Quotes About Eastern philosophy

Every American who checks the spiritual-but-not-religious box or shuffles off to a meditation retreat is squarely in the Transcendentalist lineage. A surprising number of the people I interviewed, when recalling the origins of their interest in Eastern philosophy, named Emerson or Thoreau as a catalyst.

I've been practicing modalities of Eastern philosophy since about 1972. What I've learned through my meditation is a sense of equanimity, a sense of all things being equal.

Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double-entry accounting.

One strength of the communist system of the East is that it has some of the character of a religion and inspires the emotions of a religion.

One of the things I love about wen wu is its encouragement of developing the spiritual and intellectual aspects of the self that are actually more important than the development of the body and the capacity to commit violence - which is how much of Western pop culture defines a man.

The Chinese, who seem to have had more experience with this system than anybody else (more than the Hindus, even) define non-local experience in negatives — not mind, not self, not doing, not existence, even not non-existence.

To Buddhist Tibet, this is the unity of yab and yum; to Taoist China, the unity of yin and yang. The Occident perennially seeks to repress this thought, and perennially is haunted by half-awareness of it.

Indeed, the East which accepts the unity of good and evil, yin and yang, with such equanimity, has never forgotten that if the evil is omnipresent, why, then, so must be the good.

Thus, the Fifth Patriarch of Zen, Hui Neng, said twelve centuries before Bucky Fuller, From the beginning there has never been a thing. This is easy to see, if you are thinking in Chinese, but very difficult if you are thinking in Indo-European. Einstein only got to that mode of apprehension by thinking in mathematics (and in pictures, as he once confessed).

I would say both Western psychology and Eastern paths would recognize that we get caught up in feeling like a separate self and an unworthy self.

In student government in high school, I learned how to deal with people, and in college I studied Eastern philosophy. I'm also an avid team-sports fan. I think I just blended them all together and came out with a business management philosophy that combines the Eastern ethic with the Western sport concept, basically.

In all of the Oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit doctrine of Tat tvam asi, "Thou art that," which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened.

I play basketball on Sundays and I'm a very spiritual guy; I read a lot of Eastern philosophy and I meditate.

West is too materialist; East is too spiritual; North is too cold; South is too loose!

In the West, people tend to look at life as spectators, but in the East, people are the thing.

A lot of my friends have told me to read 'Tao Te Ching' - a classic Chinese text on the fundamentals of Taoism.

I'd been reading Eastern philosophy since I was a kid. And I meditated. I did it on a daily basis. It's the one thing I do with any consistency. Meditation gives you a different kind of mindset. It's very powerful.

In the West, a teacher imparts knowledge to a student. In the East, a teacher transmits nothing more or less than his or her Being.

The teachings of Buddhism, and of Eastern spirituality generally, focus on the primacy of the mind.

Therefore the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death. The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.

Our highest aim is therefore to become aware of the unity and mutual interrelation of all things, to transcend the notion of an isolated individual self and to identify ourselves with the divine reality. For the Hindu or Buddhist, this realization, which is known as enlightenment, is much more than a mere intellectual act. It is a religious experience involving a total change in the state of consciousness. Eastern philosophy can therefore never be separated from religion.

We shall try to show in the following that the views of modern physics are in agreement with the two ideas basic to Eastern philosophy that have been described above: the idea that the universe is an organic unity whose parts are interdependent and inseparable, and the idea that the cosmos is alive. Both of these ideas also arise in quantum mechanics and in relativity theory and find their clearest modern expression in quantum field theory.

The Oriental thinks everything in the sense-perceptible world is 'maya'; everything perceived by our senses and all thinking connected with sense perceptions is 'maya,' the great illusion. The only reality is the reality of the soul. What a human being achieves in his or her soul is reality.

The Yogi and the Commissar