17 quotes
Painful feeling is suffering in itself; pleasant feeling brings suffering through its transiency and its unsatisfying and unsatisfactory nature.
The Vision of Dhamma (1994)
Mindfulness, though so highly praised and capable of such great achievements, is not at all a “mystical” state, beyond the ken and reach of the average person. It is, on the contrary, something quite simple and common, and very familiar to us.
The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965)
A look into long-neglected quarters of the mind will come as a wholesome shock to the observer. It will convince him of the urgent need for methodical mental culture.
The Vision of Dhamma (1994)
Attempts at eliminating the mind’s main defilements—greed, hate and delusion—must fail as long as these defilements find refuge and support in the uncontrolled dim regions of the mind.
The Vision of Dhamma (1994)
The relatively small sector of the mind that stands in the intense light of purposeful will and thought is not a reliable standard of the inner strength and lucidity of consciousness in its totality.
The Vision of Dhamma (1994)
If we observe our own minds, we shall notice how easily diverted our thoughts are, how often they behave like undisciplined disputants constantly interrupting each other and refusing to listen to the other side’s arguments.
The Vision of Dhamma (1994)
In the Buddhist scriptures one of the qualities attributed to Right Mindfulness is called “‘non-superficiality,” and this is, of course, just a negative way of expressing our positive term “thoroughness.”
The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965)
Men, knowing not how to handle the tool of the mind, have become used to leaning on others and on habit; and, owing to that, this splendid tool, the human mind, has in fact become unreliable through neglect.
The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965)
Intellect separated from faith will lack the firm belief in its own power to be the guide on the path of life. Without this inner conviction it will hesitate to follow in earnest its own conclusions and commands.
This method of Bare Attention, so helpful to mind-knowledge and, through it, to world-knowledge, tallies with the procedure and attitude of the true scientist and scholar: clear definition of subject-matter and terms; unprejudiced receptivity for the instruction that comes out of the things themselves; exclusion, or at least reduction, of the subjective factor in judgment; deferring of judgment until a careful examination of facts has been made.
The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965)
When once clear awareness and comprehension have been firmly established in a limited but vital sector of the mind’s expanse, the light will gradually and naturally spread, and will reach even distant and obscure corners of the mind’s realm which hitherto had been inaccessible. This will mainly be due to the fact that the instrument of that search for knowledge will have undergone a radical change: the searching mind itself will have gained in lucidity and penetrative strength.
The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965)
Buddha advised his son Rahula: "Make disgust strong in you." ... When the disciple sees the constituents of body and mind as impermanent, suffering and not self, he becomes disgusted with them; through his disgust he becomes dispassionate, and through dispassion he is liberated.
The Vision of Dhamma (1994)
It is a significant fact and worth pondering upon that the Bible commences with the words: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth....", while the Dhammapada … opens with the words "Mind precedes things, dominates them, creates them". These momentous words are the quiet and uncontending, but unshakeable reply of the Buddha to that biblical belief. Here the roads of these two religions part: the one leads far away into an imaginary Beyond, the other leads straight home, into man's very heart.
The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965)
… age-old philosophical attitudes which arise from false factual premises, with vast theoretical superstructures framed to fit those premises
The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965)
Mind is the very element in and through which we live, yet it is what is most elusive and mysterious. Bare Attention, however, by first attending patiently to the basic facts of the mental processes, is capable of shedding light on mind’s mysterious darkness, and of obtaining a firm hold on its elusive flow.
The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965)
For Buddhism, however, the basic moral law is inherent in life itself. It is a special case of the law of cause and effect, needing neither a divine law-giver nor depending upon the fluctuating human conceptions of socially-conditioned minor moralities and conventions.
The Vision of Dhamma (1994)
The method of naming and registering also extends, of course, to noble thoughts and impulses, which will be encouraged and strengthened. Without being given deliberate attention, such wholesome tendencies often pass unnoticed and remain barren. But when clear awareness is applied to them, it will stimulate their growth.
The Vision of Dhamma (1994)