Quotes from Brad Warner

Religions say that spirit/mind is real while matter is negligible. Materialistic philosophies, such as classical science, say that mind is just an illusion caused by the interactions of material objects and processes. Contemporary physics is starting to dimly comprehend that this distinction is false, but it will probably take a long time before this view becomes widely accepted. This is much more than just a dry philosophical debate. People get killed over this stuff.

Even as bad as it often gets, we are further along than Dogen could probably have envisioned in his day. I don't know how long it will take to finally get there, but, like Dogen, I believe it is possible.

At every moment, no matter what we're doing, we need to understand that not being a jerk is how someone becomes enlightened. This state has always belonged to us. Cause and effect makes us act. By not being a jerk now, you create the cause of not being a jerk in the future. Our action is not predestined, nor does it spontaneously occur.

It's just that sometimes we try to make whatever we're doing into whatever we imagine its ideal state to be. Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail. But in real action we transcend any notion of an idealized state. Even if we carry that idealized idea in our heads, it doesn't matter. We just do what we do.

The life of a Zen master is eating cornflakes and doing the dishes. From the distant past up till today, that's what the masters have all taught.

You see that what you call "self" is the manifestation of everything. You reflect and refract the universe around you in a unique way, and that unique way is commonly called "self." But it does not belong to anyone — certainly not to you!

To really know for absolute certain that you could never blame anyone else for anything is difficult.

even our mistakes are part of the perfection of the universe.

You're going to lose your life anyway. It may be now. It may be decades from now. But at some point it's going to happen, and you have no idea when or how. So it's important to be true to yourself at every moment.

Zen is the complete absence of belief. Zen is the complete lack of authority.

You can do zazen by yourself. You do Zen Buddhism with other people.

But the past and future do exist. They exist right here, right now. We are the expression of our past, and our actions now create our future. Past and future are intimately present with us at this real moment.

In Buddhist theory, action exists first and because action happens, the people and things that do that action appear. It's weird, I know.

When we forget God we make as big a mistake as we do when we insist that our concept of God is the only one that matters. When we forget God we treat one another and the world we live in as objects. We fail to recognize that whenever we harm someone else or the world we live in, we only harm ourselves.

Buddhism is a philosophy about just doing things bit by bit until the work is done. Ah, but the work is never really done. That's the beauty of it. You'll be doing it all your life, and you will never stop improving at it

Dhammapada. Anyhow,

we forget our ideas of self when we stop concentrating exclusively on how we experience the universe and learn how the universe experiences us.

Don't waste any time during the day. What you do right now becomes the seeds for raising up the next crop of wise people. Putting everyone at ease by doing your job well is how you transform yourself and everybody else.

Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it is ash, you do not return to birth after death.

Buddhist morality includes everything we do. You can never know just how far-reaching the effects of your actions might be.

When you do zazen, you're not trying to achieve a totally empty mind. That would be impossible. But you are trying to avoid the deliberate habitual manipulation of thoughts and images we usually engage in.

Firewood becomes ash and doesn't go back to being firewood again. But we shouldn't think of firewood as its past and ash as its future. Both firewood and ash have their own position in time and space. The past and future are cut off. Firewood and ash each have their own past and their own future. Just as ash doesn't go back to being firewood, human beings, when they die, don't come back to life again.

Much of the contemporary American atheistic movement seems to be treating atheism like a new kind of religion. ... It's just that some atheists are so damn evangelical about their nonreligion they might as well be ringing doorbells and handing out leaflets.

Dwelling on past mistakes is a way of reinforcing your ego. The ego can be strengthened just as well by dwelling on what's bad about you as it can by dwelling on what's good. In fact, for some of us — myself included — dwelling on what's bad about ourselves reinforces the ego much more effectively than dwelling on what's good.