Quotes About Buddhism

What I like most about Buddhism really is its fearlessness. So much of what warps people is fear of death and fear of impermanence. So much of what we do is simply strategies to try and hold back death, trying to buy time with material things. So at its best Buddhism provides people with a way of seeing their own frailty: you need less in the way of material objects and fortresses around yourself.

I've always liked Southeast Asia a lot. It's a wonderful place, an easy place. People are great, there's a lot of history and culture, and I like the serenity of Buddhism there. It's very beautiful. I find that to be a very nice place to visit.

In the Buddhist learning process, we say three stages. The first is hearing, the second is contemplation, and the third is meditation.

I believe that dialogue is the key to breaking through our tendency to separate and isolate. Dialogue changes isolation and loneliness into connection and interdependence. This, I believe, is the essence of Buddhism.

One of the happier ironies of recent history is that even as Tibet is being wiped off the map in Tibet itself, here it is in California, in Switzerland, in Japan. All over the world, Tibetan Buddhism is now part of the neighborhood. In 1968, there were two Tibetan Buddhist centers in the West. By 2000, there were 40 in New York alone.

My father gave me a copy of 'Seven Years in Tibet,' and that's what turned me on to Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism.

Dhyan traveled from India to China along with the Buddhist monks, where it was referred to as Ch'an. This yoga traveled through the Southeast Asian countries to Japan and became Zen, and found expression as a whole system of direct insight without an emphasis on doctrine. Zen is a spiritual path that has no scriptures, books, rules, or rigid practices; it is an uncharted path.

Even buddhas are subject to the conditions in which they appear, and enlightenment is not a fixed state that we can hold on to. It must be renewed, rediscovered, as we ourselves are renewed and rediscovered.

The Buddhists tell us that in order to find yourself, you first have to lose your mind.

The Buddhists tell us that in order to find yourself, you first have to lose your mind.' It is one of the most consoling things anybody has ever said to me.

All intending students of Buddhism would do well to remember, however, that the heart of the Dharma, the spiritual essence that underlies and interpenetrates all doctrinal formulations, metaphysical disciplines, and aesthetic expressions, will be revealed, not in proportion to the bulk of our scholastic equipment, but only to the extent to which we have cultivated right motive.

I spend more time learning about Buddhism than English, which is why my English today is still bad.

Modern Hinduism, modern Jainism, and Buddhism branched off at the same time. For some period, each seemed to have wanted to outdo the others in grotesqueness and humbuggism.

The cover story of the magazine [TIME magazine] depicting a few individuals who are acting contrary to most Myanmar, is creating misconceptions of Buddhism.

The Buddha] is not dividing himself into worthy and unworthy pieces; he is one being, indivisible, immune from the tendency to double back and beat up on himself. He has seen the worst in himself and not been taken down.

According to Buddhism, it is our fear at experiencing ourselves directly that creates suffering.

What I had learned from Buddhism was that I did not have to know myself analytically as much as I had to tolerate not knowing.

Buddhism teaches us that we are not so much isolated individuals as we are overlapping environments, and that we have the capacity to know ourselves in this way.

One of the things I have always appreciated about the Buddhism I have known is the way it has urged me to circumvent my own expectations about what an "enlightened" response might be in any given situation.

The Buddhist word sunyata, or emptiness, has as its original, etymological meaning "a pregnant void, the hollow of a pregnant womb." When a therapist is able to create such a fertile condition, through the use of her own silence, the patient cannot help but come in contact with that which is still unfinished and with which he is still identified, albeit unawares.

As the famous Zen master Dogen has said: To study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be one with others.

The Second Noble Truth of the Buddha takes its cue from this experience. It is traditionally described as the truth of "the arising of dukkha," and its central tenet is that the cause of suffering is craving or thirst. The

It is a fundamental tenet of Buddhist thought that before emptiness of self can be realized, the self must be experienced fully, as it appears. It is the task of therapy, as well as of meditation, to return those split-off elements to a person's awareness—to make the person see that they are not, in fact, split-off elements at all, but essential aspects of his or her own being.

Form is emptiness, the Buddhists teach, but form is also form. I would never be able to approach the emptiness of form if I continued to deny myself the experience of it.