Quotes from Brad Warner

you look out at the clear blue sky and for an instant you see that you are everything. You want to say something, but none of the words you have will stick at all; nothing will come except for a wide, wide smile that crosses all of space at time---and the moment is utterly forgotten

Trying to understand the meaning of life in terms of the human brain's activities is like trying to understand the ocean by going to the shore and scooping out a bucket of water and analyzing it.

The practice of zazen can help you gradually clear away the layers of mental noise that prevent you from seeing how the things you're going through now relate to the stuff you did in the past.

As the French philosopher Blaise Pascal famously said, "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." It's a shame that simply being quiet is so difficult for us.

There is no separation between creator, creation, and created thing. You simply admit that you are an extension of the creation, a part of it, accepted by it. Eventually the effort becomes how to live within the intention of the creator. To find this out and follow this Way, is to live.

Chasing after fantasies is always a bad idea. Stick with reality. Reality's all you've got. But here's the real secret, the real miracle: it's enough.

In D?gen's view everything is sacred, and to single out one specific thing, like a book or a city or a person, as being more sacred than anything else is a huge mistake.

You'll always find something wrong with wherever you are because it will never quite match your idea of what it "should" be.

Buddhism is basically an oral tradition, not a religion based on a book. The meaning behind the words is far more important than the specific words used to convey that meaning. The way human beings tend to misremember what they've heard is actually part of the Zen tradition.

Compassion is the ability to see what needs doing right now and the willingness to do it right now. Sometimes compassion may even mean doing nothing at all. Lots of loving people in this world go out of their way to "try to help"--but often they do more harm than good. Stupid helpfulness is not compassion either.

I never entered a monastery as a full-time live-in monk, which many people consider the only way to practice what D?gen preached. But this would ignore the fact that D?gen taught a number of lay students throughout his life and, indeed, recommended zazen as a daily practice not only for those who live in monasteries but also to anyone interested in self-discovery.

A person is a Buddha when she acts like a Buddha, when she manifests wisdom. When she fails to do so, she's not a Buddha. Thus a person can be a Buddha one minute and a jackass three minutes later. You don't just become a Buddha at the moment of your first enlightenment experience and then stay a Buddha forever.

If the mind of a practitioner often tires and quits, that is like twirling a stick to start a fire and resting before it gets hot.

Buddhism doesn't ask us to deny our natural desires. But it does ask us to regulate how we respond to them.

This is always and inevitably the case. No one gets away with murder. No one gets away with anything. You can't escape the consequences of your immoral acts any more than someone who drops a big-ass amp directly on his foot can escape having broken toe-bones. Your life and the life of everyone else in the universe are one seamless whole. To cause another living being pain isn't evil-it's just stupid. Because that being is you.

Part of the Zen way is learning to enjoy the fact that you cannot possibly have all the things you desire. In the truest sense none of your desires, no matter what they are, can ever be fulfilled because nothing will ever be the way you imagine it to be.

The trick here is to give up imagining how things are gonna be. Or, at the very least, to give up believing that the way you imagine things are going to be has anything to do with the way they really will be.

Our knowledge is always incomplete, and our brains always misinterpret so much, that the only thing we can truly trust is intuition.

If we think that time passes by us while we somehow remain the same, that's not real learning. Master

We eat living food. Through our food we learn constantly how to live on this earth. We are constantly supported by all phenomenal currents of life; we are lived by all beings. That is the truth. We are lived by whom and whatever we take, by their teachings that guide us. One way to live is to show all of their natures through our existence. It is different from our usual way of continuously exploring our capacities for what we really want to do.

We are exactly the truth of what we are — what the universe is — right here and now. Yet we need to do some work to truly become what we already are.

The Dalai Lama famously said, "If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change.

Echu says the insentient explain the dharma all the time. "All the time" means they actually explain it at every real moment. There's no break in their explanation. Real explanations always happen without any break.

power exchange is the number one thing people play with in sex. It's out there all the time. BDSM apes it and burlesques it. Because we understand that power imbalance is an essential aspect of nature. Bunnies are made to be eaten. BW: