Quotes from Ayya Khema

Everything that comes to us through our senses comes from the world, but the inner experience that comes to us through meditation is not dependent on worldly matters. Once we are able to experience the joy of full concentration, we will find that this in itself is an automatic antidote to desire.

In another sutta, he speaks about the prerequisites for the practice of meditation. The first is to know our own dukkha, to recognize where it comes from, and how it operates within our own lives. The second is to gain confidence in the teaching, to realize that we can actually take this path. The third is to experience joy at the opportunity we have been given. Only when all three are present will meditation bear fruit.

If we sit down with the idea, "Oh dear, another meditation session, I suppose I must stick it out," we will never be able to do it. There must be a feeling of strength and uplift in the mind. Meditation will enhance both, but we have to bring them with us in the first place.

The temptations in our heart are there practically all the time, and because we don't recognize them, we are often in a quandary. We are being pulled this way and that. For instance, right now: we know it's better to hear Dhamma, but wouldn't it also be nice to go to sleep? If we were left alone, without a lot of people sitting here, it is quite likely we'd wander off to bed.

There is no future, there is no past. Everything is now, and we are completely transparent; we have no solidity. We only look as if we had.

What we are looking for lies within us, and if we gave our time and energy to an interior search, we would come across it much faster, since that is the only place where it is to be found.

It is not that we kill or annihilate something that actually exists; rather, we get rid of a deluded mind-state.

Not unconsciousness, but a ceasing of perception and feeling is experienced.

In the final analysis we are all our own teachers and our own pupils and that is as it should be.

The path the Buddha taught and is explaining to Po??hap›da in this sutta has to be followed step by step. First comes morality, then guarding the sense-doors, mindfulness and clear comprehension, contentment, letting go of the hindrances, and — only after these — the first meditative absorption.

Each insight should be nurtured and reinforced by bringing it up again and again and anchoring it in the mind. Then we will have access to it and be able to use it at all times.

To be in the present is actually to be in eternity.

The teaching of the Buddha is called the Dhamma. He did not teach Buddhism, any more than Jesus taught Christianity.

He first advocates practicing moral conduct as a foundation for spiritual development.

on the higher levels of the spiritual path, celibacy is considered a most important aspect of the training.

when the words we speak or write come from inner experience and are heartfelt, they are always imbued with "trembling for the welfare of beings.

The goal of the Buddha's teaching is Nibb?na (Sanskrit: Nirv??a). Literally translated, that means "not burning," or in other words, the loss of all passions.

It is well worth our while to check out need against greed, and see where that takes us.

"Wholeheartedly" means that we give our time, love, and energy unstintingly.

The Buddha compared anger with picking up hot coals with one's bare hands and trying to throw them at the person with whom one is angry. Who gets burned first? The one who is angry of course.

From contact comes feeling. From feeling comes reaction. This is what keeps us in the cycle of birth and death. Our reactions to our feelings are our passport to rebirth.