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Showing posts from February, 2000

Purity of Heart (entire article)

Purity of Heart , Essays on the Buddhist Path by Thanissaro Bhikkhu (Geoffrey DeGraff) http://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/PurityOfHeart.pdf Purity of Heart During my first weeks with my teacher, Ajaan Fuang, I began to realize that he had psychic powers. He never made a show of them, but I gradually sensed that he could read my mind and anticipate future events. I became intrigued: What else did he know? How did he know it? He must have detected where my thoughts were going, for one evening he gently headed me off: “You know,” he said, “the whole aim of our practice is purity of heart . Everything else is just games.” That one phrase—purity of heart—more than intrigued me. It reverberated deep down inside. Although I was extremely disillusioned with Christianity, I still valued Kierkegaard’s dictum: Purity of heart is to will one thing. I didn’t agree with Kierkegaard as to what that “one thing” was, but I did agree that purity of heart is the most important treasure of l