Quotes from Red Pine

As a lamp, a cataract, a star in space an illusion, a dewdrop, a bubble a dream, a cloud, a flash of lightning view all created things like this.

When we're deluded, there's a world to escape. When we're aware, there's nothing to escape.

There is no seer or anything seen / no speaker or anything spoken / the appearance of buddhas and also their teachings / are merely what we imagine 44. Those who view such things as real / they don't see the Buddha / nor do those who imagine nothing / only those who transform their existence.

Know your mind and see your nature.

I have always taught that things arise due to the conjunction of causes and conditions not that they arise without a cause.

When you realize that whether something exists or not is nothing but the perception of your own mind, its external existence is seen as nonexistent and non-arising. Mahamati, there is no contradiction in my earlier and later statements.

Mahamati, to see things as they really are means to transcend 414 what are nothing but perceptions of your own mind.

Reading a few books can be helpful in pointing the direction - but again, these are all just fingers, fingers pointing to the moon.

There is so much baggage we burden ourselves with over the years that keeps us from seeing things the way they are. Some baggage we carry with us for a single thought, some for years, and some for lifetimes. But there isn't one piece that isn't our own creation.

The Buddha then repeated the meaning of this in verse: 1. "Distinguish units of letters / units of words and phrases / people who foolishly cling to these / are like elephants in a quagmire.

And the element distinguished as divisible form produces internal and external realms of earth—and with form comes space. According to those who cling to mistaken truths, it is the four elements and their elemental forms that give rise to the assemblage of the five skandhas.

What is real i the absence of the fiction of self-existence.

We might use or read or hear the same word twice, but we can't step into precisely the same thought a second time...Language is at the surface of the much deeper flow of our riverine minds.

To awaken to this teaching is to have 'no-idea,' 'no-memory,' and 'no-attachment.' Not giving rise to delusions, this is the nature of suchness.33 View all dharmas with wisdom. Neither grasp them nor reject them. This is the way to see your nature and become a buddha.

the use of prajna in the title tells us this is a text that goes beyond the analysis of reality into discrete, knowable entities, such as those used by the Sarvastivadins. Thus, Zen masters ask their students to show them their original face, their face before they were born.

Poem by Stonehouse I was a Zen monk who didn't know Zen so I chose the woods for the years I had left a robe made of patches over my body a belt of bamboo around my waist mountains and streams explain Bodhidharma's meaning flower smiles and birdsongs reveal the hidden key sometimes I sit on a flat-topped rock after midnight cloudless nights when the moon fills the sky Translated by Red Pine

Poem by Cold Mountain Looking for a refuge Cold Mountain will keep you safe a faint wind stirs dark pines come closer the sound gets better below them sits a gray-haired man chanting Taoist texts ten years unable to return he forgot the way he came Translated by Red Pine

The Buddha asks us to see things as they really are. He does not ask us to cling to optimistic views of eternity or pessimistic views of annihilation but simply to examine our experience.