Quotes About Buddha

The Buddha taught that flexibility and openness bring strength and that running from groundlessness weakens us and brings pain.

Just as the Buddha taught, it's important to see suffering as suffering. We are not talking about ignoring or keeping quiet. When we don't buy into our opinions and solidify the sense of enemy, we will accomplish something. If we don't get swept away by our outrage, then we will see the cause of suffering more clearly. That is how the cessation of suffering evolves.

I feel gratitude to the Buddha for pointing out that what we struggle against all our lives can be acknowledged as ordinary experience. Life does continually go up and down. People and situations are unpredictable and so is everything else. Everybody knows the pain of getting what we don't want: saints, sinners, winners, losers. I feel gratitude that someone saw the truth and pointed out that we don't suffer this kind of pain because of our personal inability to get things right.

THE BUDDHA TAUGHT that there are three principal characteristics of human existence: impermanence, egolessness, and suffering or dissatisfaction. According to the Buddha, the lives of all beings are marked by these three qualities. Recognizing these qualities to be real and true in our own experience helps us to relax with things as they are. When

The Buddha spoke a lot about the importance of working with one's ego. But what did he mean by "ego"? There are various ways to talk about this word, but one definition I particularly like is "that which resists what is." Ego struggles against reality, against the open-endedness and natural movement of life. It is very uncomfortable with vulnerability and ambiguity, with not being quite sure how to pin things down.

The Buddha taught that all beings have the potential to wake up completely, and that all of us will eventually get there. He and many other wise people in this world have given us tools for taking whatever occurs in our lives and using it to cultivate our basic goodness and become more and more able to be there for others. Whatever the future brings—welcome or unwelcome—we can use on our path of awakening. To me, this attitude is the best kind of optimism.

Taking refuge in the buddha means that you are willing to spend your life acknowledging or reconnecting with your awakeness, learning that every time you meet the dragon you take off more armor, particularly the armor that covers your heart.

feel gratitude to the Buddha for pointing out that what we struggle against all our lives can be acknowledged as ordinary experience. Life does continually go up and down.

Buddha nature, cleverly disguised as fear, kicks our ass into being receptive.

The 1,000 Buddha, to me, is almost like a contemporary art piece.

Although the book is exceedingly strange, expending undoubtedly several hundred thousand words [an astonishingly accurate word count], but its general importance may be stated in one sentence: it is only about the retrieving or releasing one's mind (). For whether we folks act like demons and become Buddha are all dependent on this mind.

The current philosophy was that Buddha was a communist.

Religion and ritual can be vehicles for entering stillness. It says in Psalm 46:10, 'Be still, and know that I am God.' But they are still just vehicles. The Buddha called his teaching a raft: You don't need to carry it around with you after you've crossed the river.

Ideally, the umpire should combine the integrity of a Supreme Court judge, the physical agility of an acrobat, the endurance of Job and the imperturbability of Buddha.

Such was the malleability of the Buddha's message, which eschewed dogma and blind faith. "Treat my teachings like gold. Test them and shape them into an ornament to suit each particular wearer", he said.

In Buddha's opinion, to train in staying open and curious—to train in dissolving the barriers that we erect between ourselves and the world—is the best use of our human lives.

ACCORDING TO THE BUDDHA, the lives of all beings are marked by three characteristics: impermanence, egolessness, and suffering or dissatisfaction. Recognizing these qualities to be real and true in our own experience helps us to relax with things as they are.

Taking refuge in the three jewels is no refuge at all from the conventional point of view. It's like finding a desert island in the middle of the ocean after a shipwreck—"Whew! Land!"—and then standing there and watching it being eaten away, day by day, by the ocean. That's what taking refuge in the buddha, the dharma, and the sangha is like.

Buddha: Hatred never ceases by hatred But by love alone is healed.

We have two alternatives: either we question our beliefs - or we don't. Either we accept our fixed versions of reality- or we begin to challenge them. In Buddha's opinion, to train in staying open and curious - to train in dissolving our assumptions and beliefs - is the best use of our human lives.

USTON SMITH NOTES, IN THE WORLD'S RELIGIONS, THAT ONLY TWO PEOPLE ever astounded their contemporaries so much that the question they evoked was not Who is he? but What is he? They were Jesus and Buddha. The answers

The Zen expression "Kill the Buddha!" means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from oneself. To kill the Buddha is to be the Buddha.

In a nutshell, the Buddha taught that life is suffering and that the primary cause of our suffering is our desire for things to be different from the way they actually are. One moment, things may be going our way, and in the next moment they're not. When we try to prolong pleasure or reject pain, we suffer.

I did not tell Fat this, but technically he had become a Buddha. It did not seem to me like a good idea to let him know. After all, if you are a Buddha you should be able to figure it out for yourself.