..续本文上一页es underlying their behavior. Also, principles of behavior which human beings should follow so as to fit in with the right natural order of things; qualities of mind they should develop so as to realize the inherent quality of the mind in and of itself. By extension, "dhamma" is used to refer also to any doctrine which teaches such things. Thus the Dhamma of the Buddha refers to his teachings, their practice, and to the direct experience of the quality of nibbana at which they are aimed.

　　dhatu: Element; property; potential. In the Pali Canon this word occurs primarily in discussions of the causes of activity, in which it forms the ultimate precondition underlying the causal chain leading to the activity in question. The arousal or irritation of the dhatu is what causes the activity to take place. Thus on the psychological level, the properties of sensuality, anger, or delusion in a person”s mind are the basic conditions underlying unwise action on his or her part. On the level of nature at large, phenomena such as windstorms, fires, floods, and earthquakes are explained as resulting from the arousal of the properties of wind, fire, and water. Such disorders cease when the disturbed property grows calm. Thus, for instance, when the fire property runs out of sustenance to cling to, it grows calm and the inpidual fire goes out. On the level of the human body, diseases are explained as resulting from the aggravation of any of these properties, all of which permeate the entire body. For example, in Thai medicine, belching, fainting, cramps, convulsions, and paralysis are associated with disorders of the internal wind element.

　　All of this explanation may make the notion of dhatu seem rather foreign, but when used as an object of meditation, the four physical dhatu are simply a way of viewing the body in impersonal, purely physical terms. they are experienced as the elementary sensations and potentials — warmth, movement, etc. — which permeate and make up the internal sense of the body (see rupa). Thus the meditation exercise of spreading the breath throughout the body is simply the feeling of linking the sensations of the in-and-out breath with the subtle sense of motion that permeates the body at all times. The six dhatu — the four physical dhatu plus space and consciousness — constitute the elementary properties or potentials which underlie the experience of physical and mental phenomena.

　　dukkha(m): Stress; suffering; pain; discontent.

　　jhana: Meditative absorption in a single object, notion or sensation (see rupa).

　　kamma (karma): Acts of intention which result in states of being and birth. The law of kamma is the principle that a person”s own intentional acts form the power which determines the good and evil that he or she meets with.

　　kasina: An object which is stared at with the purpose of fixing an image of it in one”s consciousness and then manipulating the image to make it fill the totality of one”s awareness.

　　khandha: Component parts of sensory perception; physical and mental phenomena as they are directly experienced: rupa (see below); vedana — feelings of pleasure, pain, or indifference which result from the mind”s interaction with its objects; sañña — labels, concepts, allusions; sankhara (see below); and viññana — consciousness, the acting of taking note of sense data and ideas as they occur.

　　lokadhamma: Worldly phenomena — fortune, loss of fortune, status, loss of status, praise, censure, pleasure, and pain.

　　mara: Temptation; mortality. The five forms in which temptation appears, deflecting the practitioner from the path, are as: defilement, the vicissitudes of the khandha, fear of death, urges & habitual tendencies, and as deities.

　　nibbana (nirvana): Liberation; the unbinding of the…

《The Craft of the Heart - Glossary》全文未完，请进入下页继续阅读…