Don’t be so loyal to your mind; the mind is not loyal to You.

Be aware of yourself without thinking or looking in the mirror

what is not true does not exist in this moment.

Boundaries are nothing more than imaginary lines drawn-up by delusional leaders and power hungry tyrants who wish to segregate the population into more easily controlled segments in any case. -If you really think about it...

Dare to live by letting go.

Certainty implies choice. But there is no real choice in our lives. There is order in the chaos and it is not up to us to understand why everything happens the way it that it...

The virtues of free enterprise can become distorted by greed & delusion.

A close examination of the instructions in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta reveals that the meditator is never instructed to interfere actively with what happens in the mind. If a mental hindrance arises, for example, the task...

Here’s an example: someone says, “Master, please hand me the knife,” and he hands them the knife, blade first. “Please give me the other end,” he says. And the master replies, “What would you do...

We tend to view ourselves as this, lying in contradiction with everything that is not ourselves, that.

Zen is the period of time during which a person has true clarity of vision.

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

Once you awaken, you will have no interest in judging those who sleep.

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

When you blame, you open up a world of excuses, because as long as you’re looking outside, you miss the opportunity to look inside, and you continue to suffer.

In the first movement, our infancy as a species, we felt no separation from the natural world around us. Trees, rocks, and plants surrounded us with a living presence as intimate and pulsing as our...

I do feel I’m being respectful to Buddhism and martial arts with ‘Mortal Kombat.’

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

To sense which gifts to accept & which to leave behind is our path to discovering freedom.

Siddhartha considered the ways of the demon, and in that moment he struck.

No doubt, humans will do a lot of damage before we ultimately destroy ourselves. But life will continue without humans. New forms of intelligence will emerge long after this human experiment is over.

other side” is wrong. These proclamations appear in many forms, from scathing letters to the editor to frothing-at-the-mouth comments on blogs and internet videos. Although expression and debate are vital parts of policymaking, political speech...

Maybe it’s a question, to be lived.

We have two alternatives: either we question our beliefs – or we don’t. Either we accept our fixed versions of reality- or we begin to challenge them. In Buddha’s opinion, to train in staying open...

My goal is not to upset the apple cart, but to make it more accessible.

It is recorded in the monastic rules that a monk once performed an abortion on a girl; the Buddha judged his action seriously wrong, which incurred him the highest offense in the monastic rule. A...

To have some deep feeling about Buddhism is not the point; we just do what we should do, like eating supper and going to bed. This is Buddhism.

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...

Our greatest happiness comes from the experience of love & compassion.

Patience requires a slowing down, a spaciousness, a sense of ease.

Rage — whether in reaction to social injustice, or to our leaders’ insanity, or to those who threaten or harm us — is a powerful energy that, with diligent practice, can be transformed into fierce...

Excerpt from “The Long Road from Perdition” for the day:”…I’ve always been drawn to the ocean. It is here that I now feel peaceful and can lose my thoughts while immersed in the deafening sounds...

Through this process, wisdom clarifies the way that the mind manufacturers emotion and karma, and finally penetrates the illusion of self. Just as though one were investigating how a magician created his display of illusions,...

Rise to the challenges that life presents you. You can’t develop genuine character and ability by sidestepping adversity and struggle.

Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism.

Like a caring motherholding and guarding the lifeof her only child,so with a boundless heartof lovingkindness,hold yourself and all beingsas your beloved children.

As a young doctor I would see these violent things and wonder why they happened, knowing that it was not something that Buddhists should do. Then I realized we are not born Buddhist. All the...

The thought manifests the word;The word manifests the deed;The deed develops into habit;And habit hardens into character;So watch the thought and its ways with care,And let them spring forth from loveBorn out of compassion for...

When we stop distancing ourselves from the pain in the world, our own or others, we create the possibility of a new experience, one that often surprises because of how much joy, connection, or relief...

People turn to meditation because they want to make good decisions, break bad habits & bounce back better from disappointments.

Effort is the unconstrained willingness to persevere through difficulty.

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

Somewhere Dōgen wrote about the number of moments in the snap of a finger. I don’t remember the exact figure, only that it was large and seemed quite arbitrary and absurd, but I imagine that...

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...

I have the certainty, now, of not needing certainty. I have the certainty, of uncertainty. The peace, with being uncertain. All is good. All is holy. Whatever you choose, it can be fine. Hatred never...

The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last—that they don’t disintegrate, that they can be counted on to...

The person who suffers most in this world is the person who has many wrong perceptions, and most of our perceptions are erroneous.

We live our lives based on the assumption that we directly perceive, and are accurately interpreting, objects with a fair amount of accuracy. Since we naturally assume that we are apprehending objects of cognition as...

Perspective is as simple as answering this question: If I had 5 months to live would I experience this problem differently?

Look for the heart of a tradition in the actions of its humble servants and selfless teachers. Listen and let the teachings be borne out, or set aside, based on your experience.