Quotes from Robert Aitken

Our practice is not to clear up the mystery. It is to make the mystery clear.

Watching gardeners label their plants I vow with all beings to practice the old horticulture and let plants identify me.

The one who praises you is a thief. The one who criticizes you is your true friend.

Sloppy language is a kind of disloyalty to humanity, a kind of lying. Talent

When I'm moved to complain about others I vow with all beings to remember that karma is endless and it's loving that leads to love.

When you reflect on the infinite number of happenstances that coalesced to produce you, then you understand how unique, how precious, how sacred you really are. Your task is to cultivate that precious, sacred nature and help it to flower.

The self is completely autonomous, yet exists only in resonance with all other selves.

It comes down to practice, and practice, after all, is conduct in keeping with Right Views. Of course, Right Views are not merely opinions, not even Sk?kyamuni's opinions, but are views that accord with this realization: we are all in this together and we aren't here very long. Let's take care of one another while we can.

Once one thinks like a mountain, the whole world is converted. All things confirm me. Then I sit on dojo cushions that do not move. There is no controller and no one to control.

Mystery is the unknown in which we live. It is our nature. Mystification is the exploitation of mystery.

You and I come forth as possibilities of essential nature, alone and independent as stars, yet reflecting and being reflected by all things. My life and yours are the unfolding realization of total aloneness and total intimacy.

In realizing all this, we understand how we are just bundles of sense perceptions, with the substance of a dream or a bubble on the surface of the sea. The vanity of the usual kind of self-preoccupation becomes clear, and we are freed from selfish concerns in our enjoyment of the universe as it is, and of our own previously unsuspected depths.

The Buddha challenged the idea of an immutable soul. He said nothing about the mutable soul, and its survival, though his successors in most streams of Buddhism have had a lot to say on this subject. For all their words, the question of what happens when one dies remains a mystery.

I don't dream about the President any more, and when I talk to my friends, I find they don't either. The Great Leader is a hollow man, the Law of the Market cannot prove itself, and the Nation State mocks its own values.

Clover is incapable of not nurturing. It can't do anything but nurture. Shakyamuni is capable of not nurturing. With a poisonous thought, he is a poisonous person. With an enlightened thought, he is an enlightened person. With his great realization, he is unlikely to slip back into poisonous ways, but he could, for he is human.