1,972 Quotes About Buddhism

When we fancy ourselves to be a particular thing with a name, we see ourselves as we would a cork in a stream. What we do not realize is that there is only stream. What we fancy as particular is, from the first, only movement, change and flow.

Form is emptiness", the Buddhists teach, but form is also form. I would never be able to approach the emptiness of form if I continued to deny myself the experience of it.

... everything had changed but nothing was altered.

Life is a groundless ground: no sooner does it appear, than it disappears, only to renew itself, then immediately break up and vanish again. It pours forth endlessly, like the river of Heraclitus into which one cannot step twice. If you try to grasp it, it slips away between your fingers.

One needs to be more vitally conscious of what is happening now. This is not to deny the reality of past and future. It is about embarking on a new relationship with the impermanence and temporality of life. Instead of hankering after the past and speculating about the future, one sees the present as the fruit of what has been and the germ of what will be.

Gotama did for the self what Copernicus did for the earth: he put it in its rightful place, despite its continuing to appear just as it did before.Gotama no more rejected the existence of the self than Copernicus rejected the existence of the earth. Instead, rather than regarding it as a fixed, non-contingent point around which everything else turned, he recognized that each self was a fluid, contingent process just like everything else.

Mindful awareness is not presented as a passive concentration on a single, steady object, but as a refined engagement with a shifting, complex world. Mindfulness is a skill that can be developed. It is a choice, an act, a response that springs from a quiet but curious intelligence. And it is empathetic, keenly sensitized to the peculiar texture of one’s own and others’ suffering.

The Buddhadharma is not, however, associated with the practice of being a candy-ass.

You cannot reach lofty heights in art if you do not first discover the unsurpassable beauty in your own heart. If you would like to play the flute truly well, you must find your true self on the Path of Awakening