Best 3315 quotes in «buddhism quotes» category

Your mind is made up of light. We call it the dharmakaya, the clear light of reality. The transcendental eternal light is everywhere. It's the light of god or whatever you want to call it.

Your own nature is pure, spotless, and pristine. Through association we drag ourselves down or we can raise ourselves up.

Your reason is your friend. It defends the island of your awareness. But you don't want your reason to rule everything.

Your state of mind dominates your awareness to such an extent that you can't conceive of any other state of mind other than the state of mind that you're in.

Your tonal must accept that the nagual exists and that it's beneficial and healthy.

Your self is the universe, and you perceive the universe through a state of mind.

Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts.

Your whole life is inside your mind. Your mind is the prism that refracts the entire universe. Everything around you and within you comes from your mind.

You see, I'm a believer in the rhapsodic. I like things that are happy. For no particular reason, I just like them. Most people don't seem to be like that in this particular place, in this world. You can tell by what they focus on. Read a newspaper, watch a TV show, go to a movie, look at a life.

Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts. Develop the mind of equilibrium. You will always be getting praise and blame, but do not let either affect the poise of the mind: follow the calmness, the absence of pride.

You see, that's the fun of Buddhism. We do have a wild card in the deck that can't be explained, that changes value continuously, and that's enlightenment.

You see two people together. They're in a relationship. It's really power that holds those people together. And when the designs of power change, those people will separate and there's nothing they can do in the meantime about it.

You should be drawing awareness from a deeper part of your being. Your deeper mind has everything already. It knows everything already. It has all the answers.

You stop growing when you stop listening.

You stand on the edge of eternity, with a vista that is so incredible, so powerful, so perfect that it's overwhelming. You are so overwhelmed - you no longer exist.

You start meditation as an average human being who is filled with vagueness and not much purpose or definition, who is controlled by their desires, your mind spins all over the place, your senses spin all over the place, out of control.

You think you are somebody and that is where the problem begins. You're really not somebody, you're everybody. You objectify yourself into thinking that you are a particular state of being.

You've gained some powers by your entrance into other dimensions and you use them to attack others or to make others miserable, then power reverses on you and it pulls you apart because it's not supposed to be used that way.

You've got to make a person aware of how miserable they really are and show them how happy they can be. Otherwise, why should they seek this nebulous goal called self-discovery.

You want to be happy; of course, that isn't how you get to be happy; because if you want to be happy, you are going to be sitting around being unhappy because you're not happy.

You will always see, if this group is a highly evolved group or on the way up, a movement towards oneness.

You will have to put aside some things in your life, habits, ideas, ways of seeing life. You will have to learn new things, and then new things and then new things - forever.

You work many hours. It is the major activity of your life. You can lose a lot of energy or gain a lot of energy from it. Put your full attention into it and do a good job, because it is part of your impeccability.

Zen Buddhism is a discipline where belief isn't necessary.

Zen was a reaction. Just as Buddha came into the world and spoke against the fall of Vedanta, so Buddhism lost its essence and became ritual. Zen was a reaction to that.

Zen and Buddhism have produced martial arts, because of the Buddhist injunction against weapons.

Zen is Tantric Buddhism, Vajrayana is tantric Buddhism - these are various forms of it. Tantric Buddhism simply means cutting to the chase.

Zen Buddhism does not preach. Sermons remain words. It waits until people feel stifled and insecure, driven by a secret longing.

Zen professes itself to be the spirit of Buddhism, but in fact it is the spirit of all religions and philosophies.

Zen students see themselves as athletes. Their competitive sport is enlightenment; only with enlightenment do we compete.

A balanced diet” is not so much about protein/fat/carbohydrate ratios. The real ratios to consider, at least for the typical American or European, are energy consumption/expenditure, pleasure/actual need, food/everything else.

[A] being is nothing but a combination of physical and mental forces or energies. What we call death is the total non-functioning of the physical body. Do all these forces and energies stop altogether with the non-functioning of the body?

A beginner’s mind allows you to remain flexible and open, even as you encounter new things that may seem strange or even uncomfortable at first.

A beginner’s mind allows you to remain flexible and open, even as you encounter new things that may seem strange or even uncomfortable at first. It also allows you to experience something mundane from an entirely new perspective, whereas an expert might approach something believing they “already get it.

A blind man’s thoughts almost never have anything to do with the things he is facing.

A boddhisattva is someone who is on the way to becoming a buddha. All of us become boddhisattvas as soon as we start to take our Zen work seriously and the work we do contributes to creating a world in which all good actions become more efficacious.

Absent a sense of the preciousness of one's own life, why respect the life of anyone else?

A Buddha doesn’t observe precepts. A Buddha doesn’t do good or evil. A Buddha isn’t energetic or lazy. A Buddha is someone who does nothing, someone who can’t even focus his mind on a Buddha. A Buddha isn’t a Buddha. Don’t think about Buddhas.

According to the Buddha's doctrine that they believed in, it was not the caste that defined a person high or low. It was one's deeds that mattered.

According to Zen Buddhists, all things have their existence in The Void. The Void is that which is no-thing, but contains all things within it, or as some Christian mystics state, “God is Nothing; He is Utterly Other; He is the VOID.

Acceptance IS transcendence.

Achieving the advanced state of no-thought is not about stopping the thinking process, but rather, it’s about cultivating an expansive sensitivity to a level above the thinking mind.

Accurately perceiving and following one’s intuition is, I think, the essential human spiritual process. The distractions, confusion, misinterpretations and temptations that oppose that process are enormous. At the same time, there are always clues for how to go about it. The divine is a mystery, so the impulse to really discover, like a child, has to be the core response to anything; that’s the only way beyond the habits, presumptions and prejudices that feed ignorance and fear. To question well, instead of hiding behind a belief or answer, requires the application of the most valued of all human qualities, such as compassion, courage, imagination, respect, humility, devotion, and ultimately love of life itself. This kind of passionate questing is evident in the most admired and, if you will, divine individuals in every culture, religion, and skill throughout history.

A certain amount of native skill and training can allow many individuals to be fairly successful magicians, achieving a surprisingly high ratio of positive results through sorcery.(...) These outer changes, no matter how dramatic, will not necessarily have a deep impact on the deepest levels of your psyche, which is where the process of initiation most meaningfully manifests.' --Zeena Schreck for “Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity,” University of Stockholm, Malin Fitger 2004

After all, what Buddhism offers as a solution is universalised indifference - a learning of how to withdraw from too much empathy. This is why Buddhism can so easily turn into the very opposite of universal compassion: the advocacy of a ruthless military attitude, which is what the fate of Zen Buddhism aptly demonstrates.

A fearless heart is free of desire, a kind heart finds paradise everywhere.

After all, people desire immortality and do not wish to embrace the inescapable reality of death; they long for happiness and shy away from the contemplation of pain; they want to preserve their sense of self, not desconstruction it into fleeting and impersonal components. It is counterintuitive to accept that deathlessness is experienced each moment we are released from the deathlike grip of greed and hatred; that happiness in this world is only possible for those who realized that this world is incapable of providing happiness; that one becomes a fully individuated person only by relinquishing beliefs in an essential self.

Machik thus maintains that what is conventionally referred to as a "god" is in fact the positive nature of reflexive awareness that characterizes the full potential of the enlightened mind when it is unsullied by discriminative thinking. In contrast, when "demons" are conventionally invoked, one should understand this as the obstruction of the full potential of the Universal Base [kun gzhi; ālaya] by non-aware emotional reactions (nyon mongs; kleśa).

Again and again, counteract the agitation and turbulence of the mind by relaxing more deeply, not by contracting the body or mind.

A great Zen master said just before he died, "From the bathtub, to the bathtub, I have uttered stuff and nonsense." The bathtub in which the baby is washed at birth, the bathtub in which the corpse is washed before burial, all this time I have said much nonsense.