Buddhist Quotes - Page 23

The creatures that inhabit this earth-be they human beings or animals-are here to contribute, each in its own particular way, to the beauty and prosperity of the world.

We have Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, and their own path to grace is one that we have to revere and respect as much as our own

Half the spiritual life consists of remembering what we are up against and where we are going.

The identity of just one thing, the "clash of civilization" view that you're a Muslim or a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Christian, I think that's such a limited way of seeing humanity, and schools have the opportunity to bring out the fact that we have hundreds of identities. We have our national identity. We have our cultural identity, linguistic identity, religious identity. Yes, cultural identity, professional identity, all kinds of ways.

An outrageous instinct to love and be loved blinded your arms to lines of propriety––Women and Men, Christians and Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, white, black, red, brown. An outrageous instinct to love and be loved executed your brain every hour on the hour.

When others put you down for who you are or what you're doing, it just means that you're going in the right direction.

Don't call for a revolution, but look at yourself honestly and create an evolution.

What you are today is the choice you made yesterday.

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

When I hear real faithful people - whether it's a real Christian, or a real Buddhist, or a real Muslim - I hear them use the language I use for a friend. So my metaphor for God is friend.

Cambodia wanted no part of SEATO. We would look after ourselves as neutrals and Buddhists.

When virtuous mental attitudes, like mindfulness, respect, and compassion, are invoked to justify nonvirtuous acts like hunting, fishing, and eating animal products, the mental attitudes are insincere. They are self-deceptions that we create to justify habits that in our hearts we know are wrong, but to which we have become attached.

The essence of love and compassion is understanding, the ability to recognize the physical, material, and psychological suffering of others, to put ourselves "inside the skin" of the other. We "go inside" their body, feelings, and mental formations, and witness for ourselves their suffering. Shallow observation as an outsider is not enough to see their suffering. We must become one with the subject of our observation. When we are in contact with another's suffering, a feeling of compassion is born in us. Compassion means, literally, "to suffer with."

We never try to convert those who receive (aid) to Christianity but in our work we bear witness to the love of God's presence and if Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, or agnostics become for this better men - simply better - we will be satisfied. It matters to the individual what church he belongs to. If that individual thinks and believes that this is the only way to God for her or him, this is the way God comes into their life - his life. If he does not know any other way and if he has no doubt so that he does not need to search then this is his way to salvation.

While the primary function of formal Buddhist meditation is to create the possibility of the experience of "being," my work as a therapist has shown me that the demands of intimate life can be just as useful as meditation in moving people toward this capacity. Just as in formal meditation, intimate relationships teach us that the more we relate to each other as objects, the greater our disappointment. The trick, as in meditation, is to use this disappointment to change the way we relate.

......the interesting thing was that the Roman Catholic monks and the Buddhist monks had no trouble understanding each other. Each of them was seeking the same experience and knew that the experience was incommunicable. The communication is only an effort to bring the hearer to the edge of the abyss; it is a signpost, not the thing itself. But the secular clergy reads the communication and gets stuck with the letter, and that's where you have the conflict.

I think it's more, at least at the time, a sense of abstraction. My mind doesn't really work in a way where there's a definitive sense of something. I go one way and then it opens up into a million different ideas, and somehow, when you look at the art, Buddhist art, or particularly Tibetan art, you know, it's a similar thing. All of a sudden there are a million lotus leaves and you're following one to the next and to another, and I related to that, and it felt simple and easy to me. And it made me feel smart.

One day Mara, the Buddhist god of ignorance and evil, was traveling through the villages of India with his attendants. He saw a man doing walking meditation whose face was lit up in wonder. The man had just discovered something on the ground in front of him. Mara's attendants asked what that was and Mara replied, "A piece of truth." "Doesn't this bother you when someone finds a piece of the truth, O evil one?" his attendants asked. "No," Mara replied. "Right after this they usually make a belief out of it."

According to Buddhist scriptures, compassion is the "quivering of the pure heart" when we have allowed ourselves to be touched by the pain of life.

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.

Through countless births in the cycle of existence I have run, not finding although seeking the builder of this house; and again and again I faced the suffering of new birth. Oh housebuilder! Now you are seen. You shall not build a house again for me. All your beams are broken, the ridgepole is shattered. The mind has become freed from conditioning: the end of craving has been reached.

'As I am, so are these. As are these, so am I.' Drawing the parallel to yourself, neither kill nor get others to kill.

In four ways ... should one who flatters be understood as a foe in the guise of a friend: He approves of his friend's evil deeds, he disapproves his friend's good deeds, he praises him in his presence, he speaks ill of him in his absence.

He whose inflowing thoughts are dried up, who is unattached to food, whose dwelling place is an empty and imageless release - the way of such a person is hard to follow, like the path of birds through the sky.

By three things the wise person may be known. What three? He sees a shortcoming as it is. When he sees it, he tries to correct it. And when another acknowledges a shortcoming, the wise one forgives it as he should.