The picture we present to ourselves of who we think we ought to be obscures who we really are.

Our path, our sense of spirituality demands great earnestness, dedication, sincerity & continuity.

With the practice of meditation we can develop this ability to more fully love ourselves and to more consistently love others.

If you are fortunate enough to enjoy great success, you should never forget the spirit of the beginner, and not grow indolent and arrogant.

First of all, Buddhism is neither pessimistic nor optimistic. If anything at all, it is realistic, for it takes a realistic view of life and the world. It looks at things objectively (yathābhūtam). It does...

No sane person fears nothingness.

It is better to know oneself than know to others. So not find fault others see first in yourself. When one experiences truth, the madness of finding fault with others disappears.

Guarding knowledge is not a good way to understand. Understanding means to throw away your knowledge.

If I don’t understand you, I may be angry at you, all the time. We are not capable of understanding each other, and that is the main source of human suffering.

Intruding upon a dimension rightfully ours, modern medicine robs us of the dignity of what people in the past regarded as most precious: that final moment of death.

A life out of balance is a person that doesn’t believe happiness can be achieved now, or in the future. It is as fleeting as the wind.

We must accept the reality that the causes of impatience travel a two-way street.

Our work is not to become a better person, but to become present to the perfection we already are.

To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one’s own in the midst of abundance.

We do not now stand in the middle; in every aspect of our life we have, deliberately or by the ‘conditioning’ of birth, education or environment, allowed ourselves to stand on one bank of the...

We see that the vast majority of our suffering is needless, and simply arises from the misidentification with our thinking mind.

Search not for happiness outside yourself, for nothing could be further from the truth.

We are animals descended from five billion years of wanting, striving, and seeking. And life just doesn’t cooperate. So we suffer. And so the solution to that problem is to upgrade our minds, in a...

The entire teaching of Buddhism can be summed up in this way: Nothing is worth holding on to.

Live in joy, in love,even among those who hate.Live in joy, in health,even among the afflicted.Live in joy, in peace,even among the troubled.Look within, be still.Free from fear and attachment,know the sweet joy of the...

At last the bottom fell out.No more water in the pail.No more moon in the water.

…the Chöd teachings attributed to Machik Labdrön both rely and innovate on Buddhist representations of mental functionings of a human being, including the onto-epistemological trope of the Universal Base Consciousness [ālaya-vijñāna] and the psycho-ethical trope...

According to the Buddha, the failure to recognize the illusion of the self is the source of all ignorance and unhappiness. It is only by renouncing the self, that is, by dropping his ego defences...

Left alone, I am overtaken by the northern void-no wind, no cloud, no track, no bird, only the crystal crescents between peaks, the ringing monuments of rock that, freed from the talons of ice and...

We don’t need any sort of religious orientation to lead a life that is ethical, compassionate & kind.

As a friend of mine told me about Real Happiness: you wrote this one in American.

Zeena Schreck believes that the right-hand path and the left-hand path have traditionally had the same end goal; it is only the method that is different and the fact that adepts on the left-hand path...

The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole force of their religion is directed to the great central truth in every religion, to evolve a God out of man. They...

What you know can never be the beyond. Whatever you experience is not the beyond. If there is any beyond, this movement of ‘you’ is absent. The absence of this movement probably is the beyond,...

An emotion like anger that’s an automatic response lasts just ninety seconds from the moment it’s triggered until it runs its course. One and a half minutes, that’s all. When it lasts any longer, which...

Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.

First, we must see that our negative actions arise due to prejudice and erroneous judgments. The discrimination that labels some as ‘friends’ and others as ‘enemies’ must be perceived as the root of our problems....

Returning to whereIt used to see blossoms,My mind, changed,Will stay on at Yoshino…Home now, and see anew.

I do not dispute with the world, it is the world that disputes with me. A speaker of Dhamma does not dispute with anyone in the world.

When we teach a child patience we offer them the gift of a dignified life.

You cannot control the results, only your actions.

The advantages of developing absorption concentration are not only that it provides a stable and receptive state of mind for the practice of insight meditation. The experience of absorption is one of intense pleasure and...

When you dig a well, there’s no sign of water until you reach it, only rocks and dirt to move out of the way. You have removed enough; soon the pure water will flow,” said...

The possessions themselves were not the problem, it was my relationship with possessing.

The Buddha is found in other people – even the ones we do not like very much.

Leave behind the passive dreaming of a rose-tinted future. The energy of happiness exists in living today with roots sunk firmly in reality’s soil.

We must conduct research and then accept the results. If they don’t stand up to experimentation, Buddha’s own words must be rejected.

Long is the night to him who is awake; long is a mile to him who is tired; long is life to the foolish who do not know the true law.

You don’t understand. I only prostitute the part of the body that isn’t important, and nobody suffers except my karma a little bit. I don’t do big harm. You prostitute your mind. Mind is seat...

When angry, count to Zen.

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.