To define Buddhism without a lot of words and phrases, we can simply say, ‘Don’t cling or hold on to anything. Harmonize with actuality, with things as they are.’
Why are we born? We are born so that we will not have to be born again.
Know and watch your heart. It’s pure but emotions come to colour it.
Proper effort is not the effort to make something particular happen. It is the effort to be aware and awake each moment, the effort to overcome laziness and merit, the effort to make each activity of our day meditation.
We protect virtue so that virtue will protect us.
To give up doing evil is more important than making merit.
Meditation is like a single log of wood. Insight and investigation are one end of the log; calm and concentration are the other end. If you lift up the whole log, both sides come up at once. Which is concentration and which is insight? Just this mind.
To practice Dhamma means to observe and examine oneself.
These days people don’t search for the Truth. People study simply in order to find knowledge necessary to make a living, raise families and look after themselves, that’s all. To them, being smart is more important than being wise!
If it shouldn’t happen, it wouldn’t happen.
You should know both the universal and the personal, the realm of forms and the freedom to not cling to them. The forms of the world have their place, but in another way, there is nothing there. To be free, we need to respect both of these truths.
We don’t meditate to see heaven, but to end suffering.
If you haven’t cried deeply a number of times, your meditation hasn’t really begun.
The heart is the only book worth reading.
If you let go completely you will have complete peace.
When we conquer ourselves, then everything will be conquered: oneself, others, and all the sense objects as well, coming in by way of the eyes, ears, nose, tongue and body – it will all get conquered like this.
A madman and an arahant both smile, but the arahant knows why while the madman doesn’t.
Do not be a bodhisattva, do not be an arahant, do not be anything at all. If you are a bodhisattva, you will suffer, if you are an arahant, you will suffer, if you are anything at all, you will suffer.
The Dharma Path is to keep walking forward. But the true Dharma has no going forward, no going backward, and no standing still.
The mind is intrinsically tranquil. Out of this tranquility, anxiety and confusion are born. If one sees and knows this confusion, then the mind is tranquil once more.
If you are still following your likes and dislikes, you have not even begun to practise Dhamma.