Thich Nhat Hanh writes with the voice of the Buddha.
Living with the immediacy of death helps you sort out your priorities in life. It helps you to live a less trivial life.
If the mind is not contrived, it is spontaneously blissful, just as water, when not agitated, is by nature transparent and clear.
This world can seem marvellously convincing until death collapses the illusion and evicts us from our hiding place. What will happen to us then if we have no clue of any deeper reality?
Why exactly are we so frightened of death that we avoid looking at it altogether? Somewhere, deep down, we know we cannot avoid facing death forever. We know, in Milarepa’s words: “This thing called ‘corpse’ we dread so much is living with us here and now.”
When I came to the West, I realized there was much hunger for spiritual teachings, but no environment for spirituality.
Why, if we are as pragmatic as we claim, don’t we begin to ask ourselves seriously: Where does our real future lie?
This dying forces you to look into yourself. And in this, compassion is the only way. Love is the only way.
And when you talk about realization, accomplishment for that matter enlightenment is that when you realize the fundamental essence of your mind.
The definition of mantra is “that which protects the mind.” That which protects the mind from negativity, or that which protects you from your own mind, is called mantra.
There is only one way of attaining liberation and of obtaining the omniscience of enlightenment: following an authentic spiritual master.
Our buddha nature is as good as any buddha’s buddha nature.
Saints and mystics throughout history have adorned their realisations with different names and given them different faces and interpretations, but what they are all fundamentally experiencing is the essential nature of the mind.
Theories are like patches on a coat, one day they just wear off.
In the Buddhist approach, life and death are seen as one whole, where death is the beginning of another chapter of life. Death is the mirror in which the entire meaning of life is reflected.
What is born will die, What has been gathered will be dispersed, What has been accumulated will be exhausted, What has been built up will collapse, And what has been high will be brought low.
Everything can be used as an invitation to meditation.
Yet is our deepest desire is truly to live and go on living, why do we blindly insist that death is the end? Why not at least try and explore the possibility that there may be a life after?
What should we “do” with the mind in meditation? Nothing. Just leave it, simply, as it is.
Tomorrow or the next life – which comes first, we never know.