Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If you are a student of an enlightened master, you can literally tap into his aura, anywhere and at anytime. All you have to do is meditate on your Buddhist master and the light will come into your mind.
It takes tremendous self-restraint on the part of the student not to want to monopolize the teacher's attention, to live a very controlled life and a happy life, and of course, be dedicated to the cause.
Are you still carrying everyone who's insulted you, injured you or interfered with you? That's a lot of weight. I'd let it go, personally, and just move on and forget. Be in the moment. Don't even notice.
The key to maintaining your inspiration in the day-to-day work of meditation practice is to approach it as play—a happy opportunity to master practical skills, to raise questions, experiment, and explore.
One should follow a man of wisdom who rebukes one for one's faults, as one would follow a guide to some buried treasure. To one who follows such a wise man, it will be an advantage and not a disadvantage.
When a wise man is advised of his errors, he will reflect on and improve his conduct. When his misconduct is pointed out, a foolish man will not only disregard the advice but rather repeat the same error.
Buddhism regards all living creatures as being endowed with the Buddha nature and the potential to become Buddhas. That's why Buddhism teaches us to refrain from killing and to liberate creatures instead.
Another of the things I started to do during this time was what Buddhists normally call "meditation" or, in Christian terms, "contemplative prayer". It began to supersede deipnosophy as my favorite hobby.
In Buddhist culture, offering food to the monk symbolizes the action of goodness, and if you have no opportunity to support the practice of spirituality, then you are somehow left in the realm of darkness.
Realization is not knowledge about the universe, but the living experience of the nature of the universe. Until we have such living experience, we remain dependent on examples, and subject to their limits.
Freedom is the real source of human happiness and creativity. Irrespective of whether you are a believer or nonbeliever, whether Buddhist, Christian, or Jew, the important thing is to be a good human being.
Meditation is not to escape from society, but to come back to ourselves and see what is going on. Once there is seeing, there must be acting. With mindfulness, we know what to do and what not to do to help.
If it is not truthful and not helpful, don't say it. If it is truthful and not helpful, don't say it. If it is not truthful and helpful, don't say it. If it is truthful and helpful, wait for the right time.
Christ wasn't a Christian and Buddha wasn't a Buddhist and Muhammad wasn't Muslim. These people were having the experience of unity consciousnesses and universal consciousness and they spoke of it in words.
All things are spiritual. It doesn't matter what you do or who you are or what kind of blue jeans you wear, or whether you wear an ochre robe or whether you're sober or asleep or dreaming. It's all the same.
When we lack etiquette, we trash things. We trash each other. We trash the environment. We lose sight of the value of things. We suffer alienation when our spirit is disconnected from our physical awareness.
We're connected to the Buddhist order, to the mind of enlightenment. All day long we draw the power and force from that world, from all the teachers and all the adherents of the practices and the principles.
Ah-rah-han, the first Buddhist apostle of Burma, under the patronage of King Anan-ra-tha-men-zan, disseminated the doctrines of atheism and taught his disciples to pant after annihilation as the supreme good.
Buddhism isn't about temples, and incense, and shaved heads, and robes. It's not about church. There are aspects of Buddhism that involve that. People enjoy that, it helps them, it strengthens their practice.
Originally, I was interested in athletic pursuits like snowboarding, martial arts and surfing. When I went to the Himalayas and met a number of Buddhist monks I was introduced to a new way of looking at life.
[Someone] said that what I described as the Buddhist voice - the life-denying voice of censure and guilt - sounded to him very much like a Catholic voice. This is, indeed, a mystery, and it intrigues me, too.
The purpose of all our explanations is not to have you understand anything, but for you to snap from the understanding of the intellect to the understanding of pure spirit. All our explanations work backwards.
It has been my experience as a teacher over the years and incarnations that what really counts are not techniques. What really counts is spirit, love. What really counts is a sense of propriety and dedication.
What is important in self-discovery is the person who keeps going, who has a smile, who is kind to others, who works hard at everything, and who keeps their mind on their own business and not everybody else's.
If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it's fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there's an arrow in your heart.
Mindfulness means that as we go through the day we learn to gain control of our mind, our emotions. We learn to conserve energy in a variety of simple and complicated ways that we learned in Buddhist practice.
He whose inflowing thoughts are dried up, who is unattached to food, whose dwelling place is an empty and imageless release - the way of such a person is hard to follow, like the path of birds through the sky.
He who can curb his wrath as soon as it arises, as a timely antidote will check snake's venom that so quickly spreads, - such a monk gives up the here and the beyond, just as a serpent sheds its worn-out skin.
If there is no other world and there is no fruit and ripening of actions well done or ill done, then here and now in this life I shall be free from hostility, affliction, and anxiety, and I shall live happily.
The motivation of all religious practice is similar: love, sincerity, honesty. The way of life of practically all religious persons is consistent. The teachings of tolerance, love, and compassion are the same.
You cannot convince a Buddhist to become a Protestant any more than you can convince a person who embraces realism as the highest form of art that fantasy is an equally important manifestation. It's impossible.
One way to practice staying present is to simply sit still for a while and listen. For one minute, listen to the sounds close to you. For one minute, listen to the sounds at a distance. Just listen attentively.
Each step may seem to take forever, but no matter how uninspired you feel, continue to follow your practice schedule precisely and consistently. This is how we can use our greatest enemy, habit, against itself.
People enter states of consciousness where they think they've become enlightened. The best thing to do, if you've gone through one of those phases, is to be sensible, laugh at yourself for how foolish you were.
The Dalai Lama acknowledges that he's met Westerners who to some extent are clearly Easterners at heart, and he would never want them not to become Buddhists just because they happened to be born in California.
I have the True Dharma Eye, the Marvelous Mind of Nirvana, the True Form of the Formless, and the Subtle Dharma Gate, independent of words and transmitted beyond doctrine. This I have entrusted to Mahakashyapa.
As Buddhist monks, our task is to bring ourselves resolutely more and more into light, to forgive and forget, to forget those who create problems for us because to remember them is only to keep problems is mind.
I think China's view of freedom has to do with material wealth and modernity, and the Dalai's Lama view of freedom is liberation in the Buddhist sense, which is freedom from ignorance and freedom from suffering.
The Buddhists have a story about blind men trying to describe an elephant by feeling it's various parts, and each describes the elephant according to the part he touched. That is the way we can hope to know God.
Let the disciple cultivate love without measure towards all beings. Let him cultivate towards the whole world, above, below, around, a heart of love unstinted....For in all the world this state of heart is best.
Reconciliation is to understand both sides; to go to one side and describe the suffering being endured by the other side, and then go to the other side and describe the suffering being endured by the first side.
My music is music that Christians and Catholics can listen to. Muslims. Buddhists. And non-religious people as well. It's just music. You can look at the music in several different ways. It's music for everybody.
There's only two classes of people: terrorists and non-terrorists. Terrorists come in every flavour: there are Buddhist terrorists right now killing Rohingya in Burma! Buddhists! They're not allowed to kill bugs.
As long as we remain self-reflective and keep looking at who and what we are, as long as we keep our analysis that way, then there's no freedom. We're just trying clothes on in front of a mirror and admiring them.
Sometimes I feel like a Buddhist and I need to chant; sometimes a Baptist and I need to holler and shout; and sometimes I need to be a Catholic and need to purge my sins and confess. It just depends on where I am.
Etiquette is an intelligent way to live. There are certain ways of living you will learn being around advanced students and mostly your teacher. These are methods that have been handed down for thousands of years.
I think more like a quantum Buddhist, in that there is a universal proto-conscious mind which we access, and can influence us. But it actually exists at the funda-mental level of the universe, at the Planck scale.
The four catagories of existance, non-existance, both existance and non-existance, and neither existance nor non-existance, are spiderwebs among spiderwebs which can never take hold of the enormous bird of reality
I'm thrilled by the fact that I made something out of nothing. There it is! It wasn't there before: there it is - I made it! That's pretty powerful, and that's the power that Buddhists give to every single person.