Buddhism Quotes - Page 16

Contemplation is purer still, yet more sophisticated. This comes from a strongly developed base of concentration—basically, constancy—through any temptation, including altered states of consciousness, that leads one to meditation (effortless engagement), from which is born an intuitive connection to that which is being focused upon (often, the nature of being in the moment, which is the default “focus”). Some people can attain this state accidentally through some combination of surprising events, which is sometimes called revelation. Fewer still can cause this to happen intentionally, mainly because you have to surprise yourself to have it occur. In any case, it requires a real sense of the value of paradox. One leaves a single position behind (such as “I like this” or “I don’t like this”) and expands in comprehension to simultaneously experience its opposite as well. From there, one rises above the two through a creative burst of intuition, and looks down on them both. What you might call transcendence, although I prefer mildly amused.

One physician may gravely exaggerate an illness and give up hope altogether. Another may ignorantly declare that there is no illness and that no treatment is necessary, thus deceiving the patient with false consolation. You may call the first one pessimistic and the second one optimistic. Both are equally dangerous.

Guarding knowledge is not a good way to understand. Understanding means to throw away your knowledge.

In fact, no form of death places a greater burden on society than suicide, for the act of suicide is the way a person seeks to resolve his alienation from a cooperative society.

The Amida Buddha delivers those who recognize their own weakness and cowardice... Those who admit their own faults and above all, those who believe... A wholehearted trust in Amida Buddha gives peace of mind to those who've known despair. Even the most vicious and evil of sinners will attain salvation and be reborn in paradise... Even a piece of shit like me!

We have been trained to feel shame and guilt basically as a means to cause fear and hesitation, to control behavior, or to oppress real freedom and joy. The origins of that are communal fear, jealousy and the desire for power over others. Consequently, many people have the addiction of using shame or guilt simply to avoid possibilities in life, and have, at the same time, a reason to avoid them—if you act spontaneously or feel joy, the result will eventually bring suffering, so you had better watch out, and don’t ever forget the past shame and guilt.

You tell me to stand still, but I am not walking," he shouted, "whereas you who are walking say you are still. How is it that you are standing still but I am not?"The Buddha turned round. "My legs move but my mind is still," he said. "Your legs are still but your mind moves all the time in a fire of anger, hatred, and feverish desire. Therefore, I am still but you are not.

Everything we perceive to be solid and static is made up of almost entirely empty space.

If a man speaks many holy words but he speaks and does not, this thoughtless man cannot enjoy the life of holiness: he is like a cowherd who counts the cows of his master.Whereas if a man speaks but a few holy words and yet he lives the life of those words, free from passion and hate and illusion—with right vision and a mind free, craving for nothing both now and hereafter—the life of this man is a life of holiness.

Life is very simple. Just sometimes put your head away, sometimes behead yourself, sometimes look with no clouds in the eyes - just look. Sometimes sit by the side of a tree - just feel. By the side of a waterfall - listen. Lie down on the beach and listen to the roar of the ocean, feel the sand, the coolness of it, or look at the stars, and let that silence penetrate you. Or look at the dark night and let that velvety darkness surround you, envelop you, dissolve you. This is the way of the simple heart.

Whatever a monk keeps pursuing with his thinking and pondering, that becomes the inclination of his awareness.

We are all trying to find a path back to the present moment. And good enough reason to just be happy here... Mindfulness meditation is just a trick for doing that. It's a trick for setting aside your to-do list, if only for a few moments, and actually locate a feeling of fulfilment in the present

For as long as space remains,For as long as sentient beings remain,Until then may I too remainTo dispel the miseries of the world.

Last year, Yoshino,I walked away bending branchesTo point me to blossoms--Which now are everywhere and I canGo where I've never been before.

Knowing life's purpose would invest everything one did with meaning.

We can free ourselves from the old stories that have reduced us & allow real love for ourselves to blossom.

The subjective experience of intense pain (“That’s all I can take”) corresponds exactly to one’s subjective experience in relation to truth (“That’s all I can take”).

The possessions themselves were not the problem, it was my relationship with possessing.

Dharma practice means physical hardship; it means that you shouldn't be pansies about it. You should exert yourselves wholeheartedly to engage in the practice, so that it will affect your body, speech, and mind.

Without discursive thought it is just dharma practice. Hope together with aim obscures. One does not cut through pride by meditatively cultivating the desire for happiness. If there is hope, even the hope for buddhas, it is a negative force. If there is apprehension, even apprehension about hells, it is a negative force.

As we move through time, we age, with the general speed of everything and the chaos that that produces in us in the form of anxiety, fear, confusion and negotiating an already-existing war, there is little time and space left to adjust to our developing relationship to yearning. In other words, as our needs are met, the question answered, we don’t then move on to the next question.

Amida's unimpeded light is the sun of wisdom that destroys the mind of darkness.(Preface in Teaching, Practice, Faith, Enlightenment)

On those who try to make me their guru or master, my approach is to start destroying that from the first moment we meet. It probably seems naive and idealistic, but I rely on basic, old-fashioned qualities in keeping my interactions clean: integrity, chivalry, honesty. In my experience, it’s not that difficult to eliminate the guru paradigm and stereotype, if one really wants to. Finally, it comes down to simply not accepting a role or the associated temptations offered.

Any methodology for developing patience requires a multi-tiered approach.

When we pay attention to sensations in our bodies, we can feel that love is the energetic opposite of fear.

We can learn to return home to our open hearts at any moment.

When mountain-climbing is made too easy, the spiritual effect the mountain exercises vanishes into the air.

Now seen...now gone,The butterfly flits in and outThrough fence-hung flowers;But a life lived so close to themI envy...though it's here and gone.

The sweet spot is a term used by audiophiles and recording engineers to describe the focal point between two sources of sound, where an individual is fully capable of hearing the audio mix the way it was intended to be heard by the musicians. Different static methods exist to broaden the area of the sweet spot.Sound engineers also refer to the sweet spot of any sound-producing body that may be captured with a microphone. Every individual instrument and voice has its own sweet spot, the perfect location to place the microphone or microphones in order to obtain the best sound.In tennis, baseball, or cricket, a given swing will result in a more powerful impact if the ball strikes the racquet or bat on the sweet spot, where a combination of factors results in a maximum response for a given amount of effort. The actual sweet spot on a racquet or bat is a very small area, where dispersing vibrations and spin in multiple directions are canceled out, resulting in a perfect contact point between incoming and outgoing energies.

As the twelfth-century Tibetian yogi Milarepa said when he heard of his student Gampopa's peak experiences, 'They are neither good nor bad. Keep meditating.'

Identifying the source of our personal narratives helps us to release its negative aspects and re-frame it in ways that promote wholeness.

We live in a dimension where it is necessary to find a balance between wants and needs, or desires and yearning, or answers and questions. The totality of these makes up what we know as reality or truth, at least adolescent truth—facts. The fact of the matter is, you have to live in society one way or another, and there’s a reason for that, so the base of engagement begins with acceptance of the variables as they actually are.

To be free, to come to terms with our lives, we have to have a direct experience of ourselves as we really are, warts and all.

You are already the awakeness that you seek!

We cannot learn real patience and tolerance from a guru or a friend. They can be practiced only when we come in contact with someone who creates unpleasant experiences.

Some Buddhists have criticized secular Buddhism because they think it waters down Buddhism. I like to think of it as adding Buddhist flavoring to the sparkling water of secularism.

The Four Noble Truths are pragmatic rather than dogmatic. They suggest a course of action to be followed rather than a set of dogmas to be believed. The four truths are prescriptions for behavior rather than descriptions of reality. The Buddha compares himself to a doctor who offers a course of therapeutic treatment to heal one’s ills. To embark on such a therapy is not designed to bring one any closer to ‘the Truth’ but to enable one’s life to flourish here and now, hopefully leaving a legacy that will continue to have beneficial repercussions after one’s death. (154)

We who are like senseless children shrink from suffering, but love its causes. We hurt ourselves; our pain is self-inflicted! Why should others be the object of our anger?

A man is not called wise because he talks and talks again; but if he is peaceful, loving and fearless then he is in truth called wise.

Each one of us is hard at war - within. We must face this battlefield; withdraw, as the psychologist would say, our habitual projections of that strife from the world around us, and realize that we should be so busy killing the selfishness within that we really have not the time, much less the will to blow up our neighbour. And when a few more individuals recognize that the war within implies a friendly tolerance of those about one, and of their ways of living and internal fighting, the Hitlers and Stalins and even the unpleasant fellow next door may provoke in everyman a smile, rather than an H-bomb, or even a bow and arrow.

Chöd is conventionally and misleadingly seen as analogous to, if not derived from, shamanic initiatory dismemberment visions, as well as dualistic anti-body ascetic practices. Two of the elements most commonly referenced by authors in their "identification" of Chöd and/as shamanism—the dismemberment/sacrifice of the body and "demonology"—are presented in an oversimplistic fashion. In the first instance, the numerous Buddhist precursors for the offering of the body provide ample testimony to the ethical and meritorious status such acts have in the Buddhist imagination. As for the "demonology" of Chöd, one must keep in mind the psychology and philosophy of mind that explicitly undergirds the discourse of Düd [Skt: mārā] in Chöd.

Why are you unhappy?Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself—and there isn’t one.

1. Accept everything just the way it is.2. Do not seek pleasure for its own sake.3. Do not, under any circumstances, depend on a partial feeling.4. Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.5. Be detached from desire your whole life long.6. Do not regret what you have done.7. Never be jealous.8. Never let yourself be saddened by a separation.9. Resentment and complaint are appropriate neither for oneself nor others.10. Do not let yourself be guided by the feeling of lust or love.11. In all things have no preferences.12. Be indifferent to where you live.13. Do not pursue the taste of good food.14. Do not hold on to possessions you no longer need.15. Do not act following customary beliefs.16. Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful.17. Do not fear death.18. Do not seek to possess either goods or fiefs for your old age.19. Respect Buddha and the gods without counting on their help.20. You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honour.21. Never stray from the Way.

Words!The Way is beyond language,for in it there is no yesterday no tomorrow no today.

It is like a lighted torch whose flame can be distributed to ever so many other torches which people may bring along; and therewith they will cook food and dispel darkness, while the original torch itself remains burning ever the same. It is even so with the bliss of th

The most expected thing you can expect is what's unexpected.

We grow up to believe that we are supposed to somehow "become" who we are meant to be through the trial-by-fire that is life here on planet Earth.Reality is...there's no "becoming".It's actually all an "un-becoming", only to reunite with who you were born to be in the first place before society told you otherwise.

Getting down to the gym a couple days a week and having low-fat milk in your morning latte isn’t going to make much of a dent in a system or lifestyle that is essentially, well, unwell.

Life is painful. It has thorns, like the stem of a rose. Culture and art are the roses that bloom on the stem. The flower is yourself, your humanity. Art is the liberation of the humanity inside yourself.

O snailClimb Mount FujiBut slowly, slowly!

Jehovah, the Christian name for God derived from the Hebrew Yahweh, (from the letters YHWH), is translated as "I AM." YOU ARE the essence of life—the Cosmic Consciousness that creates, lives in, and destroys all things. In Buddhism, your true nature is referred to as your “Buddha Nature.” Muslims refer to it as Allah, Native tribes have often called it the Great Spirit, Taoists refer to it as the Tao, and numerous other cultures throughout history have all created their own distinctive names for it. But the one eternal reality that these cultures point to remains the same—and this reality is YOU.

Compassion is not complete if it does not include oneself.

Yellow leaves hang on your tree of life. The messengers of death are waiting. You are going to travel far away. Have you any provisions for the journey?

Even when dreaming, if the sentient beings who dwell in the three lower realms are witnessed, then at that moment one should pray to sever the continuity of their negat

The thought manifests the word;The word manifests the deed;The deed develops into habit;And habit hardens into character;So watch the thought and its ways with care,And let them spring forth from loveBorn out of compassion for all beings.As the shadow follows the body, as we think, so we become.

There was a small glass vase between us, three gladioli in a few ounces of water. One of the gladioli had dropped a petal- brushstroke of purple on fine white cloth. Rinpoche drank the last sip of his tea, then set the cup aside, took the petal with his thumb and second finger, placed it on the middle of the saucer in front of him, and turned the cup upside down to cover it."I feel a lesson coming on," I said..."The flower is the good inside every person," he said. "The cup is like a wall, to protect. Many people have that wall.""Armor" I said. He nodded. "Why?""Because to live without the cup means you must feel the world as the world really is.

Our practice rather than being about killing the ego is about simply discovering our true nature.

Courage is often associated with aggression, but instead should be seen as a willingness to act from the heart.