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The Dignity of Restraint

Why you can't have your cake and enlightenment, too. Thanissaro Bhikkhu explains why we don't have to be slaves to our desires.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu

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Composition in White, Black, and RedIt’s always interesting to notice how words disappear from common usage. We have them in our passive vocabulary, we know their meaning, but they tend to disappear from day-to-day conversation—which usually means that they’ve disappeared from the way we shape our lives. Several years back I gave a dhamma talk in which I happened to mention the word dignity. After the talk, a woman in the audience who had emigrated from Russia came up to me and said that she had never heard Americans use the word dignity before. She had learned it when she studied English in Russia, but she had never heard people use it here. And it’s good to think about why. Where and why did it disappear?

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