Quotes About Buddhism

Do as well as you possibly can. That's Buddhist morality.

To him, Buddhism was not a spiritual practice or a religion. It was simply a practical approach to real life that neither denied the spiritual side of things nor held that spirituality was better or nobler than the material side of life. Whereas

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.

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.

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?

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.

Rather than revering supposedly special people for being Buddhas, we should revere the Buddha present in all people, whenever and wherever it manifests. D?gen talks about learning from anyone, no matter what their station in life, if that person says or does something wise.

When you study Buddhism, you should have a general house cleaning of your mind. You must take everything out of your room and clean it thoroughly. If it is necessary, you may bring everything back in again. You may want many things, so one by one you can bring them back. But if they are not necessary, there is no need to keep them.

Water, foam, and flame are mind. Flowers in the spring and the moon in the autumn are also mind. Each moment is mind. And yet mind can never be destroyed. That's why everything that's real is mind, and the Buddhas along with other Buddhas are mind.

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

Dhammapada. Anyhow,

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.

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

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

So Buddhism is not the worship of a guy named Buddha; it's learning to manifest your unique inner Buddha.

D?gen's big question when he was a young monk was this: If Buddhism teaches that we're all perfect just as we are — and it does teach that — then why do we have to undergo training? A whole lot of Sh?b?genz? is D?gen's attempt to answer that question.

According to Buddhist philosophy, nothing ever really belongs to you. Even so, you can still give stuff away.

These days we tend to put far more faith in concrete recordings, whether written or electronically preserved in audio and video, than we do in what someone remembers somebody having told them. The early Buddhists saw it differently. They thought the oral tradition was more likely to preserve the true essence and intention of what their master had said than if his exact words had been preserved on paper.

Keeping the precepts and observing pure moral conduct is the habit of Buddhists. But even those who haven't formally received the precepts or have broken them can benefit from doing zazen.

The Wheel of Life is painted on the outside walls of many Tibetan and Bhutanese monasteries in order to educate people in the basics of Buddhism. Yet it is not often found in Japan. In fact, Japanese Buddhists don't think or talk much at all about rebirth in the Six Realms. When they do talk about the afterlife, they tend to speak of becoming a Buddha, attaining Nirvana, or going to the Pure Land—expressions that they often use rather vaguely to mean roughly the same thing.

Tibetan Buddhists talk a lot about rebirth, both the rebirth of normal unenlightened people and that of enlightened beings such as the Dalai Lama, who is thought to be a reincarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion. By contrast, Zen Buddhists rarely talk in detail or in literal terms about rebirth or reincarnation.

Whereas some schools of Buddhism distinguish more sharply between the preparatory practice of concentration and the liberating practice of insight, Zen views concentration and insight as two sides of the same coin: when the mind is cleared, settled, and focused, it naturally attains insight and manifests its innate wisdom.

In general, the problem with secularized mindfulness techniques is that when they find it convenient, they abandon—or at least put out of sight on the sidelines— the crucial ethical and religious contexts in which these Buddhist meditative practices have traditionally been embedded.

Faith does play an important role in Buddhism, including in Zen: faith as preliminary trust and ultimately faith as true self-confidence.