1,972 Quotes About Buddhism

Some may be inspired to respectfully adorn the body of a bodhisattva with sandalwood powder, while others may prefer to throw lava on the bodhisattva's head, yet both affect the bodhisattva equally. May the mind of equanimity be developed.—Prajñāpāramitāsañcayagāthā (Gathering of Precious Qualities)

However, maitri is not just being kind and nice. It is the understanding that one has to become one with the situation. That does not particularly mean that one becomes entirely without personality and has to accept whatever the other person suggests. Rather, you have to overcome the barrier that you have formed between yourself and others. If you remove this barrier and open yourself, then automatically real understanding and clarity will develop in your mind.

In science, even if experience and reason can’t yield a definitive test for some unsolved problem, the rules require trying to gain some explanatory grip by looking to the best intersubjectively confirmed theory in the vicinity, the theory with the best potential resources for making sense of the puzzling phenomena.

When you're attached to a team or a player, a game becomes an emotional ferry wheel. Else you just chill and enjoy it like art. Similarly, when you're attached to things, life is a ferry wheel of emotions. When you're detached, life is a walk through an art village.

What if these people and things (including your body-mind) are just an illusion appearing on a screen? What if you are the only reality? What if you're the only one in the universe? What if you're the Paramatma?

We have been taught that there is no gap between nighttime and daytime, no gap between you and I. This means oneness. But we do not emphasize even oneness. If it is one, there is no need to emphasize one.Suzuki, Shunryu. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (pp. 108-109). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.

What is clear, however, is that we cannot assume that the earliest forms of Buddhist thought must necessarily exhibit the traits of simplicity and lack of sophistication; the earliest portions of the Nikāyas or Āgamas may already represent a quite developed synthesis of the early Indian yogic tradition.

Some of my colleagues are finding inconsistencies in the canonical texts which they assert to be such without telling us how the Buddhist tradition itself regards the texts as consistent-as if that were not important. My own view is not, I repeat, that we have to accept the Buddhist tradition uncritically, but that if it interprets texts as coherent, that interpretation deserves the most serious consideration (quoting Richard Gombrich).

If with uncorrupted mind you feel good will for even one being, you become skilled from that. But a Noble One produces a mind of sympathy for all beings, an abundance of merit.