But if God and immortality be repudiated, what is left? That is the question usually thrown at the atheist’s head. The orthodox believer likes to think that nothing is left. That, however, is because he...

We agreed that at least to some extent the whole punk movement is based on the Buddha’s 1st noble truth of suffering & the dissatisfactory nature of the material world. The punks see through the...

While happiness is an end in itself, it is also the state of mind we can have right now.

Some nonreligious people are disgruntled by the word “faith,” feeling that it has no connection to them. But we all have faith. Broadly speaking, “faith” does not apply only to belief in the supernatural. We...

The point is to be free, not to be crazy.

I was perplexed by the failure of teachers at school to address what seemed the most urgent matter of all: the bewildering, stomach-churning insecurity of being alive. The standard subjects of history, geography, mathematics, and...

Let whatever happens, be what needs to happen, so that I may awaken.

It seems that, without clarity and honesty, we don’t progress. We just stay stuck in the same vicious cycle. But honesty without kindness makes us feel grim and mean, and pretty soon we start looking...

The leaves that remain are only a very small part of the tea. The tea that goes into me is a much bigger part of the tea. It is the richest part.We are the same;...

Có một thi sĩ làm thơ hô hào những nhà sáng tác, những ca sĩ từ bỏ lối sáng tác và ca hát đau thương đứt ruột. Ông ta viết những c u này, tôi...

In fact, no form of death places a greater burden on society than suicide, for the act of suicide is the way a person seeks to resolve his alienation from a cooperative society.

… Những vết tích như những dấu chỉ đường, vô lượng phương tiện, tùy theo căn cơ của từng chúng sinh trong vô lượng chúng sinh, tùy theo từng cõi pháp trong hằng hà sa...

For Persons are selves and, in one respect at least, I was now a Not-self, simultaneously perceiving and being the Not-self of the things around me. To this new-born Not-self, the behavior, the appearance, the...

The erruption of feelings & emotions that follows a near-death exerience, or any event that causes us to stop & look deeply at the reality of our lives, is ripe with the potential for insight...

Inner Peace can be seen as the ultimate benefit of practicing patience.

Each one of us is hard at war – within. We must face this battlefield; withdraw, as the psychologist would say, our habitual projections of that strife from the world around us, and realize that...

The Heart-mantra of Dependent Origination (rten-‘brel snying-po [རྟེན་འབྲེལ་སྙིང་པོ]), which liberates the enduring continuum of phenomena and induces the appearance of multiplying relics (‘phel-gdung [འཕེལ་གདུང་] and rainbow lights, is:[OṂ] YE DHARMĀ HETUPRABHAVĀHETUN TEṢĀṂ TATHĀGATOHY AVADAT TEṢĀṂ...

We even, at the worst, reach the state for which Buddhism, in the East presents most ably the case: as in the West, does James Thomson (B.V.) in The City of Dreadful Night; we come...

When mountain-climbing is made too easy, the spiritual effect the mountain exercises vanishes into the air.

People can only live fully by helping others to live. When you give life to friends you truly live. Cultures can only realize their further richness by honoring other traditions. And only by respecting natural...

The Way is not in the sky; the Way is in the heart.

So too, friend, purification of virtue is for the sake of reaching purification of mind; purification of mind is for the sake of reaching purification of view; purification of view is for the sake of...

But, nevertheless, if there is even the slightest recognition, liberation is easy. Should you ask why this is so—it is because once the awesome, terrifying and fearful appearances arise, the awareness does not have the...

You have compassion but by itself it is not enough. It is almost as if you carry around inside you some dead thing. Some heavy black cinder in your heart that burdens you; a ponderous...

[The Buddha] is not dividing himself into worthy and unworthy pieces; he is one being, indivisible, immune from the tendency to double back and beat up on himself. He has seen the worst in himself...

By practicing meditation we establish love, compassion, sympathetic joy & equanimity as our home.

Metta is the ability to embrace all parts of ourselves, as well as all parts of the world. Practicing metta illuminates our inner integrity because it relieves us of the need to deny different aspects...

Greed kills us all.

The question has often been asked; Is Buddhism a religion or a philosophy? It does not matter what you call it. Buddhism remains what it is whatever label you may put on it. The label...

Anger spoils relationships where there should be great reciprocity.

Too lazy to be ambitious,I let the world take care of itself.Ten days’ worth of rice in my bag;a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?Listening to the night rain on...

Usually when we hear or read something new, we just compare it to our own ideas. If it is the same, we accept it and say that it is correct. If it is not, we...

…there is found a third level of religious experience, even if it is seldom found in a pure form. I will call it the cosmic religious sense. This is hard to make clear to those...

The afterlife is mostly a dream state where you confront the good and evil within you. The text repeatedly explains that the images the deceased sees and the sounds one hears are hallucinations created by...

Patience is a natural consequence of the cultivation of compassion & love, for ourselves and all beings.

An open beginner’s mind is a powerful tool for developing patience.

What is the happiness ? Is it really happiness ? Nothing stable, just happen, stay and decay… Everything is impermanence, dissatisfaction and nothing can ever belong to itself

What a nuisance is the friend who must have this and that, whose likes and hates are infinite, with bitter and loud voiced complaint about the whole of circumstance? How pleasant are the truly great...

The more we have outside ourselves the harder it is to get inside ourselves.

Sometimes it takes a miracle to remind us that the only permanent condition is that of impermanence.

At the last stages of the journey, there’s no journey at all.

Buddha wrote a code which he said would be useful to guide men in darkness, but he never claimed to be the Light of the world. Buddhism was born with a disgust for the world,...

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.

Karma is often wrongly confused with the notion of a fixed destiny. It is more like an accumulation of tendencies that can lock us into particular behavior patterns, which themselves result in further accumulations of...

[The changing relationship between evangelicals and Catholics is examined in a lengthy report] Is the Reformation Over? … lumped Buddhism, Islam, and Catholicism together as non-Christian faiths.

The eternity of “anytime” shines in this moment “now” while the unlimitedness of “anyplace” is manifested in the limits of “here.” When the universality of “anyone” dances out in the individual “I,” for the first...

enlightenment tree,” and I watched the rising of the morning star and came away no wiser than before. But later I wondered if the Tibetan monks were aware that the Bodhi tree was murmuring with...

We use mindfulness to observe the way we cling to pleasant experiences & push away unpleasant ones.

In Buddhism there is one word for mind & heart: chitta. Chitta refers not just to thoughts and emotions in the narrow sense of arising from the brain, but also to the whole range of...

Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” At the same time she notes that the left-hand path is the ‘way of action’. It is not about intellectual contemplation, or worse,...