quotations from Buddhist wisdom

The bird of paradise alights only on the hand that does not grasp. - John Berry

That people are unknowing does not mean that they are

unknowing like cows or goats. Even ignorant people look for a

pathway to reality. But, searching for it, they often

misunderstand what they encounter. They pursue names and

categories instead of going beyond that name to that which is

real. - Digha Nikaya- from "Buddha Speaks," edited by Anne Bancroft, 2000.

Whatever attitudes we habitually use toward ourselves, we will

use on others, and whatever attitudes we habitually use

toward others, we will use on ourselves. The situation is

comparable to our serving food to ourselves and to other

people from the same bowl. Everyone ends up eating the same

thing--we must examine carefully what we are dishing out.

- Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, "Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness"

While practicing generosity, we should always remember how

very fortunate we are to have this opportunity.

- Gomo Tulku, "Becoming a Child of the Buddhas"

We make every effort to keep things as they are, because human beings, alone, lament transience. Yet no matter how we grieve or protest,

there is no way to impede the flow of anything. If we but see things as they are and flow with them, we may find enjoyment in transience.

Because human life is transient, all manner of figures are woven into its fabric. Shundo Aoyama, Zen Seeds

Heedful among the heedless,
wakeful among those asleep,
just as the fast horse advances,
leaving the weak behind:
so the wise.

-Dhammapada, 2, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Just like a blossom,
bright colored
and full of scent:
a well-spoken word
is fruitful
when well carried out.

-Dhammapada 52, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with

one, and a lily with the other. -Chinese proverb

In my own experience, the period of greatest gain in knowledge and experience is the most difficult period in one's life. ...Through a difficult period, you can learn, you can develop inner strength, determination, and courage to face the problem. Who gives you this chance? Your enemy. - His Holiness the Dalai Lama

From "The Pocket Dalai Lama," edited by Mary Craig, 2002. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications

It is very important that you do not compare your actions to your partner's or judge your partner's behavior as unskillful. Rather, focus on your own actions and take responsibility for them. Recall those times when you looked into your partner's eyes and saw the pain you caused this person you love to suffer. If you can admit your own faults, if you can see how hurtful your actions were and tap into a sense of concern for your partner's well-being, then compassion and loving-friendliness will flow. - -Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, "Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness"

Friends, I know nothing which brings suffering as does an untamed, uncontrolled, unattended and unrestrained heart. Such a heart brings suffering. - Anguttara Nikaya

Bereavement can force you to look at your life directly, compelling you to find a purpose in it where there may not have been one before. When suddenly you find yourself alone after the death of someone you love, it can feel as if you are being given a new life and are being asked: “What will you do with this life? And why do you wish to continue living?”

My heartfelt advice to those in the depths of grief and despair after losing someone they dearly loved is to pray for help and strength and grace. Pray that you will survive and discover the richest possible meaning to the new life you now find yourself in. Be vulnerable and receptive, be courageous and patient. Above all, look into your life to find ways of sharing your love more deeply with others now. Rigpa

The more often you listen to your discriminating awareness, the more easily you will be able to change your negative moods yourself, see through them, and even laugh at them for the absurd dramas and ridiculous illusions that they are.

Gradually you will find yourself able to free yourself more and more quickly from the dark emotions that have ruled your life, and this ability to do so is the greatest miracle of all.

The Tibetan mystic, Tertön Sogyal, said that he was not really impressed by someone who could turn the floor into the ceiling or fire into water. A real miracle, he said, was if someone could liberate just one negative emotion. –Rigpa

Someone who is about to admonish another must realize within himself five qualities before doing so [that he may be able to say], thus:

"In due season will I speak, not out of season. In truth I will speak, not in falsehood. Gently will I speak, not harshly. To his profit will I speak, not to his loss. With kindly intent will I speak, not in anger."

-"Vinaya Pitaka," translated by F.S. Woodward

Difficulties and obstacles, if properly understood and used, can turn out to be an unexpected source of strength. Gesar was the great warrior king of Tibet, whose escapades form the greatest epic of Tibetan literature. Gesar means “indomitable,” someone who can never be put down. From the moment Gesar was born, his evil uncle Trotung tried all kinds of means to kill him. But with each attempt Gesar only grew stronger and stronger.

For the Tibetans, Gesar is not only a martial warrior but also a spiritual one. To be a spiritual warrior means to develop a special kind of courage, one that is innately intelligent, gentle, and fearless. Spiritual warriors can still be frightened, but even so they are courageous enough to taste suffering, to relate clearly to their fundamental fear, and to draw out without evasion the lessons from difficulties. –Rigpa

If happiness hasn't been recognized when alone, a group of people will be a cause of distraction.

-Adept Godrakpa, "Hermit of Go Cliffs"

There is no pleasure without some degree of pain.
There is no pain without some amount of pleasure.

-Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, "Mindfulness in Plain English" Copyright Wisdom Publications 2001. Reprinted from "Daily

Negligence produces a lot of dirt. As in a house, so in the mind, only a very little dirt collects in a day or two, but if it goes on for many years, it will grow into a vast heap of refuse.

-Commentary to Sutta Nipata

From "365 Buddha: Daily Meditations," edited by Jeff Schmidt

Anger is the real destroyer of our good human qualities; an enemy with a weapon cannot destroy these qualities, but anger can. Anger is our real enemy. - His Holiness the Dalai Lama

If false thinking suddenly stops for an instant, and you see through your own mind, the vastness of its original perfect light, the purity of its original state, no thing in it at all, this is called awakening. There is nothing to be awakened or cultivated other than this mind. - Han-shan

“But what makes these 'experts' preach their own opinion and call it truth?" asked the inquirer. "Is it an inheritance of humankind to do this, or is it merely something they gain satisfaction from?". "Apart from consciousness," answered the Buddha, "no absolute truths exist. False reasoning declares one view to be true and another view wrong. It is delight in their dearly held opinions that makes them assert that anyone who disagrees is bound to come to a bad end. But no true seeker becomes embroiled in all this. Pass by peacefully and go a stainless way, free from theories, lusts, and dogmas." - -Majjhima Nikaya

Invitation to Meditate

Everything can be used as an invitation to meditation. A smile, a face in the subway, the sight of a small flower growing in the crack of cement pavement, a fall of rich cloth in a shop window, the way the sun lights up flower pots on a windowsill. Be alert for any sign of beauty or grace. Offer up every joy, be awake at all moments, to “the news that is always arriving out of silence.”

Slowly, you will become a master of your own bliss, a chemist of your own joy, with all sorts of remedies always at hand to elevate, cheer, illuminate, and inspire your every breath and movement.

--Remember the View

Rigpa, Glimpse of the Day

September 22. 2003

All the spiritual teachers of humanity have told us the same thing, that the purpose of life on earth is to achieve union with our fundamental, enlightened nature.

From a Rigpa thought of the day

One of the greatest Buddhist traditions calls the nature of mind “the wisdom of ordinariness.” I cannot say it enough: Our true nature and the nature of all beings is not something extraordinary.

The irony is that it is our so-called ordinary world that is extraordinary, a fantastic, elaborate hallucination of the deluded vision of samsara. It is this “extraordinary” vision that blinds us to the “ordinary,” natural, inherent nature of mind. Imagine if the buddhas were looking down at us now: How they would marvel sadly at the lethal ingenuity and intricacy of our confusion!

***
The realm of reality is as vast as cosmic space; it is the knowing mind of sentient beings that is small. Just as long as you do not become egotistic and selfish, you will be ever sated with the spiritual food of nirvana. - Pao-chih

Isn’t it extraordinary that our minds cannot stay still for longer than a few moments without grasping after distraction? They are so restless and preoccupied that sometimes I think that living in a city in the modern world, we are already like the tormented beings in the intermediate state after death, where the consciousness is said to be agonizingly restless.

We are fragmented into so many different aspects. We don’t know who we really are, or what aspects of ourselves we should identify with or believe in. So many contradictory voices, dictates, and feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere, in all directions, leaving nobody at home. Meditation, then, is bringing the mind home. - Rigpa thought for the day

Wars arise from a failure to understand one another's humanness. Instead of summit meetings, why not have families meet for a picnic and get to know each other while the children play together? - His Holiness the Dalai Lama, 1981

If we were to put our minds to one powerful wisdom method and work with it directly, there is a real possibility we would become enlightened.

Our minds, however, are riddled with confusion and doubt. I sometimes think that doubt is an even greater block to human evolution than is desire or attachment. Our society promotes cleverness instead of wisdom, and celebrates the most superficial, harsh, and least useful aspects of our intelligence. We have become so falsely “sophisticated” and neurotic that we take doubt itself for truth, and the doubt that is nothing more than ego’s desperate attempt to defend itself from wisdom is deified as the goal and fruit of true knowledge.

This form of mean-spirited doubt is the shabby emperor of samsara, served by a flock of “experts” who teach us not the open-souled and generous doubt that Buddha assured us was necessary for testing and proving the worth of the teachings, but a destructive form of doubt that leaves us nothing to believe in, nothing to hope for, and nothing to live by. **

Hatred can be the greatest stumbling block to the development of compassion and happiness. If you can learn to develop patience and tolerance towards your enemies, then everything becomes much easier—your compassion towards all others begins to flow naturally. - His Holiness the Dalai Lama

If you wish to understand yourself, you must succeed in doing so in the midst of all kinds of confusions and upsets. Don't make the mistake of sitting dead in the cold ashes of a withered tree. - Emyo From "The Pocket Zen Reader," edited by Thomas Cleary, 1999.

Meditation is bringing the mind back home, and this is first achieved through the practice of mindfulness.

Once an old woman came to Buddha and asked him how to meditate. He told her to remain aware of every movement of her hands as she drew water from the well, knowing that if she did, she would soon find herself in that state of alert and spacious calm that is meditation.

And better than a hundred years
lived without seeing
the Deathless state, is
one day
lived seeing
the Deathless state.

-Dhammapada, 114, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Because in our culture we overvalue the intellect, we imagine that to become enlightened demands extraordinary intelligence. In fact, many kinds of cleverness are just further obscurations. There is a Tibetan saying: “If you are too clever, you could miss the point entirely.”

Patrul Rinpoche said: “The logical mind seems interesting, but it is the seed of delusion.” People can become obsessed with their own theories and miss the point of everything. In Tibet we say: “Theories are like patches on a coat, one day they just wear off.”

There is no evil like hatred.
And no fortitude like patience.

-Santideva, "Bodhicaryavatara"

The practice of mindfulness, of bringing the scattered mind home, and so of bringing the different aspects of our being into focus, is called Peacefully Remaining or Calm Abiding.

All the fragmented aspects of ourselves, which had been at war, settle and dissolve and become friends. In that settling we begin to understand ourselves more, and sometimes even have glimpses of the radiance of our fundamental nature.

'I am breathing in and making my whole body calm and at peace. I am breathing out and making my whole body calm and at peace.' This is how one practices." -The Sutra on Full Awareness of Breathing

Nothing has any inherent existence of its own when you really look at it, and this absence of independent existence is what we call “emptiness.” Think of a tree. When you think of a tree, you tend to think of a distinctly defined object; and on a certain level it is. But when you look more closely at the tree, you will see that ultimately it has no independent existence.

When you contemplate it, you will find that it dissolves into an extremely subtle net of relationships that stretches across the universe. The rain that falls on its leaves, the wind that sways it, the soil that nourishes and sustains it, all the seasons and the weather, moonlight and starlight and sunlight—all form part of this tree.

As you begin to think more and more about the tree, you will discover that everything in the universe helps to make the tree what it is; that it cannot at any moment be isolated from anything else; and that at every moment its nature is subtly changing. This is what we mean when we say things are empty, that they have no independent existence.

Whether you believe in God or not does not matter so much, whether you believe in Buddha or not does not matter so much. You must lead a good life. - His Holiness the Dalai Lama

None of the means employed to acquire religious merit, O monks, has a sixteenth part of the value of loving-kindness. Loving-kindness, which is freedom of heart, absorbs them all; it glows, it shines, it blazes forth. - "Itivuttaka," translated by Justin H. Moore

The cells of our body are dying, the neurons in our brain are decaying, even the expressions on our face are always changing, depending on our mood. What we call our basic character is only a “mindstream,” nothing more. Today we feel good because things are going well; tomorrow we feel the opposite. Where did that good feeling go?

What could be more unpredictable than our thoughts and emotions: Do you have any idea what you are going to think or feel next? The mind, in fact, is as empty, as impermanent, and as transient as a dream. Look at a thought: It comes, it stays, and it goes. The past is past, the future not yet risen, and even the present thought, as we experience it, becomes the past.

The only thing we really have is nowness, is now.

***

Everything that we see around us is seen as it is because we have repeatedly solidified our experience of inner and outer reality in the same way, lifetime after lifetime, and this has led to the mistaken assumption that what we see is objectively real. In fact, as we go further along the spiritual path, we learn how to work directly with our fixed perceptions. All our old concepts of the world or of matter or of even ourselves are purified and dissolved, and an entirely new, what you could call “heavenly” field of vision and perception opens up. As William Blake said:

If the doors of perception were cleansed
Everything would appear . . . as it is, infinite.

***

We live under an assumed identity, in a neurotic fairy-tale world with no more reality than the Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland. Hypnotized by the thrill of building, we have raised the houses of our lives on sand.

This world can seem marvelously convincing until death collapses the illusion and evicts us from our hiding place. And what will happen to us then if we have no clue of any deeper reality?

***

Just as Buddha said that of all the buddhas who attained enlightenment, not one accomplished it without relying on the master, he also said: “It is only through devotion, and devotion alone, that you will realize the absolute truth.”

So then, it is essential to know what real devotion is. It is not mindless adoration; it is not abdication of your responsibility to yourself, nor indiscriminately following of another’s personality or whim. Real devotion is an unbroken receptivity to the truth. Real devotion is rooted in an awed and reverent gratitude, but one that is lucid, grounded, and intelligent.

***
We are what we think.

All that we are arises with our thoughts.

With our thoughts we make the world.

Speak or act with an impure mind
And sorrow will follow you As the wheel
follows the ox that draws the cart.

Speak or act with a pure mind
And happiness will follow you As your
shadow, unshakeable.

-THE BUDDHA

***

Buddha sat in serene and humble dignity on the ground, with the sky above him and around him, as if to show us that in meditation you sit with open, skylike attitude of mind, yet remain present, earthed, and grounded. The sky is our absolute nature, which has no barriers and is boundless, and the ground is our reality, our relative, ordinary condition.

The posture we take when we meditate signifies that we are linking absolute and relative, sky and ground, heaven and earth, like two wings of a bird, integrating the skylike deathless nature of mind and the ground of our transient, mortal nature.

***

Anyone looking honestly at life will see that we live in a constant state of suspense and ambiguity. Our minds are perpetually shifting in and out of confusion and clarity. If we could be confused all the time, that would at least make for some kind of clarity. What is really baffling about life is that sometimes, despite all our confusion, we can also be really wise!

This constant uncertainty may make everything seem bleak and almost hopeless; but if you look more deeply at it, you will see that its very nature creates “gaps,” spaces in which profound chances and opportunities for transformation are continuously flowering—if, that is, they can be seen and seized.

***
Nothing is born, nothing is destroyed. Away with your dualism, your likes and dislikes. Every single thing is just the One Mind. When you have perceived this, you will have mounted the Chariot of the Buddhas.

-Huang Po, "Zen Teaching of Huang Po"

***

In his very first teaching, Buddha explained that the root cause of suffering is ignorance. But where exactly is this ignorance? And how does it display itself? Let’s take an everyday example. Think about those people—we all know some—who are gifted with a remarkably powerful and sophisticated intelligence. Isn’t it puzzling how, instead of helping them, as you might expect, it seems only to make them suffer more? It is almost as if their brilliance is directly responsible for their pain.

What is happening is quite clear: This intelligence of ours is captured and held hostage by ignorance, which then makes use of it freely for its own ends. This is how we can be extraordinarily intelligent and yet absolutely wrong, at one and the same time.

***

Sometimes we have fleeting glimpses of the nature of mind. These can be inspired by an exalting piece of music, by the serene happiness we sometimes feel in nature, or by the most ordinary everyday situation. They can arise simply while watching snow slowly drifting down, or seeing the sun rising behind a mountain, or watching a shaft of light falling into a room in a mysteriously moving way. Such moments of illumination, peace, and bliss happen to us all and stay strangely with us.

I think we do, sometimes, half understand these glimpses. But then, modern culture gives us no context or framework in which to comprehend them. Worse still, rather than encouraging us to explore them more deeply and discover where they spring from, we are told in both obvious and subtle ways to shut them out. We know that no one will take us seriously if we try to share them. So we ignore what could be really the most revealing experiences of our lives, if only we understood them. This is perhaps the darkest and most disturbing aspect of modern civilization—its ignorance and repression of who we really are .

***

Know all things to be like this:
A mirage, a cloud castle,
A dream, an apparition,
Without essence, but with qualities that can be seen.

Know all things to be like this:
As the moon in a bright sky
In some clear lake reflected,
Though to that lake the moon has never moved.

Know all things to be like this:
As an echo that derives
From music, sounds, and weeping,
Yet in that echo is no melody.

Know all things to be like this:
As a magician makes illusions
Of horses, oxen, carts and other things,
Nothing is as it appears.

BUDDHA

***

A person of wisdom should be truthful, without arrogance, without deceit, not slanderous and not hateful. The wise person should go beyond the evil of greed and miserliness.

Do not get excited by what is old, do not be contented with what is new. Do not grieve for what is lost or be controlled by desire. - Sutta-nipata, translated by H. Saddhatissa

***

Although the results of our actions may not have matured yet, they will inevitably ripen, given the right conditions. Usually we forget what we do, and it is only long afterward that the results catch up with us. By then we are unable to connect them with their causes. “Imagine an eagle,” says Jikmé Lingpa.” It is flying, high in the sky. It casts no shadow. Nothing shows that it is there. Then suddenly it spies its prey, dives, and swoops to the ground. And as it drops, its menacing shadow appears.”

***

The nature of everything is illusory and ephemeral,
Those with dualistic perception regard suffering as happiness,
Like they who lick the honey from a razor’s edge.
How pitiful are they who cling strongly to concrete reality:
Turn your attention within, my heart friends.

NYOSHUL KHEN RINPOCHE

*** Lifetimes of ignorance have brought us to identify the whole of our being with ego. Its greatest triumph is to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering.

Yet, ego is so terribly convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become egoless terrifies us. To be egoless, ego whispers to us, is to lose all the rich romance of being human, to be reduced to a colorless robot or a brain-dead vegetable.

***

You can’t ever get everything you want. It is impossible. Luckily, there is another option: You can learn to control your mind, to step outside of this endless cycle of desire and aversion. You can learn not to want what you want, to recognize desires but not be controlled by them.

-Bhanta Henepola Gunaratana, "Mindfulness in Plain English"

***

Lifetimes of ignorance have brought us to identify the whole of our being with ego. Its greatest triumph is to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering.

***

I always tell my students not to come out of meditation too quickly. Allow a period of some minutes for the peace of the practice of meditation to infiltrate your life. As my master, Dudjom Rinpoche, said: “Don’t jump up and rush off, but mingle your mindfulness with everyday life. Be like a man who’s fractured his skull, always careful in case someone will touch him.”

***
As a single slab of rock
Won't budge in the wind,
So the wise are not moved
By praise,
By blame.

Like a deep lake,
Clear, unruffled, & calm;
So the wise become clear,
Calm,
On hearing words of the Dhamma.

-Dhammapada, 6, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.

***

Worldly afflictions are as extensive as an ocean, noisy and clamorous; but they all arise from the thoughts in your own mind. When not a single thought is conceived, you are liberated from them all. - Ta-t

***

Our mind is like an onion, and each day and month of practice progressively peels away the layers of delusion. - Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey, "Advice From a Spiritual Friend"

***

The most important thing is not to get trapped in what I see everywhere in the West, a “shopping mentality”: shopping around from master to master, teaching to teaching, without any continuity or real, sustained dedication to any one discipline. Nearly all the great spiritual masters of all traditions agree that the essential thing is to master one way, one path to the truth, by following one tradition with all your heart and mind to the end of the spiritual journey, while, of course, remaining open and respectful toward the insights of all others. In Tibet we used to say: “knowing one, you accomplish all.” The modem faddish idea that we can always keep all our options open and so never need commit ourselves to anything is one of the greatest and most dangerous delusions of our culture, and one of ego’s most effective ways of sabotaging our spiritual search.

***

The practice of mindfulness defuses our negativity, aggression, and turbulent emotions, which may have been gathering power over many lifetimes. Rather than suppressing emotions or indulging in them, here it is important to view them—your thoughts and whatever arises—with an acceptance and generosity that are as open and spacious as possible. Tibetan masters say that this wise generosity has the flavor of boundless space, so warm and cozy that you feel enveloped and protected by it, as if by a blanket of sunlight.

***

One of the major aims and purposes of religious practice for the individual is an inner transformation from an undisciplined, untamed, and unfocused state of mind towards one that is disciplined, tamed and balanced.

-His Holiness the Dalai Lama

***

Enlightenment for Gautama [the Buddha] felt as though a prison which had confined him for thousands of lifetimes had broken open. Ignorance had been the jailkeeper. Because of ignorance, his mind had been obscured, just like the moon and stars hidden by the storm clouds. Clouded by endless waves of deluded thoughts, the mind had falsely divided reality into subject and object, self and others, existence and non-existence, birth and death, and from these discriminations arose wrong views—the prisons of feelings, craving, grasping, and becoming. The suffering of birth, old age, sickness, and death only made the prison walls thicker. The only thing to do was to seize the jailkeeper and see his true face. The jailkeeper was ignorance. . . . Once the jailkeeper was gone, the jail would disappear and never be rebuilt again. - THICH NHAT HANH, inTHE BUDDHA’S ENLlGHTENMENT

***

Taking impermanence truly to heart is to be slowly freed from the idea of grasping, from our flawed and destructive view of permanence, from the false passion for security on which we have built everything. Slowly it dawns on us that all the heartache we have been through from grasping at the ungraspable was, in the deepest sense, unnecessary.

At the beginning this too may be painful to accept, because it seems so unfamiliar. But as we reflect, slowly our hearts and minds go through a gradual transformation. Letting go begins to feel more natural, and becomes easier and easier.

It may take a long time for the extent of our foolishness to sink in, but the more we reflect, the more we develop the view of letting go. It is then that a complete shift takes place in our way of looking at everything. - THE DALAI LAMA

***

Since everything is but an apparition,
Perfect in being what it is,
Having nothing to do with good or bad,
Acceptance or rejection

You might as well burst out laughing!

LONGCHENPA

***

One moon appears everywhere in all bodies of water; the moons in all bodies of water are contained in one moon. This is a metaphor for one mind producing myriad things and myriad things producing one mind. This refers to dream illusions, flowers in the sky, half-seeming, half empty. - Hsueh-yen

***

At the time of Buddha, there lived an old beggar woman called Relying on Joy. She used to watch the kings, princes, and people making offerings to Buddha and his disciples, and there was nothing she would have liked more than to be able to do the same. But she could only beg enough oil to fill a single lamp. However, as she placed it before Buddha she made this wish: “I have nothing to offer but this tiny lamp. But through this offering, in the future may I be blessed with the lamp of wisdom. May I free all beings from their darkness. May I purify all their obscurations, and lead them to enlightenment.”

That night, the oil in all the other lamps went out. But the beggar woman’s lamp was still burning at dawn, when Buddha’s great disciple Maudgalyayana came to collect the lamps. He saw no reason why one lamp was still alight and tried to snuff it out. But whatever he did, the lamp kept burning.

Buddha had been watching all along, and said: “Maudgalyayana, do you want to put out that lamp? You cannot. You could not even move it, let alone put it out. If you were to pour the water from all the oceans over this lamp, it still wouldn’t go out. The water in all the rivers and lakes of the world could not extinguish it. Why not? Because this lamp was offered with devotion, and with purity of heart and mind. And that motivation has made it of tremendous benefit.”

***

Non-violence means dialogue, using our language, the human language. Dialogue means compromise; respecting each other’s rights; in the spirit of reconciliation there is a real solution to conflict and disagreement. There is no hundred percent winner, no hundred percent loser—not that way but half-and-half. That is the practical way, the only way. - His Holiness the Dalai Lama

***

Visualize someone to whom you feel very close, particularly someone who is suffering and in pain. As you breathe in, imagine you take in all their suffering and pain with compassion, and as you breathe out, send your warmth, healing, love, joy, and happiness streaming out to them.

Now, gradually widen the circle of your compassion to embrace first other people to whom you also feel very close, then to those about whom you feel indifferent, then to those whom you dislike or have difficulty with, then even to those whom you feel are actively monstrous and cruel. Allow your compassion to become universal, and to enfold in its embrace all sentient beings, and all beings, in fact, without any exception.

***

In the ordinary mind, we perceive the stream of thoughts as continuous, but in reality this is not the case. You will discover for yourself that there is a gap between each thought. When the past thought is past, and the future thought has not yet arisen, you will always find a gap in which the Rigpa, the nature of mind, is revealed. So the work of meditation is to allow thoughts to slow down, to make that gap become more and more apparent.

***

Even within the human realm, all of us have our own individual karma. Human beings look much the same, but we perceive things utterly differently, and we each live in our own unique, separate, individual world. As Kalu Rinpoche says:

“If a hundred people sleep and dream, each of them will experience a different world in his dream. Everyone’s dream might be said to be true, but it would be meaningless to ascertain that only one person’s dream was the true world and all others were fallacies. There is truth for each perceiver according to the karmic patterns conditioning his perceptions.”

***

A man was rowing his boat upstream on a very misty morning. Suddenly, he saw another boat coming downstream, not trying to avoid him. It was coming straight at him. He shouted, “Be careful! Be careful!” but the boat came right into him, and his boat was almost sunk. The man became very angry, and began to shout at the other person, to give him a piece of his mind. But when he looked closely, he saw that there was no one in the other boat. It turned out that the boat just got loose and went downstream. All his anger vanished, and he laughed and he laughed.

-Thich Nhat Nanh, "Being Peace"

***

Ego plays brilliantly on our fundamental fear of losing control, and of the unknown. We might say to ourselves: “I should really let go of ego, I’m in such pain; but if I do, what’s going to happen to me?”

Ego will chime in sweetly: “I know I’m sometimes a nuisance, and believe me, I quite understand if you want me to leave. But is that really what you want? Think: If I do go, what’s going to happen to you? Who’ll look after you? Who will protect and care for you like I’ve done all these years?”

Even if we see through the lies of the ego, we are just too scared to abandon it; for without any true knowledge of the nature of our mind, or true identity, we simply have no other alternative. Again and again we cave in to ego’s demands with the same sad self-hatred as the alcoholic feels reaching for the drink that he knows is destroying him, or the drug addict feels groping for the drug that she knows after a brief high will only leave her flat and desperate

***

Don’t be in too much of a hurry to solve all your doubts and problems. As the masters say: “Make haste slowly.” I always tell my students not to have unreasonable expectations, because it takes time for spiritual growth. It takes years to learn Japanese properly or to become a doctor. Can we really expect to have all the answers, let alone become enlightened, in a few weeks?

The spiritual journey is one of continuous learning and purification. When you know this, you become humble. There is a famous Tibetan saying: “Do not mistake understanding for realization, and do not mistake realization for liberation.” And Milarepa said: “Do not entertain hopes for realization, but practice all your life.”

***

ON BODHICITTA:

The Compassionate Heart of the Enlightened Mind

It is the supreme elixir
That overcomes the sovereignty of death.
It is the inexhaustible treasure
That eliminates poverty in the world.
It is the supreme medicine
That quells the world’s disease.
It is the tree that shelters all beings
Wandering and tired on the path of conditioned existence.
It is the universal bridge
That leads to freedom from unhappy states of birth.
It is the dawning moon of the mind
That dispels the torment of disturbing conceptions.
It is the great sun that finally removes
The misty ignorance of the world.

SHANTIDEVA

***

If you were to draw one essential message from the fact of reincarnation, it would be: Develop a good heart that longs for other beings to find lasting happiness, and acts to secure that happiness. Nourish and practice kindness.

The Dalai Lama has said: “There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; my philosophy is kindness.”

***

Nature’s Law dictates that, in order to survive, bees must work together. As a result, they instinctively possess a sense of social responsibility. They have no constitution, no law, no police, no religion or moral training, but because of their nature, they labor faithfully together. Occasionally, they may fight, but in general, based on cooperation, the whole colony survives. We human beings have a constitution, laws and a police force. We have religion, remarkable intelligence and a heart with a great capacity for love. We have many extraordinary qualities, but in actual practice, I think we are lagging behind those small insects. In some respects, I feel we are poorer than the bees. - His Holiness the Dalai Lama, From "The Pocket Zen Reader," edited by Thomas Cleary, 1999. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Boston, www.shambhala.com

***

Always recognize the dreamlike qualities of life and reduce attachment and aversion. Practice good-heartedness toward all beings. Be loving and compassionate, no matter what others do to you. What they will do will not matter so much when you see it as a dream. The trick is to have positive intention during the dream. This is the essential point. This is true spirituality.

CHAKDUD TULKU RINPOCHE

***

Whatever joy there is in this world
All comes from desiring and helping others to be happy,
And whatever suffering there is in this world
All comes from desiring myself to be happy.

SHANTIDEVA

***

To end the bizarre tyranny of ego is why we take the spiritual path, but the resourcefulness of ego is almost infinite, and it can at every stage sabotage and pervert our desire to be free of it. The truth is simple, and the teachings are extremely clear; but I have seen again and again, with great sadness, that as soon as they begin to touch and move us, ego tries to complicate them, because it knows it is fundamentally threatened.

However hard ego may try to sabotage the spiritual path, if you really continue on it, and work deeply with the practice of meditation, you will begin slowly to realize just how gulled you have been by ego’s promises: false hopes and false fears. Slowly you begin to understand that both hope and fear are enemies of your peace of mind; hopes deceive you, and leave you empty and disappointed, and fears paralyze you in the narrow cell of your false identity. You begin to see also just how all-encompassing the sway of ego has been over your mind, and in the space of freedom opened up by meditation, when you are momentarily released from grasping, you glimpse the exhilarating spaciousness of your true nature.

***

When you see others’ errors and you want to guide them because you think they are wrong and you feel compassion for them, you should employ tact to avoid angering them, and contrive to appear as if you were talking about something else.

-Tact, Dogen

***

The times when you are suffering can be those when you are open, and where you are extremely vulnerable can be where your greatest strength really lies.

Say to yourself: “I am not going to run away from this suffering. I want to use it in the best and richest way I can, so that I can become more compassionate and more helpful to others.” Suffering, after all, can teach us about compassion. If you suffer, you will know how it is when others suffer. And if you are in a position to help others, it is through your suffering that you will find the understanding and compassion to do so.

***

Never give up
No matter what is going on
Never give up
Develop the heart
Too much energy in your country is spent
Developing the mind instead of the heart.
Be compassionate not just to your friends but to everyone
Be compassionate.
Work for peace in your heart and in the world.
Work for peace and I say again
Never give up.
No matter what is happening,
No matter what is going on around you,
Never give up.

-His Holiness the Dalai Lama

***

It is essential to realize now, in life, when we still have a body, that its convincing appearance of solidity is a mere illusion. The most powerful way to realize this is to learn how, after meditation, to “become a child of illusion”: to refrain from solidifying, as we are always tempted to do, the perceptions of ourselves and our world; and to go on, like the “child of illusion,” seeing directly, as we do in meditation, that all phenomena are illusory and dreamlike. The realization that this deepens the body’s illusory nature is one of the most profound and inspiring we can have to help us to let go.

What is born will die,
What has been gathered will be dispersed,
What has been accumulated will be exhausted,
What has been built up will collapse,
And what has been high will be brought low.

TRADITIONAL BUDDHIST SCRIPTURE

***

Fleeting is this world
Growth and decay its very nature
Things spring to being and again they cease
Happy the marvel of them and the peace.

-Nidana Vagga

***

It is precisely because our present life is so inseparably linked with desire that we must make use of desire’s tremendous energy if we wish to transform our life into something transcendental.

-Lama Thubten Yeshe, Introduction to Tantra

***

“Training” the mind does not in any way mean forcibly subjugating or brainwashing the mind. To train the mind is first to see directly and concretely how the mind functions, a knowledge that you derive from spiritual teachings and through personal experience in meditation practice. Then you use that understanding to tame the mind and work with it skillfully, to make it more and more pliable, so that you can become master of your mind and employ it to its fullest and most beneficial end.

***

A good motivation is what is needed: compassion without dogmatism, without complicated philosophy; just understanding that others are human brothers and sisters and respecting their human rights and dignities. That we humans can help each other is one of our unique human capacities.

-His Holiness the Dalai Lama

***

Since the old days, it is said that "anger is the fire in one's mind that burns away all of one's virtuous deeds." Anger should be absolutely surrendered.

-Jae Woong Kim, "Polishing the Diamond"

For the one who has no inner, angry thoughts,
Who has gone past being a someone, a this or a that,
That one is free from fear and is blissful.
Even the gods cannot win such serenity.

-Udana Sutta

***

I see all the different religious traditions as paths for the development of inner peace, which is the true foundation of world peace. These ancient traditions come to us as a gift from our common past. Will we continue to cherish it as a gift and hand it over the the future generations as a legacy of our shared desire for peace? - His Holiness the Dalai Lama

***

Slowly, you will become a master of your own bliss, a chemist of your own joy, with all sorts of remedies always at hand to elevate, cheer, illuminate, and inspire your every breath and movement.

***

When we have really grasped the law of karma in all its stark power and complex reverberations over many, many lifetimes, and seen just how our self-grasping and self-cherishing, life after life, have woven us repeatedly into a net of ignorance that seems only to be ensnaring us more and more tightly; when we have really understood the dangerous and doomed nature of the self-grasping mind’s enterprise; when we have really pursued its operations into their most subtle hiding places; when we have really understood just how our whole ordinary mind and actions are defined, narrowed and darkened by it, how almost impossible it makes it for us to uncover the heart of unconditional love, and how it has blocked in us all sources of real love and real compassion, then there comes a moment when we understand, with extreme and poignant clarity, what Shantideva said:

If all the harms
Fears and sufferings in the world
Arise from self-grasping,
What need have I for such a great evil spirit?

And then a resolution is born in us to destroy that evil spirit, our greatest enemy. With that evil spirit dead, the cause of all our suffering will be removed, and our true nature, in all its spaciousness and dynamic generosity, will shine out.

***

To recognize the nature of your mind is to engender in the ground of your being an understanding that will change your entire worldview and help you discover and develop, naturally and spontaneously, a compassionate desire to serve all beings, as well as a direct knowledge of how best you can do so, with whatever skill or ability you have, in whatever circumstances you find yourself.

***

There is a spark of hope, a playful humor about the posture we take in meditation, which lies in the secret understanding that we all have the buddha nature. So when you assume this posture, you are playfully imitating a buddha, acknowledging and giving real encouragement to the emergence of your own buddha nature. You begin to respect yourself as a potential buddha.

At the same time, you still recognize your relative condition. But because you have let yourself be inspired by a joyful trust in your own true buddha nature, you can accept your negative aspects more easily and deal with them more generously and with more humor.

When you meditate, invite yourself to feel the self-esteem, the dignity, and the strong humility of the buddha that you are. If you simply let yourself be inspired by this joyful trust, it is enough: Out of this understanding and confidence, meditation will naturally arise.

***

You can have no greater ally in the war against your greatest enemy, your own self-grasping and self-cherishing, than the practice of compassion. It is compassion, dedicating ourselves to others, taking on their suffering instead of cherishing ourselves, that, hand in hand with the wisdom of egolessness, destroys most effectively and most completely that ancient attachment to a false self that has been the cause of our endless wandering in samsara. That is why in our tradition we see compassion as the source and essence of enlightenment and the heart of enlightened activity.

***

My call for a spiritual revolution is thus not a call for a religious revolution. Nor is it a reference to a way of life that is somehow other-worldly, still less to something magical or mysterious. Rather, it is a call for a radical re-orientation away from our habitual preoccupation with self towards concern for the wider community of beings with whom we are connected, and for conduct which recognizes others’ interests alongside our own.

-His Holiness the Dalai Lama

***

As Buddhists, our task is to manifest compassion in everyday life, beginning with members of our own family and extending it to all of society.

Taitetsu Unno (Shin Buddhist professor at Smith C)

for Pure Land Buddhists, the key to being illuminated with the divine light of compassion and transcending delusions, is single-hearted recitation of NEMBUTSU, the name of Amida, the Buddha of Infinite Light. . . .”Namu-Amida-Butsu”

We cultivate the aspiration to benefit others as an antidote to self-cherishing.

Dalai Lama

We perceive conventional truth , that is , the relative world in all its diversity, through our everyday use of mind and our sense faculties. However, it is only through penetrating analysis that we are able to perceive ultimate truth, the true nature of things and events.

Dalai Lama

(after the first stage of accumulation of knowledge to gain total clarity of insight, comes the second stage of preparation, when) The use of concepts in meditation gradually recedes. When all dualistic perceptions of subject and object, of conventional reality, and of intrinsic existence are removed, one enters the path of seeing. At this point, there is no separation of subject and object.

-Dalai Lama

the 5 spiritual friends, or powers: faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, wisdom

Two fundamental tenets of Buddhist practice are to want little and to be easily satisfied. Is that your aim? Are you helping people to live a life of less suffering and more happiness through continuous practice of meditation, virtue and insight?

Venzin Wangyal Rinpoche

(There are 3 pillars of all schools of Buddhism:) the method of mindfulness, the motivation of compassion, and the liberating wisdom of non-clinging.

Joseph Goldstein

I think one can call oneself a Buddhist because one is inspired by various and sundry aspects of the Buddhist teachings (even if one hasn’t taken refuge in the 3 jewels).

Jeffry Hopkins (Buddhism professor at U. of Va.)

The mind plays a game called “Attachment” and is fooling itself by pretending that external forces are responsible for your happiness. Attachment is the root cause of all mental disturbances, and expectations play the biggest role. Your expectations breed likes and dislikes. Then you get attached to your likes and dislikes and cling to them. It is your expectations that create distractions and disturbances when you do your meditation practice—not the outside world and not the people around you.

. . .If we expect worldly objects and relationships to secure our happiness, we will be disappointed. Disappointment leads to misery.

. . .How foolish I have been to forget that invisible, benevolent force that accompanies us always, protecting, guiding, and nurturing. Instead of remembering that force, I am complaining and worrying.

. . .Once the virtue of pure faith begins to blossom in your heart, you will no longer be dependent on the world and worldly relations to make you happy. Contentment will become your nature.

- Pandit Rajmani Tigunait (spiritual head of the Himalayan Instit)

***

As Buddha said: “What you are is what you have been, what you will be is what you do now.” Padmasambhava went further: “If you want to know your past life, look into your present condition; if you want to know your future life, look at your present actions.”

***

The quality of life in the realm of the gods may look superior to our own, yet the masters tell us that human life is infinitely more valuable. Why? Because of the very fact that we have the awareness and intelligence that are the raw materials for enlightenment, and because the very suffering that pervades this human realm is itself the spur to spiritual transformation.

Pain, grief, loss, and ceaseless frustration of every kind are there for a very real and dramatic purpose: to wake us up, to enable, almost to force us to break out of the cycle of samsara and so release our imprisoned splendor.

***

Compassion is not true compassion unless it is active. Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of Compassion, is often represented in Tibetan iconography as having a thousand eyes that see the pain in all corners of the universe, and a thousand arms to reach out to all corners of the universe to extend his help.

***

Anger or hatred is like a fisherman's hook. It is very important for us to ensure that we are not caught by it.

-His Holiness the Dalai Lama

***

Karma means that whatever we do, with our bodies, speech, or minds, will have a corresponding result. Each action, even the smallest, is pregnant with its consequences. It is said by the masters that even a little poison can cause death, and even a tiny seed can become a huge tree. And as Buddha said: “Do not overlook negative actions merely because they are small; however small a spark may be, it can burn down a haystack as big as a mountain.”

Similarly he said: “Do not overlook tiny good actions, thinking they are of no benefit even tiny drops of water in the end will fill a huge vessel.”

Karma does not decay like external things, or ever become inoperative. It cannot be destroyed “by time, fire, or water.” Its power will never disappear, until it is ripened.

***

The problem is not materialism as such. Rather, it is the underlying assumption that full satisfaction can arise from gratifying the senses alone. Unlike animals whose quest for happiness is restricted to survival and to the immediate gratification of sensory desires, we human beings have the capacity to experience happiness at a deeper level which, when achieved, can overwhelm unhappy experiences. - His Holiness the Dalai Lama

***

Gradually, as you remain open and mindful, and use a technique to focus your mind more and more, your negativity will slowly be defused; you begin to feel well in your own skin, or, as the French say, être bien dans sa peau (“well in your own skin”). From this comes release and a profound ease. I think of this practice as the most effective form of therapy and self-healing.

***

Every single negative thing we have ever thought or done has ultimately arisen from our grasping at a false self, and our cherishing of that false self, making it the dearest and most important element in our lives. All those negative thoughts, emotions, desires, and actions that are the cause of our negative karma are engendered by self-grasping and self-cherishing. They are the dark, powerful magnet that attracts to us, life after life, every obstacle, every misfortune, every anguish, every disaster, and so they are the root cause of all the sufferings of samsara.

***

All things are free-flowing, untrammeled—what bondage is there, what entanglement? You create your own difficulty and ease therein. The mind source pervades the ten directions with one continuity; those of the most excellent faculties understand naturally.

-Tzu-hu

***

How hard it can be to turn our attention within! How easily we allow our old habits and set patterns to dominate us! Even though they bring us suffering, we accept them with almost fatalistic resignation, for we are so used to giving in to them. We may idealize freedom, but when it comes to our habits, we are completely enslaved.

Still, reflection can slowly bring us wisdom. We may, of course, fall back into fixed repetitive patterns again and again, but slowly we can emerge from them and change.

***

Karma is not fatalistic or predetermined. Karma means our ability to create and to change. It is creative because we can determine how and why we act. We can change. The future is in our hands, and in the hands of our heart.

Buddha said:

Karma creates all, like an artist,
Karma composes, like a dancer.

***

The still revolutionary insight of Buddhism is that life and death are in the mind, and nowhere else. Mind is revealed as the universal basis of experience—the creator of happiness and the creator of suffering, the creator of what we call life and what we call death.

***

Not thinking about anything is zen. Once you know this, walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is zen. To know that the mind is empty is to see the Buddha...Using the mind to look for reality is delusion. Not using the mind to look for reality is awareness. Freeing oneself from words is liberation.

-Bodhidharma

***

A wave in the sea, seen in one way, seems to have a distinct identity, an end and a beginning, a birth anda death. Seen in another way, the wave itself doesn’t really exist but is just the behavior of water, “empty” of any separate identity but “full” of water. So when you really think about the wave, you come to realize that it is something that has been made temporarily possible by wind and water, and is dependent on a set of constantly changing circumstances. You also realize that every wave is related to every other wave.

***

If a man should conquer in battle a thousand and a thousand more, and another should conquer himself, his would be the greater victory, because the greatest of victories is the victory over oneself.

-Buddha

***

When anger arises,
whoever keeps firm control
as if with a racing chariot:
him
I call a master charioteer.
Anyone else;
a rein-holder--
that's all.

-Dhammapada, 17, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.

***

Let us rise up and be thankful,
for if we didn’t learn a lot today,
at least we learned a little,
and if we didn’t learn a little,
at least we didn’t get sick,
and if we got sick,
at least we didn’t die;
so, let us be thankful.

-The Buddha

***

We have been taught to spend our lives chasing our thoughts and projections. Even when the “mind” is talked about, it is only thoughts and emotions that are referred to; and when our researchers study what they imagine to be the mind, they look only at its projections. No one ever really looks into the mind itself, the ground from which all these expressions arise; and this has tragic consequences.

***

As Buddhists, our task is to manifest compassion in everyday life, beginning with members of our own family and extending it to all of society.

Taitetsu Unno (Shin Buddhist professor at Smith C)

We cultivate the aspiration to benefit others as an antidote to self-cherishing.

Dalai Lama

Dalai Lama

-Dalai Lama

the 5 spiritual friends, or powers: faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, wisdom

Venzin Wangyal Rinpoche

(There are 3 pillars of all schools of Buddhism:) the method of mindfulness, the motivation of compassion, and the liberating wisdom of non-clinging. - Joseph Goldstein

I think one can call oneself a Buddhist because one is inspired by various and sundry aspects of the Buddhist teachings (even if one hasn’t taken refuge in the 3 jewels).

Jeffry Hopkins (Buddhism professor at U. of Va.)

. . .If we expect worldly objects and relationships to secure our happiness, we will be disappointed. Disappointment leads to misery.

. . .Once the virtue of pure faith begins to blossom in your heart, you will no longer be dependent on the world and worldly relations to make you happy. Contentment will become your nature.

- Pandit Rajmani Tigunait (spiritual head of the Himalayan Instit)

***

At present, our body is undoubtedly the center of our whole universe. We associate it, without thinking, with our self and our ego, and this thoughtless and false association continually reinforces our illusion of their inseparable, concrete existence. Because our body seems so convincingly to exist, our “I” seems to exist, and “you” seem to exist, and the entire illusory, dualistic world we never stop projecting around us looks ultimately solid and real.

When we die, this whole compound construction falls dramatically to pieces.

***

There is a famous saying: “If the mind is not contrived, it is spontaneously blissful, just as water, when not agitated, is by nature transparent and clear.”

I often compare the mind in meditation to a jar of muddy water: The more we leave the water without interfering or stirring it, the more the particles of dirt will sink to the bottom, letting the natural clarity of the water shine through. The very nature of the mind is such that if you only leave it in its unaltered and natural state, it will find its true nature, which is bliss and clarity.

***

Even though that which is usually called “mind” is widely esteemed and much discussed,
Still it is not understood or it is wrongly understood or it is understood in a one-sided manner only.
Since it is not understood correctly, just as it is in itself,
There comes into existence inconceivable numbers of philosophical ideas and assertions.
Furthermore, since ordinary individuals do not understand it,
They do not recognize their own nature,
And so they continue to wander among the six destinies of rebirth within the three worlds, and thus experience suffering.

Therefore, not understanding your own mind is a very grievous fault.

PADMASAMBHAVA

***

The absolute truth cannot be realized within the domain of the ordinary mind. And the path beyond the ordinary mind, all the great wisdom traditions have told us, is through the heart. This path of the heart is devotion.

***

Renunciation has both sadness and joy in it: sadness because you realize the futility of your old ways, and joy because of the greater vision that begins to unfold when you are able to let go of them. This is no ordinary joy. It is a joy that gives birth to a new and profound strength, a confidence, an abiding inspiration that comes from the realization that you are not condemned to your habits, that you can indeed emerge from them, that you can change, and grow more and more free.

***

Quietly sitting, body still, speech silent, mind at peace, let thoughts and emotions, whatever rises, come and go, without clinging to anything.

What does this state feel like? Dudjom Rinpoche used to say: Imagine a man who comes home after a long, hard day’s work in the fields, and sinks into his favorite chair in front of the fire. He has been working all day and he knows that he has achieved what he wanted to achieve; there is nothing more to worry about, nothing left unaccomplished, and he can let go completely of all his cares and concerns, content, simply, to be.

***

Adopting an attitude of universal responsibility is essentially a personal matter. The real test of compassion is not what we say in abstract discussions but how we conduct ourselves in daily life.

-His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "Imagine All the People"

It is very important that you do not compare your actions to your partner's or judge your partner's behavior as unskillful. Rather, focus on your own actions and take responsibility for them. Recall those times when you looked into your partner's eyes and saw the pain you caused this person you love to suffer. If you can admit your own faults, if you can see how hurtful your actions were and tap into a sense of concern for your partner's well-being, then compassion and loving-friendliness will flow.

-Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, "Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness"

Copyright Wisdom Publications 2001. Reprinted from "Daily Wisdom: 365 Buddhist Inspirations," edited by Josh Bartok, with permission of Wisdom Publications, 199 Elm St., Somerville MA 02144 U.S.A, www.wisdompubs.org.

When someone is suffering and you find yourself at a loss to know how to help, put yourself unflinchingly in his or her place. Imagine as vividly as possible what you would be going through if you were suffering the same pain. Ask yourself: “How would I feel? How would I want my friends to treat me? What would I most want from them?”

When you exchange yourself for others in this way, you are directly transferring your cherishing from its usual object, yourself, to other beings. So exchanging yourself for others is a very powerful way of loosening the hold on you of the self-cherishing and the self-grasping of ego, and so of releasing the heart of your compassion.

Slowly, you will become a master of your own bliss, a chemist of your own joy, with all sorts of remedies always at hand to elevate, cheer, illuminate, and inspire your every breath and movement.

One of the greatest Buddhist traditions calls the nature of mind “the wisdom of ordinariness.” I cannot say it enough: Our true nature and the nature of all beings is not something extraordinary.

If we were to put our minds to one powerful wisdom method and work with it directly, there is a real possibility we would become enlightened.

When little obstacles crop up on the spiritual path, a good practitioner does not lose faith and begin to doubt, but has the discernment to recognize difficulties, whatever they may be, for what they are—just obstacles, and nothing more. It is the nature of things that when you recognize an obstacle as such, it ceases to be an obstacle. Equally, it is by failing to recognize an obstacle for what it is, and therefore taking it seriously, that it is empowered and solidified and becomes a real blockage.

For us to survive on the spiritual path, there are many challenges to face, and there is much to learn. We have to discover how to deal with obstacles and difficulties; how to process doubts and see through wrong views; how to inspire ourselves when we least feel like it; how to understand ourselves and our moods; how really to work with and integrate the teachings and practices; how to evoke compassion and enact it in life; and how to transform our suffering and emotions.

On the spiritual path, all of us need the support and the good foundation that come from really knowing the teachings, and this cannot be stressed strongly enough. For the more we study and practice, the more we shall embody discernment, clarity, and insight. Then, when the truth comes knocking, we will know it, with certainty, for what it is, and gladly open the door, because we’ll have guessed that it may well be the truth of who we really are.

Similarly he said: “Do not overlook tiny good actions, thinking they are of no benefit even tiny drops of water in the end will fill a huge vessel.”

Karma does not decay like external things, or ever become inoperative. It cannot be destroyed “by time, fire, or water.” Its power will never disappear, until it is ripened.

The beginner’s mind is an open mind, an empty mind, a ready mind, and if we really listen with a beginner’s mind, we might really begin to hear. For if we listen with a silent mind, as free as possible from the clamor of preconceived ideas, a possibility will be created for the truth of the teachings to pierce us, and for the meaning of life and death to become increasingly and startlingly clear.

My master Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche said: “The more and more you listen, the more and more you hear; the more and more you hear, the deeper and deeper your understanding becomes.”

Realizing the View subtly but completely transforms your vision of everything. More and more, I have come to realize how thoughts and concepts are all that block us from always being, quite simply, in the absolute. Now I see clearly why the masters so often say: “Try hard not to create too much hope and fear,” for they only engender more mental gossip. When the View is there, thoughts are seen for what they truly are: fleeting and transparent, and only relative. You see through everything directly, as if you had X-ray eyes. You do not cling to thoughts and emotions or reject them; you welcome them all within the vast embrace of Rigpa. The things you took so seriously before—ambitions, plans, expectations, doubts, and passions—no longer have any deep and anxious hold on you, for the View has helped you to see the futility and pointlessness of them all, and born in you a spirit of true renunciation.

We must never forget that it is through our actions, words, and thoughts that we have a choice. And if we choose to do so, we can put an end to suffering and the causes of suffering, and help our true potential, our buddha nature, to awaken in us. Until this buddha nature is completely awakened and we are freed from our ignorance and merge with the deathless, enlightened mind, there can be no end to the round of life and death. So, the teachings tell us, if we do not assume the fullest possible responsibility for ourselves now in this life, our suffering will go on not only for a few lives but for thousands of lives.

It is this sobering knowledge that makes Buddhists consider that future lives are more important even than this one, because there are many more that await us in the future. This long-term vision governs how they live. They know if we were to sacrifice the whole of eternity for this life, it would be like spending our entire life savings on one drink, madly ignoring the consequences.

To realize what I call the wisdom of compassion is to see with complete clarity its benefits, as well as the damage that its opposite has done to us. We need to make a very clear distinction between what is in our ego’s self-interest and what is in our ultimate interest; it is from mistaking one for the other that all our suffering comes.

Self-grasping creates self-cherishing, which in turn creates an ingrained aversion to harm and suffering. However, harm and suffering have no objective existence; what gives them their existence and their power is only our aversion to them. When you understand this, you understand then that it is our aversion that attracts to us every negativity and obstacle that can possibly happen to us, and fills our lives with nervous anxiety, expectation, and fear.

Wear down that aversion by wearing down the self-grasping mind and its attachment to a nonexistent self, and you will wear down any hold on you that any obstacle and negativity can have. For how can you attack someone or something that is just not there?

***

Each time we begin our practice of meditation, we are moved by the awareness that we and all other sentient beings fundamentally have the Buddha nature as our innermost essence, and that to realize it is to be free of ignorance and to put an end, finally, to suffering.

We are inspired with the motivation to dedicate our practice, and our life, to the enlightenment of all beings in the spirit of this prayer, which all the buddhas of the past have prayed:

By the power and the truth of this practice:
May all beings have happiness, and the causes of happiness;
May all be free from sorrow, and the causes of sorrow;
May all never be separated from the sacred happiness which is sorrowless;
And may all live in equanimity, without too much attachment and too much aversion,
And live believing in the equality of all that lives.

The practice of mindfulness, of bringing the scattered mind home, and so of bringing the different aspects of our being into focus, is called Peacefully Remaining or Calm Abiding.

To learn how to die is to learn how to live; to learn how to live is to learn how to act not only in this life but in the lives to come. To transform yourself truly and learn how to be reborn as a transformed being to help others is really to help the world in the most powerful way of all.

Let us dare to imagine now what it would be like to live in a world where a significant number of people took the opportunity, offered by the teachings, to devote part of their lives to serious spiritual practice, to recognize the nature of their minds, and so to use the opportunity of their deaths to move closer to buddhahood, and to be reborn with one aim, that of serving and benefiting others.

Our minds can be wonderful, but at the same time they can be our very worst enemy. They give us so much trouble. Sometimes I wish the mind were like a set of dentures, which we could take out and leave on our bedside table overnight. At least we would get a break from its tiring and tiresome escapades.

We are so at the mercy of our minds that even when we find that the spiritual teachings strike a chord inside us, and move us more than anything we have ever experienced, still we hold back, because of some deep-seated and inexplicable suspicion.

Somewhere along the line, though, we have to stop mistrusting. We have to let go of the suspicion and doubt, which are supposed to protect us but never work, and only end up hurting us even more than what they are supposed to defend us from.

Grasping is the source of all our problems. Since impermanence to us spells anguish, we grasp on to things desperately, even though all things change. We are terrified of letting go, terrified, in fact, of living at all, since learning to live is learning to let go. And this is the tragedy and the irony of our struggle to hold on: Not only is it impossible, but it brings us the very pain we are seeking to avoid.

The intention behind grasping may not in itself be bad; there’s nothing wrong with the desire to be happy, but what we try to grasp on to is by nature ungraspable.

The Tibetans say that you cannot wash the same dirty hand twice in the same running river, and “no matter how much you squeeze a handful of sand, you will never get oil out of it.”

Whatever we have done with our lives makes us what we are when we die. And everything, absolutely everything, counts.

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

Ego is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing, and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence.

In Tibetan, ego is called dakdzin , which means “grasping to a self.” Ego is then defined as incessant movements of grasping at a delusory notion of “I” and “mine,” self and other, and all the concepts, ideas, desires, and activities that will sustain that false construction.

Such grasping is futile from the start and condemned to frustration, for there is no basis or truth in it, and what we are grasping at is by its very nature ungraspable. The fact that we need to grasp at all and to go on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self doesn’t inherently exist. From this secret, unnerving knowledge spring all our fundamental insecurities and fears.

As we follow the teachings and as we practice, we will inevitably discover certain truths about ourselves that stand out prominently: There are places where we always get stuck; there are habitual patterns and strategies that are the legacy of negative karma, which we continuously repeat and reinforce; there are particular ways of seeing things—those tired old explanations of ourselves and the world around us—that are quite mistaken yet which we hold onto as authentic, and so distort our whole view of reality.

When we persevere on the spiritual path, and examine ourselves honestly, it begins to dawn on us more and more that our perceptions are nothing more than a web of illusions. Simply to acknowledge our confusion, even though we cannot accept it completely, can bring some light of understanding and spark off in us a new process, a process of healing.

If the doors of perception were cleansed
Everything would appear . . . as it is, infinite.

When we die we leave everything behind, especially this body we have cherished so much and relied upon so blindly and tried so hard to keep alive. But our minds are no more dependable than our bodies. Just look at your mind for a few minutes.

You will see that it is like a flea, constantly hopping to and fro. You will see that thoughts arise without any reason, without any connection. Swept along by the chaos of every moment, we are the victims of the fickleness of our minds. If this is the only state of consciousness we are familiar with, then to rely on our minds at the moment of death is an absurd gamble.

Since everything is but an apparition,
Perfect in being what it is,
Having nothing to do with good or bad,
Acceptance or rejection

You might as well burst out laughing!

LONGCHENPA

Wrong views and wrong convictions can be the most devastating of all our delusions. Surely Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot must have been convinced that they were right too? And yet each and every one of us has that same dangerous tendency as they had: to form convictions, believe them without question, and act on them, so bringing down suffering not only on ourselves but on all those around us.

On the other hand, the heart of Buddha’s teaching is to see “the actual state of things, as they are,” and this is called the true View. It is a view that is all-embracing, as the role of spiritual teachings is precisely to give us a complete perspective on the nature of mind and reality.

To contemplate impermanence on its own is not enough: You have to work with it in your life. Let’s try an experiment. Pick up a coin. Imagine that it represents the object at which you are grasping. Hold it tightly clutched in your fist and extend your arm, with the palm of your hand facing the ground. Now if you let go or relax your grip, you will lose what you are clinging to. That’s why you hold on.

But there’s another possibility: You can let go and yet keep hold of it. With your arm still outstretched, turn your hand over so that it faces the sky. Release your hand and the coin still rests on your open palm. You let go. And the coin is still yours, even with all this space around it.

So there is a way in which we can accept impermanence and still relish life, at one and the same time, without grasping.

ON BODHICITTA: The Compassionate Heart of the Enlightened Mind

SHANTIDEVA

The Dalai Lama has said: “There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; my philosophy is kindness.”

CHAKDUD TULKU RINPOCHE

Sometimes when we see too much truth about ourselves suddenly mirrored in front of us by the teacher or the teachings, it is simply too difficult to face, too terrifying to recognize, too painful to accept as the reality about ourselves. We deny and reject it, in an absurd and desperate attempt to defend ourselves fromourselves,from the truth of who we really are. And when there are things too powerful or too difficult to accept about ourselves, we project them onto the world around us, usually onto those who help us and love us the most—our teacher, the teachings, our parent, or our closest friend.

How can we possibly penetrate the tough shield of this defensive system? The very best solution is when we can recognize ourselves that we are living duped by our own delusions. I have seen how for many people a glimpse of the truth, the true View, can bring the whole fantastic construction of wrong views, fabricated by ignorance, tumbling instantly to the ground.

When we are in a negative frame of mind, it is only natural to doubt rather than to believe.

From a Buddhist point of view, doubt is a sign of a lack of complete understanding and a lack of spiritual education, but it is also seen as a catalyst in the maturing of faith. It is when we face doubts and difficulties that we discover whether our faith is a simplistic, pious, and conceptual one, or whether it is strong, enduring, and anchored in a deep understanding in the heart.

If you have faith, sooner or later it may well be put to the test, and wherever the challenge may come from—from within you or from outside—it is simply part of the process of faith and doubt.

The teachings tell us what it is we need to realize, but we also have to go on our own journey, in order to come to a personal realization. That journey may take us through suffering, difficulties, and doubts of all kinds, but they will become our greatest teachers. Through them we will learn the humility to recognize our limitations, and through them we will discover the inner strength and fearlessness we need to emerge from our old habits and set patterns, and surrender into the vaster vision of real freedom offered by the spiritual teachings.

In today’s highly interdependent world, individuals and nations can no longer resolve many of their problems by themselves. We need one another. We must therefore develop a sense of universal responsibility . . . It is our collective and individual responsibility to protect and nurture the global family, to support its weaker members, and to preserve and tend to the environment in which we all live.

THE DALAI LAMA

A direct reflection on what death means and the many facets of the truth of impermanence can enable us to make rich use of this life while we still have time, and ensure that when we die it will be without remorse or self-recrimination at having wasted our lives.

As Tibet’s famous poet-saint, Milarepa, said: “My religion is to live—and die—without regret.”

The greatest of victories is the victory over oneself.

-the Thammapada

If all the harms
Fears and sufferings in the world
Arise from self-grasping,
What need have I for such a great evil spirit?

* * *

If we were to put our minds to one powerful wisdom method and work with it directly, there is a real possibility we would become enlightened.

* * *

Is karma really so hard to see in operation? Don’t we only have to look back at our own lives to see clearly the consequences of some of our actions? When we upset or hurt someone, didn’t it rebound on us? Were we not left with a bitter and dark memory, and the shadows of self-disgust? That memory and those shadows are karma. Our habits and our fears too are also due to karma, the results of our past actions, words, and thoughts. If we examine our actions, and become really mindful of them, we will see that there is a pattern that repeats itself. Whenever we act negatively, it leads to pain and suffering; whenever we act positively, it eventually results in happiness.

* * *

Similarly he said: “Do not overlook tiny good actions, thinking they are of no benefit even tiny drops of water in the end will fill a huge vessel.”

Karma does not decay like external things, or ever become inoperative. It cannot be destroyed “by time, fire, or water.” Its power will never disappear, until it is ripened.

* * *

I often think of the great masters and imagine beings who have their depth of realization as magnificent mountain eagles, who soar above both life and death and see them for what they are, in all their mysterious, intricate interrelation.

To see through the eyes of the mountain eagle, the view of realization, is to look down on a landscape in which the boundaries that we imagined existed between life and death shade into each other and dissolve. The physicist David Bohm has described reality as being “unbroken wholeness in flowing movement.”

What is seen by the masters, then, seen directly and with total understanding, is that flowing movement and that unbroken wholeness. What we, in our ignorance, call “life” and what we, in our ignorance, call “death” are merely different aspects of that wholeness and that movement.

* * *

When you have learned, through discipline, to simplify your life, and so practiced the mindfulness of meditation, and through it loosened the hold of aggression, clinging, and negativity on your whole being, the wisdom of insight can slowly dawn. And in the all-revealing clarity of its sunlight, this insight can show you, distinctly and directly, both the subtlest workings of your own mind and the nature of reality.

* * *

Just as the ocean has waves, and the sun has rays, so the mind’s own radiance is its thoughts and emotions. The ocean has waves, yet the ocean is not particularly disturbed by them. The waves are the very nature of the ocean. Waves will rise, but where do they go? Back into the ocean. And where do the waves come from? The ocean.

In the same manner, thoughts and emotions are the radiance and expression of the very nature of the mind. They rise from the mind, but where do they dissolve? Back into the mind. Whatever rises, do not see it as a particular problem. If you do not impulsively react, if you are only patient, it will once again settle into its essential nature.

When you have this understanding, then rising thoughts only enhance your practice. But when you do not understand what they intrinsically are—the radiance of the nature of your mind—then your thoughts become the seed of confusion. So have a spacious, open, and compassionate attitude toward your thoughts and emotions, because in fact your thoughts are your family, the family of your mind. Before them, as Dudjom Rinpoche used to say: “Be like an old wise man, watching a child play.”

* * *

The Buddhist meditation masters know how flexible and workable the mind is. If we train it, anything is possible. In fact, we are already perfectly trained by and for samsara, trained to get jealous, trained to grasp, trained to be anxious and sad and desperate and greedy, trained to react angrily to whatever provokes us. In fact, we are trained to such an extent that these negative emotions rise spontaneously, without our even trying to generate them.

So everything is a question of training and the power of habit. Devote the mind to confusion and we know only too well, if we’re honest, that it will become a dark master of confusion, adept in its addictions, subtle and perversely supple in its slaveries. Devote it in meditation to the task of freeing itself from illusion, and we will find that with time, patience, discipline, and the right training, the mind will begin to unknot itself and know its essential bliss and clarity.

* * *

Still, reflection can slowly bring us wisdom. We may, of course, fall back into fixed repetitive patterns again and again, but slowly we can emerge from them and change.

* * *

We all have the karma to take one spiritual path or another, and I would encourage you, from the bottom of my heart, to follow with complete sincerity the path that inspires you most.

If you go on searching all the time, the searching itself becomes an obsession and takes you over. You become a spiritual tourist, bustling about and never getting anywhere. As Patrul Rinpoche says: “You leave your elephant at home and look for its footprints in the forest.” Following one teaching is not a way of confining you or jealously monopolizing you. It’s a compassionate and practical way of keeping you centered and always on your path, despite all the obstacles that you, and the world, will inevitably present.

* * *

BUDDHA

* * *

There are rough as well as gentle waves in the ocean; strong emotions come, like anger, desire, jealousy. The real practitioner recognizes them not as a disturbance or an obstacle but as a great opportunity. The fact that you react to arisings such as these with habitual tendencies of attachment and aversion is a sign not only that you are distracted but that you do not have the recognition and have lost the ground of Rigpa. To react to emotions in this way empowers them and binds you even tighter in the chains of delusion.

The great secret of Dzogchen is to see right through them, as soon as they arise, to what they really are: the vivid and electric manifestation of the energy of Rigpa itself. As you gradually learn to do this, even the most turbulent emotions fail to seize hold of you and instead dissolve, as wild waves rise and rear and sink back into the calm of the ocean.

* * *

Rest in natural great peace
This exhausted mind
Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thought,
Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves
In the infinite ocean of samsara.

Rest in natural great peace.

NYOSHUL KHEN RINPOCHE

* * *

When we die, this whole compound construction falls dramatically to pieces.

* * *

CHAKDUD TULKU RINPOCHE

* * *

Even in the greatest yogi, sorrow and joy still arise just as before. The difference between an ordinary person and the yogi is how they view their emotions and react to them.

An ordinary person will instinctively accept or reject them, and so arouse the attachment or aversion that will result in the accumulation of negative karma.

A yogi, however, perceives everything that rises in its natural, pristine state, without allowing grasping to enter his perception.

* * *

TRADITIONAL BUDDHIST SCRIPTURE

* * *

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.

SUZUKI-ROSHI

* * *

What is compassion? It is not simply a sense of sympathy or caring for the person suffering, not simply a warmth of heart toward the person before you, or a sharp clarity of recognition of their needs and pain, it is also a sustained and practical determination to do whatever is possible and necessary to help alleviate their suffering.

* * *

“If you try to subdue your selfish motives—anger and so forth—and develop more kindness and compassion for others, ultimately you yourself will benefit more than you would otherwise. So sometimes I say that the wise selfish person should practice this way. Foolish selfish people are always thinking of themselves, and the result is negative. Wise selfish people think of others, help others as much as they can, and the result is that they too receive benefit.”

* * *

What really matters is not just the practice of sitting but far more the state of mind you find yourself in after meditation. It is this calm and centered state of mind you should prolong through everything you do. I like the Zen story in which the disciple asked his master:

“Master, how do you put enlightenment into action? How do you practice it in everyday life?”
“By eating and by sleeping,” replied the master.
“But Master, everybody sleeps and everybody eats.”
“But not everybody eats when they eat, and not everybody sleeps when they sleep.”

From this comes the famous Zen saying, “When I eat, I eat; when I sleep, I sleep.”

To eat when you eat and sleep when you sleep means to be completely present in all your actions, with none of the distractions of ego to stop you from being there. This is integration.

* * *

Buddha was a human being, like you or me. He never claimed divinity, he merely knew he had the buddha nature, the seed of enlightenment, and that everyone else did too. The buddha nature is simply the birthright of every sentient being, and I always say: “Our buddha nature is as good as any buddha’s buddha nature.

* When we have really grasped the law of karma in all its stark power and complex reverberations over many, many lifetimes, and seen just how our self-grasping and self-cherishing, life after life, have woven us repeatedly into a net of ignorance that seems only to be ensnaring us more and more tightly; when we have really understood the dangerous and doomed nature of the self-grasping mind’s enterprise; when we have really pursued its operations into their most subtle hiding places; when we have really understood just how our whole ordinary mind and actions are defined, narrowed and darkened by it, how almost impossible it makes it for us to uncover the heart of unconditional love, and how it has blocked in us all sources of real love and real compassion, then there comes a moment when we understand, with extreme and poignant clarity, what Shantideva said:

If all the harms
Fears and sufferings in the world
Arise from self-grasping,
What need have I for such a great evil spirit?

* * *

It is said that when Buddha attained enlightenment, all he wanted to do was to show the rest of us the nature of mind and share completely what he had realized. But he also saw, with the great sorrow of infinite compassion, how difficult it would be for us to understand.

For even though we have the same inner nature as Buddha, we have not recognized it because it is so enclosed and wrapped up in our individual ordinary minds.

Imagine an empty vase. The space inside is exactly the same as the space outside. Only the fragile walls of the vase separate one from the other. Our buddha mind is enclosed within the walls of our ordinary mind. But when we become enlightened, it is as if the vase shatters into pieces. The space “inside” merges instantly into the space “outside.” They become one: There and then we realize that they were never separate or different; they were always the same.

* * *

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche describes a yogi wandering through a garden. He is completely awake to the splendor and beauty of the flowers, and relishes their colors, shapes and scents. But there is no trace of clinging or any “after-thought” in his mind.

As Dudjom Rinpoche says:

“Whatever perceptions arise, you should be like a little child going into a beautifully decorated temple; he looks, but grasping does not enter into his perception at all. You leave everything fresh, natural, vivid and unspoiled. When you leave each thing in its own state, then its shape doesn’t change, its color doesn’t fade and its glow does not disappear. Whatever appears is unstained by any grasping, so then all that you perceive arises as the naked wisdom of Rigpa, which is the indivisibility of luminosity and emptiness.”

* * *

Similarly he said: “Do not overlook tiny good actions, thinking they are of no benefit even tiny drops of water in the end will fill a huge vessel.”

Karma does not decay like external things, or ever become inoperative. It cannot be destroyed “by time, fire, or water.” Its power will never disappear, until it is ripened.

* * *

We may say, and even half-believe, that compassion is marvelous, but in practice our actions are deeply uncompassionate and bring us and others mostly frustration and distress, and not the happiness we are all seeking.

Isn’t it absurd that we all long for happiness, yet nearly all our actions and feelings lead us directly away from that happiness?

What do we imagine will make us happy? A canny, self-seeking, resourceful selfishness, the selfish protection of ego, which can as we all know, make us at moments extremely brutal. But in fact the complete reverse is true: Self-grasping and self-cherishing are seen, when you really look at them, to be the root of all harm to others, and also of all harm to ourselves.

* * *

We are inspired with the motivation to dedicate our practice, and our life, to the enlightenment of all beings in the spirit of this prayer, which all the buddhas of the past have prayed:

* * *

The intention behind grasping may not in itself be bad; there’s nothing wrong with the desire to be happy, but what we try to grasp on to is by nature ungraspable.

The Tibetans say that you cannot wash the same dirty hand twice in the same running river, and “no matter how much you squeeze a handful of sand, you will never get oil out of it.”

* * *

Mindfulness- the aware, balanced acceptance of present experience. – Sylvia Boorstein

* * *

Mind-tangles and suffering are universal, and the desire for happiness and the end of suffering is also universal.

. . .Mind habits are hard to change.

Awareness, clarity, compassion, generosity, understanding-these are in the middle of everyone’s spiritual road.

The Buddha taught that it doesn’t make sense to upset ourselves about what is beyond our control. We don’t get a choice about what hand we are dealt in this life. The only choice we have is our attitude about the cards we hold and the finesse with which we play our hand.

The First Noble Truth is that life is difficult and painful, just by its very nature, not because we’re doing it wrong. . . . Dukkha: ultimate unsatisactoriness.

All relationships end in loss. . . . Becoming aware of fragility, of temporality, of the fact that we will surely all be lost to one another, sooner or later, mandates a clear imperative to be totally kind and loving to each other always. . . . Holding onto anything, in addition to being painful, is totally futile. . . . Since everything is change happening, there is no one who owns the changes and no one to whom the changes are happening. We are verbs, not nouns, experiences unfolding . . .(awareness of this is anatta)

The Second Noble Truth is that craving anything is suffering.

I once heard someone say that a sign of enlightenment was the ability to say (and mean it) in any moment, “Well, this isn’t what I want, but it’s what I got, so okay.” . . . spacious acceptance . . . the Third Noble Truth says it is indeed possible. . . . suffering is manageable. . . . When I love, I’m happy.

In contact with pleasant experience, desire arises. Nor is it necessarily naughty to act on desire; sometimes desires are wholesome, expecially sense desires. . . . The way the mind works is that in contact with pleasant experience, we feel a kind of pull, an energy of wanting, and the mind moves toward pleasant sense experiences. . . . we scan the horizon for possible pleasant experiences and then dwell on them. It’s part of our conditioning. . . . The antidote for the hindrance of lust is restraint. It means waiting around long enough to see two things. The first thing one hopes to see is whether or not the object of the desire is wholesome and whether or not acting on the desire would be a moral, responsible, and appropriate thing to do. The second thing that waiting around allows us to see is that the desire itself is just a mind energy. It’s a mind energy that colors our feelings and motivates our behavior, but if we recognize it as just an energy, we realize it’s not an imperative to action. It’s not a demand; it’s a suggestion. If the diesire is wholesome and the time is appropriate, we can act on it. If the desire is not wholesome and the time is wron, we can restrain ourselves, and the energy will pass.

–Sylvia Boorstein

* * *

Before admonishing another, one should reflect thus . . .

In due season will I speak, not out of season.

In truth will I speak, not in falsehood.

For his (her) benefit will I speak, not his (her) loss.

Gently will I speak, not harshly.

In kindness will I speak, not in anger.

-the Buddha

* * *

Don’t worry, be happy.

-Meher Baba

* * *

When I love, I’m happy.

When we see clearly, we understand that, given the history of all creation, each of us is the only person we could be and the world is the only world it could be. The truth is: “It’s all okay.”

The five confusing energies: lust, aversion, torpor, restlessness, doubt.

The four Divine Abodes: lovingkindness (metta, complete and unrestrained friendliness), sympathetic joy (mudita, shared delight in another’s joy, happiness or good fortune), compassion, equanimity.

-Sylvia Boorstein

* * *

I once heard the Dalai Lama teaching about how sensible it was to put other people’s good fortune on a par, at least, with one’s own. There are, he explained, so many other people that your chances for delight are immeasurably increased if the joys of others are experienced as your own.

Whatever mood is present is serving as a grid for our experience.

The most magic mind balancer is clear seeing.

You can’t see wisdom, but you can see its reflection. Its reflection is happiness, fearlessness, and kindness.

We can, with practice, begin to decondition the mind from its unconscious reactivity. Even without changing the habitual tendencies, we can be alert to them and work around them. If the mind is clear and steady, we can recognize filters as being just filters and choose the most wholesome response.

-Sylvia Boorstein

* * *

To integrate meditation in action is the whole ground and point and purpose of meditation. The violence and stress and the challenges and distractions of this modern life make this integration urgently necessary.

How do we achieve this integration, this permeation of everyday life with the calm humor and spacious detachment of meditation? There is no substitute for regular practice, for only through real practice will we begin to taste unbrokenly the calm of our nature of mind and so be able to sustain the experience of it in our everyday lives.

If you really wish to achieve this, what you need to do is practice not just as occasional medicine or therapy but as if it were your daily sustenance or food.

* * *

I once heard the “Dalai Lama teaching about how sensible it was to put other people’s good fortune on a par, at least, with one’s own. There are, he explained, so many other people that your chances for delight are immeasurably increased if the joys of others are experienced as your own.

Every pain is important pain to whomever is feeling it. …It’s ridiculous to decide what “should” grieve someone else. Everyone’s attachments are unique.

Since everything is change happening, there is no one who owns the changes and no one to whom the changes are happening. We are verbs, not nouns, experiences unfolding.

Life is so difficult, how can we be anything but kind.

What the Buddha taught was simple: when we see clearly, we behave impeccably, out of love, on behalf of all things.

Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile.

I know I’m not paying attention if I’m not feeling kind.

The 10 Perfections of the heart (Paramitas): Generosity, Morality, Renunciation, Wisdom, Energy, Patience, Truthfulness, Determination, Lovingkindness and Equanimity . . . together are the one path to goodness and kindness. Each particular quality is an entryway into that path.

Virtue is both the cause of happiness and the expression of happiness.

The Buddha taught that suffering is the extra pain in the mind that happens when we feel an anguished imperative to have things be different from how they are.

It is possible-- indeed, imperative—to change course, or to repair an action, whenever it is a mistake.

Everyone’s mind is outrageous.

The discovery that everything is always changing, that everything has multiple causes, most of them beyond our control, and that struggling to have things a certain way or to keep things a certain way is both futile and painful is the key, the Buddha taught, to developing the mind habit of noncontentious, gentle, wise response.

When we are relaxed and reasonably content, we are naturally wise. We accept that life is unpredictable, unreliable.

There is only one Dharma talk: How are we going to live this life, invevitably challenged, gracefully, with kindness and compassion.

Everything that is dear to us causes pain. . . . caring makes us vulnerable.

Now is the only time anything happens.

The Buddha’s criteria for Wise Speech include—in addition to the obvious expectation that speech be truthful—that it be timely, gentle, motivated by kindness, and helpful.

When I feel loved and loving, I am protected and my speech is protected.

Every day I bump into “mind walls”, walls that feel solid because the impact is painful. Only when I remember that the walls are the habits of my own mind, that I built them and they will continue to exist as long as I insist that they are real, can I stop building. Then my mind relaxes and I see clearly. . . . Practice is about recognizing traps and choosing freedom. . . .day after day, little by little, and more and more often.

People who practice lovingkindness (metta)

Sleep peacefully,

Wake peacefully,

Dream peaceful dreams.

People love them,

Angels love them,

Angels will protect them.

Poisons and weapons and fire don’t harm them.

Their faces are clear.

Their minds are serene.

They die unconfused.

And when they die, their rebirth is in heavenly realms.

Hatred will never cease by hatred,

Only love will erase hatred,

This is the eternal law. (from the Dhammapada)

“You did great!”—is probably the universal, livesaving password for human connection.

Meet each arriving moment—each breath, or each mood, each thought, or each idea—as the next word of the song that needs to get sung. You can choose what line of the score to sing—breath, mood, thought, idea—and still hear the others in the background. . . . just do now, now.

We couldn’t any of us be beter, ever, than how we are.

Only connect. Wherever you are, right now, pay attention. Forever.

-Sylvia Boorstein

* * *

Life is so short, we should all move more slowly.

-T. N. Hahn

* * *

If the doors of perception were cleansed
Everything would appear . . . as it is, infinite.

* * *

The Dalai Lama has said: “There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; my philosophy is kindness.”

* * *

CHAKDUD TULKU RINPOCHE

* * *

* * It is essential to realize now, in life, when we still have a body, that its convincing appearance of solidity is a mere illusion. The most powerful way to realize this is to learn how, after meditation, to “become a child of illusion”: to refrain from solidifying, as we are always tempted to do, the perceptions of ourselves and our world; and to go on, like the “child of illusion,” seeing directly, as we do in meditation, that all phenomena are illusory and dreamlike. The realization that this deepens the body’s illusory nature is one of the most profound and inspiring we can have to help us to let go.

* * *

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.

* * *

If we are interdependent with everything and everyone, even our smallest, least significant thought, word, and action have real consequences throughout the universe.

Throw a pebble into a pond. It sends a shiver across the surface of the water. Ripples merge into one another and create new ones. Everything is inextricably interrelated: We come to realize that we are responsible for everything we do, say, or think, responsible in fact for ourselves, everyone and everything else, and the entire universe.

* * *

Whatever you do, don’t shut off your pain; accept your pain and remain vulnerable. However desperate you become, accept your pain as it is, because it is in fact trying to hand you a priceless gift: the chance of discovering, through spiritual practice, what lies behind sorrow.

“Grief,” Rumi wrote, “can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life’s search for love and wisdom.”

* * *

Give all profit and gain to others,
Take all loss and defeat on yourself.

* * *

When the teachings “click” for you somewhere deep in your heart and mind, then you really have the View. Whatever difficulties you face, you will find you have some kind of serenity, stability, and understanding, and an internal mechanism—you could call it an “inner transformer”—that works for you, to protect you from falling prey to wrong views. In that View, you will have discovered a “wisdom guide” of your own, always on hand to advise you, support you, and remind you of the truth. Confusion will still arise, that’s only normal, but with a crucial difference: No longer will you focus on it in a blinded and obsessive way, but you will look on it with humor, perspective, and compassion.

* * *

The fear that impermanence awakens in us, that nothing is real and nothing lasts, is, we come to discover, our greatest friend because it drives us to ask: If everything dies and changes, then what is really true? Is there something behind the appearances? Is there something in fact we can depend on, that does survive what we call death?

Allowing these questions to occupy us urgently, and reflecting on them, we slowly find ourselves making a profound shift in the way we view everything. We come to uncover in ourselves “something” that we begin to realize lies behind all the changes and deaths of the world.

As this happens, we catch repeated and glowing glimpses of the vast implications behind the truth of impermanence. We come to uncover a depth of peace, joy, and confidence in ourselves that fills us with wonder, and breeds in us gradually a certainty that there is in us “something” that nothing destroys, that nothing alters, and that cannot die.

* * *

"Live with skillful nonchalance and ceaseless concern."

~ Prajnaparamita Sutra ~

* * *

When a much larger number of people know the nature of their minds, they’ll know also the glorious nature of the world they are in, and will struggle urgently and bravely to preserve it. It’s interesting that the Tibetan word for “Buddhist” is nangpa . It means “insider”: someone who seeks the truth not outside but within the nature of his or her mind. All the teachings and training in Buddhism are aimed at that one single point: to look into the nature of mind, and so free us from the fear of death and help us realize the truth of life.

* * *

Buddha said:

Karma creates all, like an artist,
Karma composes, like a dancer.

* * *

The intention behind grasping may not in itself be bad; there’s nothing wrong with the desire to be happy, but what we try to grasp on to is by nature ungraspable.

The Tibetans say that you cannot wash the same dirty hand twice in the same running river, and “no matter how much you squeeze a handful of sand, you will never get oil out of it.”

* * *

Doubts demand from us a real skillfulness in dealing with them, and I notice how few people have any idea how to pursue doubts or to use them. It seems ironic that in a civilization that so worships the power of deflation and doubt, hardly anyone has the courage to deflate the claims of doubt itself—to do as one Hindu master said: turn the dogs of doubt on doubt itself, to unmask cynicism, and to uncover what fear, despair, hopelessness, and tired conditioning it springs from. Then doubt would no longer be an obstacle, but a door to realization, and whenever doubt appeared in the mind, a seeker would welcome it as a means of going deeper into the truth.

* * *

A meditation technique used a great deal in Tibetan Buddhism is uniting the mind with the sound of a mantra. The definition of mantra is “that which protects the mind.” That which protects the mind from negativity, or which protects you from your own mind, is mantra.

When you are nervous, disoriented, or emotionally fragile, inspired chanting or reciting of a mantra can change the state of your mind completely, by transforming its energy and atmosphere. How is this possible? Mantra is the essence of sound, the embodiment of the truth in the form of sound. Each syllable is impregnated with spiritual power, condenses a deep spiritual truth, and vibrates with the blessing of the speech of the buddhas. It is also said that the mind rides on the subtle energy of the breath, the prana, which moves through and purifies the subtle channels of the body. So when you chant a mantra, you are charging your breath and energy with the energy of the mantra, and so working directly on your mind and your subtle body.

* * *

Since everything is but an apparition,
Perfect in being what it is,
Having nothing to do with good or bad,
Acceptance or rejection

You might as well burst out laughing!

LONGCHENPA

* * *

Listening is a far more difficult process than most people imagine. Really to listen in the way that is meant by the masters is to let go utterly of ourselves, to let go of all the information, all the concepts, all the ideas, and all the prejudices that our heads are stuffed with. If you really listen to the teachings, those concepts, which are our real hindrance—the one thing that stands between us and our true nature—can slowly and steadily be washed away.

* * *

If we are interdependent with everything and everyone, even our smallest, least significant thought, word, and action have real consequences throughout the universe.

* * *

There could be no bigger mistake than to think that ignorance is somehow dumb and stupid, or passive and lacking in intelligence. On the contrary, it is shrewd and cunning, versatile and ingenious in the games of deception, and in our wrong views and their burning convictions we find one of its deepest and, as Buddha said, most dangerous manifestations:

What do you have to fear from the wild elephant
Who can only damage your body here and now,
When falling under the influence of misguided people and wrong views
Not only destroys the merit you have accumulated in the past,
But also blocks your path to freedom in the future?

* * *

We are so addicted to looking outside ourselves that we have lost access to our inner being almost completely. We are terrified to look inward, because our culture has given us no idea of what we will find. We may even think that if we do, we will be in danger of madness. This is one of the last and most resourceful ploys of ego to prevent us from discovering our real nature.

So we make our lives so hectic that we eliminate the slightest risk of looking into ourselves. Even the idea of meditation can scare people. When they hear the words egoless or emptiness, they think that experiencing those states will be like being thrown out the door of a spaceship to float forever in a dark, chilling void. Nothing could be further from the truth. But in a world dedicated to distraction, silence and stillness terrify us; we protect ourselves from them with noise and frantic busyness. Looking into the nature of our mind is the last thing we would dare to do.

* * *

The masters tell us that there is an aspect of our minds that is its fundamental basis, a state called “the ground of the ordinary mind.” It functions like a storehouse, in which the imprints of past actions caused by our negative emotions are all stored like seeds. When the right conditions arise, they germinate and manifest as circumstances and situations in our lives.

If we have a habit of thinking in a particular pattern, positive or negative, then these tendencies will be triggered and provoked very easily, and recur and go on recurring. With constant repetition our inclinations and habits become steadily more entrenched, and continue increasing and gathering power, even when we sleep. This is how they come to determine our life, our death, and our rebirth.

* * *

Today, more than ever before, life must be characterized by a sense of Universal responsibility, not only nation to nation and human to human, but also human to other forms of life.

- His Holiness the Dalai Lama

* * *

What most of us need, almost more than anything, is the courage and humility really to ask for help, from the depths of our hearts: to ask for the compassion of the enlightened beings, to ask for purification and healing, to ask for the power to understand the meaning of our suffering and transform it; at a relative level to ask for the growth in our lives of clarity, peace, and discernment, and to ask for the realization of the absolute nature of mind that comes from merging with the deathless wisdom mind of the master.

* * *

This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds
To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance.
A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky,
Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.

BUDDHA

* * *

The real glory of meditation lies not in any method but in its continual living experience of presence, in its bliss, clarity, peace, and, most important of all, complete absence of grasping.

The diminishing of your grasping is a sign that you are becoming freer of yourself. And the more you experience this freedom, the clearer the sign that the ego and the hopes and fears that keep it alive are dissolving and the closer you will come to the infinitely generous “wisdom of egolessness.” When you live in that wisdom home, you’ll no longer find a barrier between “I” and “you,” “this” and “that,” “inside” and “outside”; you’ll have come, finally, to your true home, the state of nonduality.

* * *

Gradually you will find yourself able to free yourself more and more quickly from the dark emotions that have ruled your life, and this ability to do so is the greatest miracle of all.

* * *

Suffering is the sandpaper of our life. It does its work of shaping us.

Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.-Ram Dass

* * *

Fundamentally, what everyone needs is mental strength and confidence, to manage the mind, just as we manage the outside world. -Amma (Sudhamani)

* * *

Do your best and then relax. Let things go on in a natural way, rather than force them.

- Paramahansa Yogananda

* * *

The happiness of one's own heart alone cannot satisfy the soul; one must try to include, as necessary to one's own happiness, the happiness of others. - Paramahansa Yogananda

* * *

The period of greatest gain in knowledge and experience is the most difficult period in one's life. Through a difficult period you can learn; you can develop inner strength, determination, and courage to face the problems. - His Holiness the Dalai Lama

* * *

Slowly, you will become a master of your own bliss, a chemist of your own joy, with all sorts of remedies always at hand to elevate, cheer, illuminate, and inspire your every breath and movement.

* * *

The belief in reincarnation shows us that there is some kind of ultimate justice or goodness in the universe. It is that goodness that we are all trying to uncover and to free. Whenever we act positively, we move toward it; whenever we act negatively, we obscure and inhibit it. And whenever we cannot express it in our lives and actions, we feel miserable and frustrated.

* * *

It has often intrigued me how some Buddhist masters I know ask one simple question of people who approach them for teaching: “Do you believe in a life after this one?” They are not being asked whether they believe in it as a philosophical proposition but whether they feel it deeply in their hearts. The master knows that if a man believes in a life after this one, his whole outlook on life will be different, and he will have a distinct sense of personal responsibility and morality. What the masters must suspect is that there is a danger that people who have no strong belief in a life after this one will create a society fixated on short-term results, without much thought for the consequences of their actions.

Could this be the major reason why we have created a world like the one we are now living in, a world with hardly any real compassion?

* * *

As Dudjom Rinpoche says:

Whatever perceptions arise, you should be like a little child going into a beautifully decorated temple; he looks, but grasping does not enter into his perception at all. You leave everything fresh, natural, vivid and unspoiled. When you leave each thing in its own state, then its shape doesn’t change, its color doesn’t fade and its glow does not disappear. Whatever appears is unstained by any grasping, so then all that you perceive arises as the naked wisdom of Rigpa, which is the indivisibility of luminosity and emptiness.

* * *

Although we have been made to believe that if we let go we will end up with nothing, life reveals just the opposite: that letting go is the real path to freedom. -Sogyal Rinpoche- Glimpse After Glimpse

* * *

* * *

Although we have been made to believe that if we let go we will end up with nothing, life itself reveals again and again the opposite: that letting go is the path to real freedom.

Just as when the waves lash at the shore, the rocks suffer no damage but are sculpted and eroded into beautiful shapes, so our characters can be molded and our rough edges worn smooth by changes. Through weathering changes, we can learn how to develop a gentle but unshakable composure. Our confidence in ourselves grows, and becomes so much greater that goodness and compassion begin naturally to radiate out from us and bring joy to others.

* * *

My master Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche said: “The more and more you listen, the more and more you hear; the more and more you hear, the deeper and deeper your understanding becomes.”

* * *

When you practice meditation, rather than “watching” the breath, let yourself gradually identify with it, as if you were becoming it. Slowly the breath, the breather, and the breathing become one; duality and separation dissolve.

You will find that this very simple process of mindfulness filters your thoughts and emotions. Then, as if you were shedding an old skin, something is peeled off and freed.

* * *

Still, reflection can slowly bring us wisdom. We may, of course, fall back into fixed repetitive patterns again and again, but slowly we can emerge from them and change.

* * *

Buddha said:

Karma creates all, like an artist,
Karma composes, like a dancer.

* * *

The only thing we really have is nowness, is now.

* * *

Of all the practices I know, the practice of Tonglen, Tibetan for “giving and receiving,” is one of the most useful and powerful. When you feel yourself locked in upon yourself, Tonglen opens you to the truth of the suffering of others; when your heart is blocked, it destroys those forces that are obstructing it; and when you feel estranged from the person who is in pain before you, or bitter or despairing, it helps you to find within yourself and then to reveal the loving, expansive radiance of your own true nature. No other practice I know is as effective in destroying the self-grasping, self-cherishing, self-absorption of the ego, which is the root of all our suffering and all hard-heartedness.

Put very simply, the Tonglen practice of giving and receiving is to take on the suffering and pain of others and give to them your happiness, well-being, and peace of mind.

* * *

If you really wish to achieve this, what you need to do is practice not just as occasional medicine or therapy but as if it were your daily sustenance or food.

* * *

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.

SUZUKI-ROSHI

* * *

TRADITIONAL BUDDHIST SCRIPTURE

* * *

If we are interdependent with everything and everyone, even our smallest, least significant thought, word, and action have real consequences throughout the universe.Throw a pebble into a pond. It sends a shiver across the surface of the water. Ripples merge into one another and create new ones. Everything is inextricably interrelated: We come to realize that we are responsible for everything we do, say, or think, responsible in fact for ourselves, everyone and everything else, and the entire universe.

* * *

Because the law of karma is inevitable and infallible, whenever we harm others, we are directly harming ourselves, and whenever we bring them happiness, we are bringing ourselves future happiness. The Dalai Lama says: “If you try to subdue your selfish motives—anger and so forth—and develop more kindness and compassion for others, ultimately you yourself will benefit more than you would otherwise. So sometimes I say that the wise selfish person should practice this way. Foolish selfish people are always thinking of themselves, and the result is negative. Wise selfish people think of others, help others as much as they can, and the result is that they too receive benefit.”

* * *

Imagine vividly a situation where you have acted badly, one about which you feel guilty, and about which you wince even to think of it.

Then, as you breathe in, accept total responsibility for your actions in that particular situation, without in any way trying to justify your behavior. Acknowledge exactly what you have done wrong, and wholeheartedly ask for forgiveness. Now, as you breathe out, send out reconciliation, forgiveness, healing, and understanding.

So you breathe in blame, and breathe out the undoing of harm; you breathe in responsibility, breathe out healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation.This exercise is particularly powerful and may give you the courage to go to see the person whom you have wronged, and the strength and willingness to talk to him or her directly and actually ask for forgiveness from the depths of your heart.

* * *

As a mother would risk her life to protect her child, her only child, even so should one cultivate a limitless heart with regard to all beings. So with a boundless heart should one cherish all living beings; radiating kindness over the entire world. -The Buddha, Sutta Nipata I, 8

* * *

Any kind of expectation creates a problem. We should accept, but not expect. Whatever comes, accept it. Whatever goes, accept it. The immediate benefit is that your mind is always peaceful.

Sri Swami Satchidananda

* * *

Those who are awake live in a constant state of amazement.

Jack Kornfield

* * *

True compassion is not just an emotional response, but a firm commitment founded on reason. Therefore, a truly compassionate attitude toward others does not change, even if they behave negatively. Through universal altruism, you develop a feeling of responsibility for others: the wish to help them actively overcome their problems. -His Holiness the Dalai Lama

* * *

If you touch one thing with deep awareness, you touch everything. - Thich Nhat Hanh

Enlightenment, for a wave in the ocean, is the moment the wave realizes it is water.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar
- Thich Nhat Hanh

It is possible to live happily in the here and now. So many conditions of happiness are available—more than enough for you to be happy right now. You don't have to run into the future in order to get more. - Thich Nhat Hanh

People suffer because they are caught in their views. As soon as we release those views, we are free and we don't suffer anymore. - Thich Nhat Hanh

Life is available only in the present. That is why we should walk in such a way that every step can bring us to the here and the now - Thich Nhat Hanh

When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence. How can you love if you are not there?
- Thich Nhat Hanh

Life is filled with suffering, but it is also filled with many wonders, like the blue sky, the sunshine, the eyes of a baby. To suffer is not enough. We must also be in touch with the wonders of life. They are within us and all around us, everywhere, any time. - Thich Nhat Hanh

Each day 40,000 children die of hunger. The superpowers now have more then 50,000 nuclear warheads, enough to destroy our planet many times. Yet the sunrise is beautiful, and the rose bloomed this morning along the wall is a miracle. Life is both dreadful and wonderful. To practice meditation is to be in touch with both aspects. Please do not think we must be solemn in order to meditate. In fact, to meditate well, we have to smile a lot. - Thich Nhat Hanh

If you are motivated by loving kindness and compassion, there are many ways to bring happiness to others right now, starting with kind speech. ~Thich Nhat Hanh

You are me, and I am you. Isn’t it obvious that we “inter-are”? You cultivate the flower within yourself, so that I will be beautiful. I transform the garbage within myself, so that you will not have to suffer. I support you, you support me. I am in this world to offer you peace, you are in this world to bring me joy. - Thich Nhat Hanh

* * *

Unceasing change turns the wheel of life,

and so reality is shown in all its many forms.

Dwell peacefully as change itself

liberates all suffering sentient beings

and brings them great joy.

-from a Buddhist sutra

* * *

We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.

Thich Nhat Hanh

* * *

Given the scale of life in the cosmos, one human life is no more than a tiny blip. Each one of us is a just visitor to this planet, a guest, who will only stay for a limited time. What greater folly could there be than to spend this short time alone, unhappy or in conflict with our companions? Far better, surely, to use our short time here in living a meaningful life, enriched by our sense of connection with others and being of service to them. ~ His Holiness the Dalai Lama

* * *

Believe nothing merely because you have been told it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings -- that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide. – Buddha

* * *

The source of a true smile is an awakened mind. Smiling helps you approach the day with gentleness and understanding. – Thich Nhat Hanh

* * *

Health is the greatest gift,
contentment is the greatest wealth,
a trusted friend is the best relative,
Liberated mind is the greatest bliss.

-The Buddha

* * *

When a person lives heedlessly, his craving grows like a creeping vine. He runs now here and now there, as if looking for fruit: a monkey in the forest. If this sticky, uncouth craving overcomes you in the world, your sorrows grow like wild grass after rain. If, in the world, you overcome this uncouth craving, hard to escape, sorrows roll off you, like water beads off a lotus. -The Dhammapada

* * *

Any kind of expectation creates a problem. We should accept, but not expect. Whatever comes, accept it. Whatever goes, accept it. The immediate benefit is that your mind is always peaceful. – Sri Swami Satchidananda

* * *

all conditioned things have the nature of vanishing. Keep on diligently with your practice.

subject to breaking up are all compounded things. with mindfulness strive on

* * *

With our thoughts,
we make our world,
Our mind is central
and precedes our deeds.
Speak or act with a pure mind
and happiness will follow you
like a shadow that never leaves.

As long as space remains
and as long as sentient beings remain,
until then may I, too, remain
and help dispel the misery of the world.

HH Dalai Lama from US Senate Prayer

* * *

You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather. - PEMA CHÖDRÖN

Simply by turning on the light, you can instantly destroy the darkness. Likewise, even a rather simple analysis of ego-clinging and afflictive emotions can make them collapse. — Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, “An Investigation of the Mind”

At its most basic level, dana [generosity] in the Buddhist tradition means giving freely without expecting anything in return.

—Gil Fronsdal, “The Joy of Giving”

To experience the everyday sublime one needs to dismantle piece by piece the perceptual conditioning that insists on seeing oneself and the world as essentially comfortable, permanent, solid, and mine. — Stephen Batchelor, “The Everyday Sublime”

If a mind state or emotion or mood becomes strong—feelings such as sadness or happiness or anger or desire, restlessness or excitement, interest or rapture, joy or calm—make the mental note of that mind state, feeling it and observing how that too is part of the passing show. It arises, it is there for some time, it passes away. - Joseph Goldstein, “Breathing”

From a practice perspective, there is great power in intention and how it can shape the present moment and even the future—because if you approach this present moment with wisdom, kindness, and a sense of responsibility, you won’t have to worry about the future. It will take care of itself. - —Dawa Tarchin Phillips, “What to Do When You Don’t Know What’s Next”

We have to be careful not to think that meditation is about getting rid of thoughts. On the contrary, I would say that meditation helps us to creatively engage with our thoughts and not fixate on them. - Martine Batchelor, “Meditation, Mental Habits, and Creative Imagination”

When layered, perceptions become distorted, sticky, and weighty. Essentially, we think we know something, then we are off and running—all based on past experiences, preferences, and beliefs. [But] usually . . . it’s all in our minds.—Ruth King, “Mindful of Race”

Awareness is nothing special. It’s natural. In fact, it may be the most natural—the only natural—thing there is. —Andrew Olendzki, “Keep It Simple”

His Holiness the XIVth Dalai Lama
- An Aspiration Prayer -

May I become at all times, both now and forever,
A protector for those without protection,
A guide for those who have lost their way,
A ship for those with oceans to cross,
A bridge for those with rivers to cross,
A sanctuary for those in danger,
A lamp for those without light,
A place of refuge for those who lack shelter,
And a servant to all in need.

We don’t have to take the story as truth. - JACK KORNFIELD

The transformation of envy & jealousy through the cultivation of mudita (sympathetic joy, the choice to participate in the joy, happiness and pleasure of others] bolsters the awakening of the enlightened heart. -

—Jorge Ferrer, “What’s the Opposite of Jealousy?”

Every wave on the ocean is the whole ocean waving... So, the ocean of being waves every one of us, and we are its waves. - ALAN WATTS

We can get dragged back into the past, which can lead to depression, or we can become anxious about the future, which can lead to fear. Conscious breathing returns us to the here and the now, where we really belong. - Gary Gach, “Brief Teachings”

In situations of conflict, lovingkindness and compassion grow when we understand them to be the most beneficial motivation for responsive and effective action. —Joseph Goldstein, “Triumph of the Heart”

How do we develop this appreciation of things just as they are, especially if we are sick and in pain? We must treat our pain gently, respectfully, not resisting it but living with it. - Darlene Cohen, “The Practice of Nonpreference”

The act of giving purifies intention, the quality of mind with which any action is unThoughts are like clouds and can vanish just as clouds naturally disperse into space.

—Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche and Tsoknyi Rinpoche, “As the Clouds Vanish”dertaken. For a brief moment, the giver’s self-absorption is lifted, attachment to the gift is relinquished, and kindness towards the recipient is developed. - Andrew Olendzki, “The Wisdom of Giving”

Thoughts are like clouds and can vanish just as clouds naturally disperse into space. - Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche and Tsoknyi Rinpoche, “As the Clouds Vanish”

To live is to let go, and in order to live fully we must learn to let go fully and to embrace the flow that is the universe. - —Bodhipaksa, “What You’re Made Of”

Loss is a fact of life. Impermanence is everywhere we look. We are all going to suffer our losses. How we deal with these losses is what makes all the difference. For it is not what happens to us that determines our character, our experience, our karma, and our destiny, but how we relate to what happens. —Lama Surya Das, “Practicing With Loss”

When we are not attached to who we think we are, life can move through us, playing us like an instrument. Understanding how everything is in continual transformation, we release our futile attempts to control circumstances. When we live in this easy connection with life, we live in joy. —James Baraz, “Lighten Up!”

Appreciative joy (mudita) is a natural expression of our best humanity…[it] cheers for the happiness and success of others and celebrates buoyancy, health, and happiness wherever they are encountered. - Judith Simmer-Brown, “Transforming the Green-Ey’d Monster

If we act constructively, happiness will ensue; if we act destructively, problems will result…We create the causes by our actions, and we experience their results. - Ven. Thubten Chodron, “What Is Karma?”

People who are awake see the manifestation of the dharma in everything. A pebble, a bamboo tree, the cry of a baby, anything can be the voice of the dharma calling. We should be able to practice like that. —Thich Nhat Hanh, “The Three Gems”

Each moment is a chance for us to make peace with the world. - THICH NHAT HANH

Mindful speech and the ability to really listen are at the heart of all relationships. And thoughtful, kind, and effective interactions are at the center of our ethical core, the foundation of any spiritual practice. - Marshall Glickman, “Talk Like a Buddha”

Real peace is not simply the absence of violent conflict but a state of harmony: harmony between people; harmony between humanity and nature; and harmony within ourselves. - Bhikkhu Bodhi, “Fostering Peace, Inside and Out”

Learning to drop what we’re doing, however momentarily, and to genuinely pay attention in the present moment, without attachment or bias, helps us become clear, just as a snow globe becomes clear when we stop shaking it and its flakes settle. - Lama Surya Das, “The Heart-Essence of Buddhist Meditation”

As your mindfulness develops, your resentment for the change, your dislike for the unpleasant experiences, your greed for the pleasant experiences, and the notion of selfhood will be replaced by the deeper awareness of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and selflessness. - Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, “Sitting Still”

The Now does not come and go, but includes everything all at once. When we’re aware of being in the Now, present moments come and go, like ripples and waves in the ocean of awake awareness. - Loch Kelly, “When Am I?”

Changing ourselves involves learning how to develop those states, behaviors, and dispositions that are healthy, while allowing the unhealthy ones to atrophy from neglect… Generosity, kindness, and wisdom can save us from ourselves. - Andrew Olendzki, “Turning the Corner”

Sympathetic joy is a heartfelt gratification that accompanies the awareness of another’s well-being. It’s a joy entirely devoid of expectations. Instead, it carries one of life’s greatest pleasures: celebrating the happiness of others. - Ellen Agler, “In the Spirit of Service”

With a strong foundation in how to practice meditation, we can begin to live in a way that enables us to respect ourselves, to be calm rather than anxious, and to offer caring attention to others instead of being held back by notions of separation. - Sharon Salzberg, “Sticking With It”

The mind is very powerful. Therefore, it requires firm guidance. A powerful jet plane needs a good pilot; the pilot of your mind should be the wisdom that understands its nature.—Lama Thubten Yeshe, “Your Mind Is Your Religion”

By widening the gap between action and reaction, you can gain some distance from your automatic responses and also gain an opportunity to know your emotions. You can stop being ruled by these emotions and instead begin to rule your experience of life.-

Trungram Gyalwa Rinpoche, “The Power of the Third Moment”

The content of life, the what, is always what it is at any given moment, just the fact, but it’s how we relate to that moment that will either lead us toward or away from more suffering.- Mark Van Buren, “Relating to Life”Emptiness does not mean that things don’t exist, nor does “no self” mean that we don’t exist. Emptiness refers to the underlying nonseparation of life and the fertile ground of energy that gives rise to all forms of life. - Jack Kornfield, “Identity and Selflessness in Buddhism: No Self or True Self?”

When Buddhist teachings talk about emotions, such as love and hate, they are describing our disposition toward the things we encounter. - Andrew Olendzki, “What’s in a Word? Dukkha”

When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment. - Pema Chödrön, “The Fundamental Ambiguity of Being Human”

Karma teaches us that every action that we take has a very powerful impact. It also reminds us that the state of consciousness in which we live has a long-term impact on our own life as well as on the lives of the people around us. - Anam Thubten, “Karma: Not Just Action”

We do not become less human by purging toxins from our emotional life but rather more nobly human. Abandoning greed, hatred, and delusion at every opportunity, we are still left with a rich, nuanced, and healthier emotional life. - Andrew Olendzki, “The Buddha’s Smile”

Like the Buddha, we examine our mind state, accept it, and watch it change. We are transformed simply by being fully in the present moment. - Elizabeth Napp, “Mindfulness and the Bad Class”

Teach this triple truth to all: A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things which renew humanity. - The Buddha

Right livelihood involves mindfulness of our place in the whole, and thus becomes the foundation for intelligent social activism and ecological responsibility. - Krishnan Venkatesh, “Why Right Livelihood Isn’t Just About Your Day Job”

When we begin to feel the benefits of meditation practice, it is like putting on glasses for the first time. Once we learn to sit with the breath, be with the present moment, and create space between ourselves and our thoughts, our lives come into focus and we awaken to the possibility of something else—the alleviation of suffering. - Jessica Angima, “The High of New Beginnings—and the Joy of What Comes Next”

You don’t escape from your delusions in zazen. Instead, you look straight at them, since you have to work with them. This is the paradox. You never enter a promised paradise in which there will be no delusion. But all your delusions are workable. If they weren’t, I think we’d all go mad. - Jakusho Kwong-roshi, “Emptying into Spaciousness”

Awakening reveals the no-thingness of things—that no thing is apart from all other things. To realize truly that there is only this nature, with no “other” outside us, is to naturally want to refrain from causing harm, just as we refrain from doing harm to one of our own limbs or eyes. - Bodhin Kjolhede, “Pain, Passion, and the Precepts”

Samsara, the world of being, is a gigantic, endless, and beginingless ocean of impermanent instability. Even if you were to ascend to the heaven of a god, you would not escape karma. Misery happens when you don’t see this situation as what it is, and refuse to do anything about it — such as obtaining a boat in order to stay afloat and reach the far shore.- anon

When passing thoughts appear in our mind, we often take them personally, as though we were the owner and controller of such thoughts. We’re not. In fact, there is no thinker behind passing thoughts. They merely exist without an owner. Once you see this truth clearly, it becomes easier to allow thoughts to simply pass by. - Haemin Sunim, “Three Methods for Letting Go of Thoughts”

Mindfulness is not a state but an action, a cultivation of openness, again and again in each moment. - Alex Tzelnic, “‘Blindfulness’: How to Avoid Moral and Attentional Licensing”

The Buddha taught that there is no birth and no death. Our belief that these ideas about birth and death are real creates a powerful illusion that causes us a great deal of suffering. When we understand that we can’t be destroyed, we’re liberated from fear. It’s a huge relief. We can enjoy life and appreciate it in a new way. - Thich Nhat Hanh, “Free from Fear”

Fulfilling the true commitment of a relationship is extraordinary, unrelenting selfless activity. It is one of the most authentic ways that humanity can experience self-transcendence. This is authentic selflessness, not the endorphin-intoxicated spiritual trance that some mistakenly think of as the transcendent experience. - Anam Thubten, “What We Can Learn from the Haunted Ground of Relationships”

Become still, quiet the mind, sit like the mountain and sky—stable and undivided in the face of everything that comes up. - Diane Musho Hamilton, “Practice Is the Way”

Past karma shapes your experience of the world. It exists; there is not much you can do about it. Yet you are also constantly creating new karma, and that gives you a golden opportunity. With your reaction to each experience, you create the karma that will color your future. -

Trungram Gyalwa Rinpoche, “The Power of the Third Moment”

A sense of ease and wellbeing with the breath can do a lot more for you than any amount of status, material gain, praise, outside pleasures—any of the ways of the world. - Thanissaro Bhikkhu, “Less is More”

It is not necessary to be a prisoner of old karma. It is always possible to change your karma. You can make new karma. But there is only one time that you ever have to do it. Can you guess when that might be? - Jon Kabat-Zinn, “Changing Karma”

Desirable things do not have to beguile the mind, and undesirable ones do not have to bring endless resistance. We can let the winds blow through us instead of letting them buffet us about. - Mark Epstein, “How Meditation Failed Me”

The practice of dharma is akin to the practice of art. With the tools of ethics, meditation, and understanding, one works the clay of one’s confined and anguished existence into a bodhisattva. Practice is a process of self-creation. - Stephen Batchelor, “A Democracy of the Imagination”

If we really understand that nothing lasts and that everything is unreal and illusory, then letting go is easy. Actually, it happens by itself without effort. - Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche, “The Secret Strength of Sadness”

Reality is always falling apart. In this fleeting situation, the only thing that makes sense is for us to reach out to one another. - Pema Chödrön

Metta, or lovingkindness, is first practiced toward oneself, since we often have difficulty loving others without first loving ourselves. Sitting quietly, mentally repeat, slowly and steadily, the following or similar phrases: May I be happy. May I be well. May I be safe. May I be peaceful and at ease. - Barry Magid, “Five Practices to Change Your Mind”

Everything that exists depends on everything else: this is the heart of the Buddha’s core teaching of dependent arising. . . Everything in life is conditioned by other factors—they don’t just arise out of nowhere. A flower needs the conditions of sunlight, soil, and water to grow, just as a calm or agitated mind arises from a set of conditions. Deep contemplation of this important teaching can guide us to a liberating view of life. - Tricycle

Everything that exists depends on everything else: this is the heart of the Buddha’s core teaching of dependent arising. All things are conditioned by other factors—they don’t just arise out of nowhere. A flower needs the conditions of sunlight, soil, and water to grow, just as a calm mind requires the condition of relaxation. This is common sense. But if we follow this important teaching all the way, it guides us to a profound and liberating view of life. - Christina Feldman

Nothing is static. Nothing has an independent existence. Nothing stands alone. We are the children of the conditions in our lives. But we have the potential, with mindfulness, with awareness, with stillness, to step out of our patterns and cycles of habitual reactivity and grasping. There is nothing deterministic in dependent arising. - Christina Feldman

Personal responsibility is the lynchpin of Buddhist ethics. We have choices in how we respond to situations- Akincano Weber

If you distinguish between pain and suffering, change is possible. As the saying goes, “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional. - Jon Kabat-Zinn, “At Home In Our Bodies”

Compassion and tolerance are not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength. - Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

Imperfect, limited, and vulnerable as I am, the sun still shines upon me, things do work out, food appears, rain falls, wonderful conversations take place, and the grass grows without any help from me. - Dharmavidya David Brazier, “Unconditional Love”

Learning to walk out of thinking mind into flow mind or awareness mind is the ultimate medicine. - Jan Chozen Bays, “How to Break Free of the Inner Critic”

By starting our meditation practice with joy in our hearts, we begin to associate all dharma activity with joy and we will, in time, begin to look forward to practice. - Pema Düddul, “Awakening to Joy”

Sometimes we have to use diplomacy or deflection to work with our wily mind. Sometimes we have to be our own cheerleaders, other times tough taskmasters. The most important thing is to watch and respond. - Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, “Switching Off Unskillful Thoughts”

You are always entering through the doorway of this very moment. There is no retreat. No heading for the exits. Just a continual “going in” to this eternal now. - Gary Thorp, “Crossing the Threshold”

Our capacity to meet and dissolve habits is awakened and sustained by applying active capacities to “go beyond”—generosity, ethical conduct, patient endurance, diligence, contemplative cultivation, and discerning wisdom. - Steven D. Goodman, “The Spiritual Work of a Worldly Life”

Awareness itself is the primary currency of the human condition, and as such it deserves to be spent carefully. - Andrew Olendzki, “Busy Signal”

When we are happy, healthy, safe, and at ease, we can model those qualities for others as well as make choices and take action from a place of sanity and lovingkindness. - Cyndi Lee, “May I Be Happy”

The key to development along the Buddhist path is repetitive routine guided by inspirational vision. - Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi, “Vision and Routine”

If there is no regarding of phenomena as “mine,” then the self who suffers is not constructed. -

Andrew Olendzki, “A Universal Formula”

Our hearts and minds change from moment to moment, just as the clouds shift in the evening sky as the sun goes down. Who are we to think we have grasped the true nature of our souls? The Buddha-mind within us will not be constrained by the limits of language. - Abbess Fushimi, “Shedding Light”

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

Posted by: |

This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.

Your comment could not be posted. Error type:

Your comment has been saved. Comments are moderated and will not appear until approved by the author. Post another comment

The letters and numbers you entered did not match the image. Please try again.

As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.

Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.

Comments are moderated, and will not appear until the author has approved them.

(URLs automatically linked.)

Your Information

Name is required. Email address will not be displayed with the comment.

Name is required to post a comment

Please enter a valid email address

Invalid URL

Eddie Miller's blog

philosophical thoughts, and many blogs consisting of collected quotations from an author or about a subject

07/09/2023