Quotes about Buddha

After his great awakening, the Buddha continued to meditate and to devote himself to others; otherwise his vision would have receded into a pleasant memory.

The Buddha's insight into the middle way is not simply about a balance between extremes. This conventional understanding misses the deeper revelation of the middle way as being the very nature of unexcelled enlightenment. The middle way is an invitation to leap beyond nirvana and samsara and to realize the unborn Buddha mind right in the middle of everywhere.

Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace.

Birth and death are doors through which you pass from one dream to another. Someone is born on Earth in France as a powerful king, rules for a time, then dies. He maybe reborn in India, and travel in a bullock cart into the forest to meditate. He may next find rebirth in America as a successful businessman; and when he dreams death again, reincarnates perhaps in Tibet as a devotee of Buddha and spend his entire life in a lamasery. Therefore hate none and be attached to no nationality, for sometimes you are a Hindu, sometimes a Frenchman, sometimes an Englishman, or an American or a Tibetan. What is the difference? Each existence is a dream within a dream, is it not?

I, ever knowing the living beings
Who tread the Path and those who do not
In response to those who may be saved
Preach to them a variety of dharmas,
Each time having this thought:
'How may I cause the beings
To contrive to enter the Unexcelled Path
and quickly to perfect the Buddha-body?'

What is most important is to go deep into ourselves and discover the loving kindness and compassion of the buddha within - the awakened nature we all possess.

The Buddha shared his teachings so that everyone, without exception, could reach the same supreme state of liberation that he had attained through practice and effort.

You may have seen people praying to an image as if it had special power. Perhaps they're wishing for the well-being of their family, for material prosperity, or to recover from illness. But this way of practicing faith only leads to a dead end. Buddha images should serve as inspirations to cultivate the infinite loving kindness latent in the buddha within us.

The Buddha's teachings on love are clear. It is possible to live twenty-four hours a day in a state of love. Every movement, every glance, every thought, and every word can be infused with love.

Jesus taught us many things. But so did Muhammad and Buddha and countless others. You don't need priests or prophets to teach you. People and events in your life can teach you.

 The records of every great religion show the presence of such Supermen, so full of the Divine Life that again and again they have been taken as the very representatives of God Himself.

the mind is pure and luminous by nature. It is defiled only by adventitious thoughts and emotions

We are not innocent children victimized by a big bad world; if our world is big and bad, we made it that way. This is what the Buddha taught. The “other” is the child's boogeyman, the projection of our own fears onto a terrifying object of our imagination, which in turn terrorizes us. Our ignorance is not seeing that we are the other. We cannot afford to confuse innocence with this ignorance. Violence is not a permanent, immutable, fixed object. It is a state of mind, an expression of ignorance, with no more solid substance than a cloud. We cannot make a frontal attack on violence. Even protecting ourselves from it fuels its boogeyman existence. But the Buddha taught that we can change. This was his good news: that there is a way to alleviate suffering by freeing our minds from greed, anger, and ignorance. Yet until we apprehend the ways in which we are Oklahoma City, the bombs and the baby bears, the victims and the violators, we will continue to blame “them,” all the while proclaiming our innocence and evading our responsibilities.

The essence of human spirit would seem to be something static to Buddha: if it has an internal imperative to become something else (something higher or more spiritual), what self-disequilibrium could it suffer from that could nonetheless still be considered spiritual in Buddha's eyes? Nietzsche sought to explain this imperative for self-acculturation, for achieving rational self-mastery, for spiritualization, for self-radicalization and self-sublimation, by means of a "Will to Power" far more comprehensive than moderns (with only the cheapest and most facile grasp of "power") can understand. As a philhellene Nietzsche perceives and respects what the Greeks took for granted, that "power" above all else must be self-reflexive, an expression of aristic self-moderation (their anti-hybristic ethos and its correlative contempt for idiotia): "power" to the Greeks is moral and philosophical and cultural and political authority because it expresses itself in the hardest thing of all for humans to achieve, self-mastery.

"But people of the deepest understanding look within, distracted by nothing. Since a clear mind is the Buddha, they attain the understanding of a Buddha without using the mind." - Bodhidharma

The good news is that we are Buddha.
The bad news is that all beings are Buddha.
The sickness of being human is the sickness of wanting to be unique.

After 48 years, I have said nothing.

Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there. If I only know who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am.
What in fact I am, if only Manichee I think I am would allow me to know it, is the reconciliation of yes and no lived out in total acceptance and the blessed experience of Not-Two.
In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soup. Because his aspiration to perpetuate only the "yes" in every pair of opposites can never, in the nature of things, be realized, the insulated Manichee I think I am condemns himself to endlessly repeated frustration, endlessly repeated conflicts with other sspiring and frustrated Manichees.
Conflicts and frustrations--the theme of all history and almost all biography. "I show you sorrow," said the Buddha realistically. But he also showed the ending of sorrow--self-knowledge, total acceptance, the blessed experience of Not-Two

If you want to read a letter from the Buddha's world, it is necessary to understand Buddha's world.

What I know is like the leaves on that tree; what I teach is only a small part. But I offer it to all with an open hand. What do I not teach? Whatever is fascinating to discuss, divides people against each other, but has no bearing on putting an end to sorrow. What do I teach? Only what is necessary to take you to the other shore.

The worlds originate so that truth may come and dwell therein.

I cannot find the Monastery of Heaped Fragrance,
Miles up now into the clouds of the summit.
There is no footpath through the ancient woods.
Where did the bell sound,
Deep in the sound, deep in the mountain?
The voice of the torrent gulps over jagged stones;
Sunlight hardly warms the bluish pines.
As dusk deepens in these unfathomable mazes,
I practice meditation
To subdue the dragon of desire.

Those who awaken never rest in one place.
Like swans, they rise and leave the lake.
On the air they rise and fly an invisible course.
Their food is knowledge.
They live on emptiness.
They have seen how to break free.
Who can follow them?

I am the owner of my actions, heir to my actions, born of my actions, related through my actions, and have my actions as my arbitrator. Whatever I do, for good or for evil, to that I will fall heir.

The only way to reply to a non-dualist is to ask an inscrutable koan “Does Buddha Wear Harmony Hairspray?”

As you learn to leave alone the activity of unconsciously trying to be the mindbody that you think that you are - the mindbody that this "you" is currently flowing through - and you learn to move as this one that you truly are - this "you" of you; the very heart of existence - steadily, consciously and momentarily, the continuity of the ever deepening of this innermost as it keeps on entering its manifestation, through this mindbody that you find yourself flowing through, allows you to simply bubble in the sheer joy, pleasure, peace, delightfulness and stillness that this "you" of you is.

As a lotus flower is born in
water, grows in water and rises out of water to stand above it
unsoiled, so I, born in the world, raised in the world having overcome
the world, live unsoiled by the world

The ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi is supposed to have said, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” Like much of Zen teaching, this seems too cute by half, but it makes a valuable point: to turn the Buddha into a religious fetish is to miss the essence of what he taught. In considering what Buddhism can offer the world in the twenty-first century, I propose that we take Lin Chi’s admonishment rather seriously. As students of the Buddha, we should dispense with Buddhism.

Buddha is said to have given a "silent sermon" once during which he held up a flower and gazed at it.  After a while, one of those present, a monk called Mahakasyapa, began to smile.  He is said to have been the only one who had understood the sermon.  According to legend, that smile (that is to say, realization) was handed down by twenty-eight successive masters and much later became the origin of Zen.

Q: Why the word "Self"?

A: The experience of the Presence is radically and profoundly subjective.  It is commonly presumed by the mind that God is 'elsewhere', namely, above, beyond, transcendent, in heaven, or somewhere back in history or in the future.  Traditionally, however, God is described as both transcendent and immanent.  The term "Self" emphasizes that God is discovered within as the ultimate reality that underlies one's actual existence in the 'here and now' (e.g., "Heaven is within you.").

The Buddha is said to have avoided using the term "God" because of the prevalence of misconceptions surrounding it.  He wanted to avoid all the limitations that that conceptualization confounds.  The Self as Awareness is often referred to in literature as Light.  As recounted in Genesis, the Unmanifest became Manifest first as Light, which was the radiance of the energy of God that took form as the universe.

The term "Self" also overcomes the dualistic notion that one is separated from God.  Historically, the picture that there is a sinner down here on Earth and there is a God up there somewhere in heaven is the viewpoint of the ego.  Thus, to most people, the term "God" implies "otherness."  However, there is no separation in the Allness of Creation, so it is impossible for the created to be separate from the Creator.  Enlightenment is therefore the revelation of the Self when the illusion of the reality of a separate self is removed.

The constant awareness of one's existence as 'I' is the ever present expression of the innate divinity of the Self.  This is a universal, constant experience that is purely subjective and of which no proof is possible or necessary.  The 'I' of the Self is the expression of Divinity as Awareness which is therefore beyond time and form.  The truth of this identity is obscured by the duality created by perception and disappears when all positionalities are relinquished.