Quotes from Brad Warner

We live forever by practicing the Buddha Way right now. If we wind up being reborn after we pass from this life, that's fine. If not, that's okay too.

Truth doesn't screw around, and truth doesn't care about your opinions. It doesn't care if you believe in it, deny it, or ignore it. It couldn't care less what religion you are, what country you're from, what color your skin is, what or who you've got between your legs, or how much you've got invested in mutual funds. None of the trivial junk that concerns most people most of the time matters even one teensy-weensy bit to the truth.

The entire moon and sky can be reflected in a dewdrop on a blade of grass.

Buddhas do not make intentional efforts for this to happen," he says; "it happens when they are activated by the moment of the present." You get it when you allow the universe to act through you without hindering what it wants with your own petty needs and wishes.

There is no ultimate arbiter of right or wrong. In the whole vast universe, there is nobody who knows what you should do in any given situation any better than you do — not your mom and dad, not your best friend Alice, not the president or the pope, and certainly not God.

The very sense of wondering is God wondering.

it's still absurd from a Buddhist standpoint to say the mountain on which the old man / wild fox met Hyakujo is the same one that existed millions of years ago. Yet there is still some kind of continuity from the past to the present, and we all know that.

He had the saffron robes, the shaved head, and that mellow spiritual way of talking that let you know here was a guy who had truly achieved a rare state of inner with-it-ness.

Practicing zazen is like gradually (or maybe not so gradually) getting your sight back.

At best, past and future are no more than reference material for the eternal now. The only real facts are those at the present moment.

So I do fear death in the sense that I find the prospect of dying pretty scary. But I no longer fear that I will one day be annihilated and cease to exist.

The Buddha was not full of shit when he said the cause of suffering could be uprooted and that you can put an end to it once and for all. There is a way out of this mess humanity has found itself in. It's just that the answer to the cause of suffering — and the way to end it — are nothing at all like what you think they are or imagine they should be.

God is not the possession of any religion. If anything, religion can be a path away from God. God cannot be bound up inside churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. Those are just community centers where people gather to hang out with their friends. God is no more to be found in those places than he is in rock clubs or back-alley bars. God is in the wilderness, and God is in the city. Everywhere you go God is there. God walks with you. God is you, and God is the very act of walking.

You can get hooked on afterlife ideas just like a drug. The reason to avoid ideas about life after death isn't because they couldn't possibly be true. Maybe they could. How would I know? It's because ideas like that promote a kind of dreamy fantasy state that distracts us from seeing what our life is right now. "The question doesn't fit the case." Look at your life as it is right now and live it, right now.

If you don't want to be grabbed by God," Zen teacher Jiyu Kennet said, "don't stare at a wall. Definitely don't sit still.

Transcending emotions doesn't mean you have no feelings. You have them. But you recognize them for what they are and respond appropriately without letting them develop into what we call emotions, which are really just feelings that have been blown way out of proportion. A

We always tend to think we can become happier by getting what we want, even if that means we have to make someone else suffer.

Often statues depicting the Buddha's moment of enlightenment show him touching the ground. This symbolizes that his enlightened state included a firm grounding in this reality instead of serving as an escape from it.

Effort is far more important than so-called success because effort is a real thing. What we call "success" is just the manifestation of our mind's ability to categorize things. This is "success.

In conclusion, polishing a stone really does transform it into a mirror. If stones couldn't become mirrors, regular people couldn't become Buddhas. If we hate stones for being hunks of dirt, you might as well hate people for being hunks of dirt. If people have minds, stones must also have minds. Who can notice that there are mirrors in which stones are reflected? Who can notice that there are mirrors in which mirrors are reflected?

When I teach zazen I often tell people that it's kind of like a yoga class where there is only one posture and you hold it for a very long time.

Even if the whole universe is nothing but a bunch of jerks doing all kinds of jerk-type things, there is still liberation in simply not being a jerk.

Dumb-bunnies think that if they don't understand the dharma or memorize it, then there's no benefit to even hearing it. They think that the best thing is to pursue knowledge and that if they forget what they've learned they might as well not have learned it at all.

Buddhism started not when Shakyamuni had his great revelation by himself. Lots of people had done that before. It began when he made his first efforts to transform that into a communal practice. Buddhism, then, is not something you do by yourself.