Thanissaro Bhikkhu on the Ultimate Goal

"So when you see dispassion as a good thing, that’s when you’re really on the path. As the Buddha said, if you think that nibbana is something dull, or that it would have any bad qualities at all, then you’ve got wrong view and it’s going to hamper your practice. So learn to look on dispassion favorably — as freedom, as being unfettered — and that’ll give your practice a real boost." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Dispassion is Freedom"

"So even though our pursuit may be for something very private and individual — the way we pursue this happiness, this skill that enables us not to suffer even through illness or death — we take care of a part of ourselves that no one else can reach. If we don’t take care of this, what do we do? We thrash around, placing burdens on other people and leaving them miserable because they see ultimately that they can’t help our suffering either, deep down inside. But if you learn how to take care of that part inside you, you’ve taken care of your responsibility. And then whatever gifts you have for other people, you can offer them freely. They’re not offered in exchange for, “You take care of me, and I’ll take care of you.” The attitude is, “Here, look, take this. I don’t need it anymore.” That’s a very different kind of relationship. It doesn’t come with a quid pro quo of, “Okay, I’ll be nice to you, and you’ll be nice to me.” It’s simply: “Here, take.” But the Buddha goes beyond ev

"Theravada Buddhism is often criticized for being selfish. We’re not here to save all beings, we’re here to save our own skin: That’s what they say. It is true that we recognize that we each are making ourselves suffer and we have to work on putting an end to that suffering ourselves. Each of us has his or her own karma. You can’t take your karma and give it to somebody else. So it looks like we’re just working on our own goodness, our own happiness, and forgetting about everyone else. But when you think about goodness, you realize that it’s not the sort of thing that’s limited just to you. The goodness you do has to spill out into the lives of other people. There’s that image the Buddha gives of the two acrobats. One acrobat is standing on the top of a bamboo pole. Another acrobat, his female assistant, is standing on his shoulders. He says to her, “You look out after me, and I’ll look out after you, and that way we’ll maintain our balance and come down safely from the pole.” An

"You know the story about Angulimala who had killed 999 people and then, not long after the Buddha taught him, became an arahant. A lot of people like that story. It shows that no matter what your background, there’s hope. But we have to remember that, at the time, there were a lot of people who didn’t like what had happened and were pretty upset. Here was Angulimala who had killed all these people and he was literally getting away with murder. You could say that he deserved to suffer, but the Buddha didn’t take that into consideration at all. He said, “Here’s a person who’s suffering really badly and his suffering is spilling out and affecting other people.” By curing Angulimala’s suffering, or showing him how to cure his suffering, he saved a lot of other people, too. So if there’s the question of whether you deserve to be happy or not, you learn how to put that aside. Realize that that’s a non-issue. The issue is that you’ve got actions. The mind is an active princi