated Anatta or Selfless Teachings or Motto Quotes

of Thabarwa Sayadaw U Ottamasara  

Part - Two 



  

  

Anatta Teachings - 02

Anatta Teachings

Anatta or Selfless Teachings or Motto Quotes

of Thabarwa Sayadaw U Ottamasara 

Part - Two

Your Good Deeds Should Be Energized

• What is important in life is to strive towards doing good deeds.
• What is needed to do is to strive towards doing good deeds.
• How to do it will need to overcome all obstacles standing in the way.
• Your good deeds should not be superficial and shallow.  It is necessary to perform in such a way as to lead to perfection of virtue.
• As you are doing good deeds, you should do it always, in continuity whether it is easy or difficult, irrespective of long or short duration.
• When you are doing good deeds there should be no excuses or exceptions.  You should do it with firm determination.
• You should increase and upgrade the momentum of all good deeds.
• When you do good deeds, it should be for merit only.  You should overcome and go beyond the negative extreme of personal self motivation and craving. 
• When you do good deeds you will gain merit. If the merit is boundless, then your benefits will also be boundless.
• You should also do unintended or unplanned good deeds frequently as much as planned merits.
• What you must do is good deeds. You should strive to do it, not considering whether you do it or not, whether you know it or not, whether you can know or reach the end of all your endeavors or not.

Kamma (Action) And Nyana (Wisdom)

• Action that is made is called action perception.  The insight wisdom arising out of abandoning action is called wisdom perception.
• Power of wisdom is far superior than power of action.
• When you are a victim of kamma action, and strive to become a victor by managing your own action based on knowledge power, instead of being dictated by kamma , then it is called true Dhamma doctrine.

True Understanding

• When you see truth as it is, then you have achieved true understanding.
• True virtue can be gained only by Dhamma virtue.
• True disciplinary practice is gained only be practical contemplation and meditation.
• It is not only necessary to have a true understanding of Dhamma law, but is essential to practice what you have understood.
• It is necessary to work to reach a true state of understanding, but is also essential that the fruition of true understanding must be reached.
• Because you don’t understand what needs to be done, you do what is prescribed.
• You should begin from doing what is prescribed, to enable you to do what needs to be done to reach the true path of fruition and realization.
• You must do in a way that can be done for the moment, but you must have the freedom to think.
• You become attached to other carnal desires and pleasures because you have not sensed  the real taste of true Dhamma.

• Unwholesome defilements (kilesa) or subjective sensuality are only bent on taking for self-enjoyment.  Wisdom knowledge is free from taking. Both defilement sensuality and true doctrine is concerned with the state of mind.
• You must strive to listen and understand what has been lectured superficially on the essentials of natural law.
• If you believe wrongly that you have reached the end of the road on what mundane knowledge you have pursued during your lifetime, you will never achieve true learning, insight knowledge and wisdom.
• Only true insight knowledge can make you understand true metta  lovingkindness.
• Only when you abandon your personal view and conviction, you will come to understand the viewpoint of other persons from their perspective.
• Only when you strive to be a true disciple, you will eventually find the true teacher.
• It will not be enough to be polite in conversation, good looking, good manners, and possess loving personality.  The more important virtue is your action, your state of mind, your true intellect and wisdom that really is important.
• It does not matter whether you are famous or not.  The important factor is your correct ability and proficiency.

The Correct Attitude

• You must learn not to be too dogmatic and not to be too grasping in your way of life.
• In your way of living you must learn not to hold too rigid and dogmatic. 

Dhamma’s Way Of Virtue To Overcome Difficulties

• Difficulties are meant to be overcome, not to retreat or surrender in defeat.
• Problems are meant to be solved, not to search for it and worry over it.
• Impediments are meant to be faced and cleared, with endurance and fortitude, not to be dissatisfied over it.

       

Belief, Faith And Conviction

• Your correct belief and faith must be borne out of abandoning greed (lobha), anger (dosa), and delusion (moha).
• Your correct belief must be based on true action (kamma), true sacrifice and abandonment. 

Words Containing Energy Of Performance

• Use more of ability to work rather than ability to speak.
• Don’t work with just speaking only. Speak with work.
• There is more power when you speak on what you can do, rather than speak on what you cannot do.
• You should speak, backed by the power of action (work) rather than speaking only without action.
• You need to have the power to work on what you speak, and the power to speak on what you can work.
• It is better to work and show rather than to speak out what to do. (Follow deeds with words rather than words without deeds).
• Create a virtuous world by virtuous deed and action.
• Towards a virtuous world through the power of supreme sacrifice and    abandonment.

Good Deeds Flock Together

Volition, will (cetana) flocks where there is volition (cetana);

Anger (dosa) flocks  where there is anger;

Greed (loba) flocks where there is greed;

Delusion (moha) flocks where there is delusion. 

The True Noble Creator

• Evil minds create evil creator, giving evil results.
• Good minds create noble creator giving good benefits.
• This universe is like a movie where all living beings of the thirty three worlds (Thirty-one Planes of Existence); men and women, animate and the inanimate, rupa loka (physical phenomenon or corporeality) play their role under the direction of the director (state of mind, mental state of consciousness).

Illustrated Anatta Teachings - 01

Anatta Teachings

Illustrated Anatta or Selfless Teachings or Motto Quotes

of Thabarwa Sayadaw U Ottamasara

Part - One

  

Anatta Teachings - 01

Anatta Teachings

Anatta or Selfless Teachings or Motto Quotes

of Thabarwa Sayadaw U Ottamasara 

Part - One



Benefits Realized By Own Efforts

• Your actions (kamma) will give you the same results.
• The action of killing will give you the result of being killed.
• The action of blame will result in being blamed.
• The action of anger will result in suffering from anger.
• Do not utter vile and indecent speech, because you will suffer the same reaction.  
• Do not quarrel, for it will cause only suffering.
• Ill deeds do not result in quick reaction like fresh milk, which do not turn sour immediately.  It is like fire cinders covered with ash, which burn and follow the evil doers. 

Reduce  Talking

• One good spoken word is much better and brings peace and virtue, than   one thousand useless words.
• Quarrelling and arguing will not bring inner peace and tranquility.  It will only bring spite, conceit, and jealousy.
• Those who accuse others of being a rogue, villain and fool is never a person of virtue.  Because they vainly believe that only their policies are right and others are wrong.    

Emphasize On One’s Own Power

When one meets an industrious and virtuous person or friend, who chooses the right path of virtue and morality, you should make company with him although you will meet difficulty or troubles.  

You Will See What You Look

• In this mundane universe, there is no one free from praise or blame in the past, in the present or in the future.
• There are some who regards Dhamma which is virtuous as immoral, and Dhamma which is immoral as virtuous.  All these people are egoistic self-centered people.  As such who can say which policy is justifiable or which policy is wrong?
• If a person were to become evil, or faulty, there will be no one in the universe whose policy is good at all.  Everyone will say only their policy is good and all others are evil.
• Giving emphasis to the defined wrong is truly defilement and passion (Kilesa).  Giving emphasis to the defined right is also defilement and passion.
• If you breed evil mind, whatever you see will be wrong.  
• If you breed good mind, whatever you will see will be good.  
• What you see depends on your mind formation.  
• Change of mind will effect change of your insight.
• Even though your deed is good, if you look with an evil mind, you will see evil.  
• Even though your deed is evil, if you look with a good mind you will see no evil. 

The Bondage That Binds Without Knowing

• Those who believe and say that only their doctrine and policy is pure, right  and noble, they bind themselves with various dogmas and doctrines.
• All doctrines with future promises and prophesies shall be used as objects to be discarded finally.  All doctrines pointing future time and place shall be used as objects to be discarded finally.  

Rely Only On Noble Practice As True Support

• Grief and worry can bring futility in life.  It will not bring peace of mind but increase suffering.
• Only by contemplating on good thought, deeds and words, you will solve the problem of suffering.  There is no other way to root out such evil.
• Those who do not regard materials as my own possession, or his own possession, has no attachment and craving, will not suffer for loss of those which truly is not his own.
• It is not proper or right to do things you will later suffer or weep.
• You should do deeds which will bring no future regret or remorse, but bring only joy and happiness.
• You should not kill any living being intentionally, even when you know that it will harm you, you do so in self-defense.
• Revenge will never bring peace. Only by lovingkindness (metta) enmity can be solved.  This is the immutable natural law.
• There is no other noble practice like forbearance and patience in this universe. 
• Only through self admonition and noble practice you will have true support.
• The best and safest protection is your meritorious deed.
• You must know how to perfect yourself only through practicing what is perfect.  You must know how to train yourself in the ways of perfection only through self training.
• You must know how to walk the true perfect path only by practicing how to walk on the true perfect path. 

Purification Is The Main Criteria

• When you are soiled with dirt of attachment, lust and passion, it will be useless  only by washing your exterior physical body (rupa khanda).
• You can hope to achieve noble purity, only by contemplating on true noble Dhamma and practice.   

Beware Of Misusing Your Mind

• Beware of the misconception of the mind and strive towards freedom from errors.
• Problems of the mind occur because of dogmatic misuse of the true state of mind.
• What is more important than the resulting effects of the mind is the causation. 

Cause And Effect

• The more you place high expectation the more you will be frustrated.
• The more you love, the bitter is your hatred.
• Do not be too attached.  Learn to sacrifice.
• Do not be greedy.  Increase your merit and generosity.
• Things do not happen because of desire only.  It happens because we make it happen.
• Merit, virtue and good deeds always accrue equal returns without fail. Evil always accrue equal returns without fail.
• You will not get anything by just wishing for it.  Do good deeds always.  If you deserve, you will get it.
• Nothing will happen if you just wish it to be.  You must work hard, do good deeds and make it happen.  It will happen if you deserve it.
• If you do good deeds, you will surely enjoy the benefits.
• Try to cultivate good deeds with your own free will and determination to fulfill the common will, and you will surely enjoy fulfillment. 

To be continued