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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.

— Nyanaponika Thera The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965)

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More quotes by Nyanaponika Thera

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)

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