Quotes About Enlightenment

The Five Mindfulness Trainings are needed because we're not fully enlightened yet. We don't need to practice the five trainings perfectly. If we know we're making steps in the right direction, that's good enough.

Suffering has causes which can be illuminated in order to be removed

Vá»›i má»™t mi?ng gá»— m?m và Æ°á»›t thì ta không th? nào c? xát làm cho lá»­a phát sinh ???c. Thân th? ta cÅ©ng v?y, n?u thân th? ta còn b? v?t d?c kh?ng ch? thì tâm ta khó có th? ??t tá»›i gi?i thoát.

Th? giá»›i là th? giá»›i c?a tri giác; tri giác chính xác thì thá»±c t?i hi?n lá»™, tri giác sai l?m thì thá»±c t?i chìm l?n.

May the sound of this bell penetrate deeply into the cosmos. In even the darkest places, may living beings hear it clearly so that understanding comes to their hearts, and without much hardship, they transcend the cycle of birth and death. or:

The Buddha said many times. My teaching is like a finger pointing to the moon. Do not mistake the finger for the Moon

At the moment of his awakening at the foot of the bodhi tree, the Buddha declared, How strange—all beings possess the capacity to be awakened, to understand, to love, and to be free, yet they don't know it and they allow themselves to be carried away on the ocean of suffering.

The Buddha also taught on many occasions that most of our perceptions are erroneous, and that most of our suffering comes from wrong perceptions.

Sometimes people say they don't know what to do when they are sitting. You only need to sit is an exhortation of the Soto Zen meditation school. It means that you should sit without waiting for a miracle, and that includes the miracle of enlightenment. If you always sit in expectation, you're not in the present moment. The present moment contains the whole of life.

The seed of Buddhahood, the capacity to wake up and understand things as they are, is also present in each of us.

In the Diamond Sutra the meditator is urged to throw away, to release, four notions in order to understand our own true nature and the true nature of reality: the notion of "self," the notion of "human being," the notion of "living beings," and the notion of "life span.

If you sit regularly, it will become a habit. You will let go of trying to arrive anywhere. Even the Buddha still practiced sitting every day after his enlightenment. There is nowhere to arrive except the present moment.

the concentrations on emptiness, signlessness, and aimlessness. They are known as the Three Doors of Liberation and are available in every school of Buddhism.

Reliance on the Dharma Rather than Reliance on the Person Who Teaches It.

Many practitioners are inclined to think that sitting in meditation is a means for obtaining Awakening, which would thus be an end. However, a line of demarcation between the end and the means cannot truly be established. When we turn from forgetfulness to awareness of being, this state is already true Awakening. This is why the Ts'ao-t'ung [Soto] sect has said, To sit in meditation is to be Buddha. When one truly sits in meditation, one finds oneself Awakened; and Awakening is Buddha himself.

We can learn many practices to lessen our sadness and our suffering, but the cream of enlightened wisdom is the insight of no birth, no death.

Ignorance is in each cell of our body and our consciousness. It's like a drop of ink diffused in a glass of water. That ignorance stops us from seeing reality; it pushes us to do foolish things that make us suffer even more

The kung-an is the lamp-shade, while Zen is the lamp itself.

We are in nirv??a. The only problem is that we are not able to return to it.

if we are free of the past, free of the future, we can touch the kingdom of God, the Pure Land of the Buddha, with every step.

Mara personifies the inner hindrances to the practice, the opposite of the Buddha nature in each person.

Keep looking into the truth in order to have the understanding that nirv??a is the greatest happiness.

When you think, The sun of awareness has gone out in me, at that moment it relights itself, faster than the speed of light.

We don't say that we "hit the bell" or "strike the bell." Rather, we say we "invite the bell" to sound, because the bell is a friend, an enlightened friend that helps us wake up and guides us home to ourselves. Gentleness and nonviolence are characteristics of the sound of the bell. Its sound is gentle but very powerful. When you hear the sound of the bell, take the opportunity to come home to yourself