What are habits in buddhism?

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How are habits seen in buddhism - how are they explained ?

Habitual tendencies persist from life to life. Say you were a monkey than then born a human sometimes the tendency to jump last.

Only the Buddha can overcome habitual tendencies. Even an enlightened person will have habitual tendencies.

read now about habit making - and would love to hear users views on habits - and what they see habits as

And what people think about habit making and its effectiveness and why

A worldly person does many thing habitually. Though habitual action is at the pre conscious level they have karmic potent. So if you develop wholesome habits this definitely would be a bonus for this life and after. In absence of weighty and near death Karma, habitual karma decides the next life.

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We are our habits. We are what we repeatedly do. So we can You focus on the issue of how we are creating suffering for ourselves because of our habits, and how we can develop new habits that create the causes for happiness. If we find ourselves engaged in unskillful habits, we’ve got to learn how to overcome those habits and replace them with more skillful habits. We can’t do this for one another. It’s a personal, individual matter.

So the precepts are a crucial part of this. They help you develop good habits and foster insight. In particular, they help you see into your habits of self-indulgence. A lot of the pleasures we indulge in really do get in the way of deeper pleasure, deeper happiness. The hardest habit of all that we should strive to overcome is the ‘I am’, mine, myself belief in all of us. We can’t see things clearly because the “I am” gets in the way.

It’s interesting: The Pali word for “conceit”—mana—doesn’t mean only a sense that you’re better than other people. If you say, “I’m worse than other people,” or “I’m equal to other people,” that’s conceit as well, because you’re still building the “I am” around things. There are several ways to get around this.

One such is the Buddha’s advice to Rahula: Whatever comes up is inconstant. It doesn’t last, so it’s not enough to build an identity around. Another way around the “I am” is that, whatever comes up in the mind, you remind yourself that this happens to everybody. Remind yourself that you don’t have any innate nature. The mind is neutral. It just knows. The thinking is skillful or unskillful, but those are habits, which aren’t innate at all.

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I'm also interested in habits and found this text in the Samana-Mundika Sutta

And what are skillful habits? Skillful bodily actions, skillful verbal actions, purity of livelihood. These are called skillful habits. What is the cause of skillful habits? Their cause, too, has been stated, and they are said to be mind-caused. Which mind? — for the mind has many modes & permutations. Any mind without passion, without aversion, without delusion: That is the cause of skillful habits.

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