Buddhadasa quote

According to Lord Buddha, the causes of everything in the world are rooted in the vedana. All activities occur because the vedana force us to desire and then to act out those desires. Even the rounds of rebirth within the cycle of samsara the cycles of birth and death, of heaven and hell-are themselves conditioned by the vedana. Everything originates in the feelings. To master the vedana is to master the origin, the source, the birthplace of all things. Thus, it is absolutely necessary to understand these feelings correctly and com-prehensively. Then we shall be able to master our feelings, and their secrets will never again deceive us into behaving foolishly.

Once we master the highest and most sublime vedana, we can also master the lower, cruder, more petty vedana. When we learn to control the most difficult feelings, we can control the easy, simple, childish feelings as well. For this reason we should strive to achieve the highest level of vedana; namely, the feelings that are born from samadhi. If we can conquer the most pleasant vedana, we can be victorious over all vedana. Should you bother to give it a try? Should you endure any difficulties that might arise? Should you spend your precious time on this practice? Let us consider wisely.

It may seem curious that in striving to realize the highest vedanà our aim is to control and eliminate these feelings rather than to enjoy and indulge in them. Some people might think it strange to search for the highest vedanà only to master and control them. It is important to understand this point correctly. By eliminating these pleasant feelings we obtain something even better in return. We receive another kind of vedana, a higher order of vedana one that perhaps should not even be called vedana something more like nibbana or emancipation. So it is not so unusual or strange that we wish to achieve the best vedana in order to eliminate the pleasant feelings.

From p. 34 of Mindfulness with Breathing (1988/96) by Buddhadasa Bhikkhu

Quote David L. McMahan

David L. McMahan in his piece about secular subjectivity in Secularizing Buddhism, writes, “ They might be used to shore up the "buffered self" and reassert the lost sense of autonomous selfhood. Popular culture in the United States and Europe (and increasingly around the world) tells us that we, indeed, have a self that we need to discover, and to discover it we need to look within. When we discover who we are, we must be true to that self, casting off socially conditioned influences to emerge as a truly free, autonomous self-contained being. Some Buddhist-derived approaches to mindfulness implicitly take this approach, using contemplative methods originally designed to undermine the perception of a fixed, permanent self instead to reinforce the individualism so deeply rooted in Western culture. They attempt to strike back against fragmentation by using meditation to reaffirm the integrated, singular individual-the man in the mirror. In this sense, meditation, mindfulness, self-monitoring, and self-observation have the potential to exacerbate the sense of individual isolation, separation from the world, and even narcissism. These interpretations of mindfulness tend to be either purely introspective or instrumental, offering either private psychological comfort or increasing one's effectiveness at doing whatever one happened to be doing anyway. If mindfulness is a tool to enhance the efficiency of the autonomous self, then it can, in the current context, simply reinforce a sense of isolated individuality, to which instrumentalized, decontextualized, commercialized, and corporatized applications of mindfulness become an appendage.”

Evan Thompson quote

 “it’s not the case that the experience of bare attention independently establishes the descriptive truth of the Buddhist mind-doctrine; rather, the Buddhist mind-doctrine is needed to give meaning to the experience of bare attention.” (Why I Am Not a Buddhist by Thompson)

Epistemic priority

"While, generally speaking, all human beings have similar minds and mental states, at the more subtle level we are all quite unique mental configurations. We are the only ones who can truly know our own mind, so we are the only ones who can truly know how to work with it."

Working With The Five Hindrances by Ajahn Thiradhammo

I saw this and liked it:

 

Thich Nhat Hanh quote

"Understanding someone's suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love's other name. If you don't understand, you can't love" -- Thich Nhat Hanh

Joy Harjo

"Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time."

From Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings

Maha-parinibbana Sutta quote

"...the monk, nun, male lay follower, or female lay follower who keeps practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma, who keeps practicing masterfully, who lives in accordance with the Dhamma: that is the person who worships, honors, respects, venerates, & pays homage to the Tathagata with the highest homage. "

The Lotus Sutra Translated by Burton Watson chapter 16 quote

"Because living beings have different natures, different desires, different actions, and different ways of thinking and making distinctions, and because I want to enable them to put down good roots, I employ a variety of causes and conditions, similes, parables, and phrases and preach different doctrines. This, the Buddha's work, I have never for a moment neglected." The Lotus Sutra
Translated by Burton Watson, chapter 16

Ancient Greek Quote

"Let there be less suffering...
give us the sense to live on what we need."

Chorus,  381,2, in Aeschylus's Agamemnon.

Ayya Khema quote

"If we want to be loved, we are looking for a support system. If we want to love, we are looking for spiritual growth. "

- Ayya Khema, "What Love Is"

Quote from Living Wisely

"We fear fearlessness in the same way that we fear nonviolence. To act non-violently certainly appears to make one more vulnerable. You are dropping your defensiveness, leaving yourself more open, more exposed. However, this very vulnerability can be disarming, and even when it doesn't succeed in disarming aggression, the lack of desire for retaliation and security renders you much less vulnerable at a mental and emotional level. You do not feed the escalating verbal aggression out of which most physical violence issues. At its most developed, non-violence is equivalent to non-ego, there is no fixed identification with the threatened self, and therefore no fear for it, and no violence in defense of it." (p. 37-38)

Quote

There's a lot of good quotes from Sex and the Spiritual Teacher by Scott Edelstein, but here is one where a teacher has committed a breach:

"If the spiritual community chooses to hire a lawyer, the lawyer may initially advise leaders to close ranks, withhold information, or further victimize the teacher's accuser(s) by challenging their claims and/or their motives. The lawyer may even urge community leaders to try to eject the accuser(s) from the community. Any of these actions will of course make matters worse. Yet the lawyer is simply doing their job, as they see it: protecting their client from liability. To prevent such a pernicious turn of events, community leaders need to tell their lawyer from the beginning, "Our goal is not to minimize the organization's liability. It's to heal the community's wounds, keep or make it healthy, resolve whatever legal issues arise, and keep people safe. We will not harm or disrespect any human being in order to protect this organization. The interest of community members comes before the interest of this nonprofit entity." Because attorneys are rarely asked to think this way, leaders may need to remind their lawyers this again and again. At times they may need to remind themselves as well."

This is an interesting book that I recommend to anyone in administration of a spiritual community.

Here is a video of an interview of the author.

Norman Fisher Quote

"Some are calm and quiet, others are talky and jumpy. Some are decisive and stubborn, others more thoughtful and softer. Still, it seems that maturity brings stability into a person's life, no matter what that life looks like. When you have lived long enough to find a way of being that suits you, you do become calmer and stable. When you've learned how to be confident enough to give yourself willingly and completely to what's in front of you, life holds you in place, for you are not off-balance, grabbing for something other than what arises in front of you. You are willing to stand where you are, looking straight ahead without glancing off in a million directions. Some might call this strength of character, but to me it seems more like inspiration. We are inspired by what happens and what happens deepens us. Life becomes more interesting. Rather than feeling that we have to seek new or exotic experience, we become fascinated with whatever our situation happens to be. We love whatever we are, we love whatever our life provides. Living, just as it is, is enough for us. There's tremendous steadiness and reliability in this acceptance, whatever our personal style of expressing it may be." (p.35-6 Taking Our Places)

To me he's expressing the precept, "with simplicity, stillness and clarity" and something that happens when you meditate. But he's connecting that to maturity. I like his appreciation that things can be expressed in different personalities. That's a real gift.

Cheryl Strayed quote

"...a prayer marched through my head, though prayer is not the right word to describe that march. I wasn't humble before God. I didn't even believe in God. My prayer was not: Please, God, take mercy on us." p. 10 Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (Vintage)

When I read the above quote, I began to like Strayed and her book. You'd think that when you pray to an all powerful, all knowing god, that you'd ask them to change things since they were all powerful. God the powerful. It's Dharma to try and accept things as they really are, and prayer is a kind of way of asking yourself, too, for the grace to accept the reality that you resist.

Pico Iyer's The Joy of Quiet

T“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” 

That is from a lovely essay called The Joy of Quiet, from the Times, by Pico Iyer (which I found through Wildmind).

Also, "Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.”"

Also, "Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister."

Also, "We barely have enough time to see how little time we have..."

Also, "We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say."

Also, "MAYBE that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an “Internet sabbath” every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation."

Also, "Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”"

Long Quote on Confession and Ethics

"For many people, a belief in divine punishment or reward is integral to their sense of the meaning of religion. For instance, on a recent journey to India, I met a Sri Lankan Muslim while I was waiting for a connection at Kuwait airport. He was a nice chap and we got talking. When he heard I was a Buddhist, he started asking me about the violent things that he had seen some Buddhist monks doing in Sri Lanka. I had to agree with him and say, ‘Yes, it’s terrible’, because I knew about them too. He went on to ask, ‘Well, what is there that guarantees morality in Buddhism?’  So I tried to explain about Buddhist ethics, but he could only comment, ‘Well, that’s not enough is it? Who is going to refrain from doing bad things, or care about doing good, if there is no punishment for evil?’  To him it seemed obvious that, if people did not believe there was an all-powerful God waiting to fry them if they stepped out of line, they would throw all moral restraint to the winds.


This attitude is found in all theistic religions. In a sense, it is found in Buddhist societies too, although it does not really fit in with the Buddhist view of things. Bhante has often commented that the gory detail in which some Buddhists speak about the torments of hell is really a means of social control, comparable to similar talk in the theistic religious traditions. It seems that most societies have considered it necessary to frighten the mass of people into morality (or at least into docility). I doubt whether such terror tactics are beneficial or even effective, but this is not the place to explore that question. The point is that this fear of a punishing power has got nothing to do with Buddhist morality as such. We should recognise that some of the difficulties that we typically face in our spiritual lives come from our inability to distinguish remorse from its near enemy, namely the fear of losing love and acceptance, or of being punished (or some poisonous brew concocted from the two)."



(from "Remorse and Confession in the Spiritual Community" By Subhuti)



In a way, there's nothing to add to that, but it's a point I struggle with others.  They want ethics to have more bite.  They want to judge people.  The idea that ethics is something you develop for yourself, that you apply to yourself, is a foreign thing.  People want to hack into others.  In a way, there is something profound about just working on yourself, and letting everyone else sort themselves out.  It's the thing you have most control over.

MLK Quote

“Everybody can be great… because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”

Martin Luther King

Which I got here.

Quote

"we live at the quivering center of a web of conditions so complex that while we can believe that it is all dependently arisen, exactly how or why any particular thought or feeling arises is mostly beyond our capacity to understand." p19 This Being, That Becomes by Dhivan Thomas Jones

quote

Those who say that the Buddha himself partook of flesh calumniate him.

(Sangharakshita in The Eternal Legacy, p193)

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Thich Nhat Hanh quote

From page 28 of Buddha Mind, Buddha Body:

"When you listen to a talk or read a book about the Dharma, it's not for the purpose of getting notions and ideas. In fact it's for releasing notions and ideas. You don't replace your old notions and ideas with new ones. The talk or the writing should be like the rain that can touch the seed of wisdom and freedom within you. That's why we have to learn how to listen. We listen or read not to receive more notions and concepts, but in order to get free from all notions and concepts. It's not important that you remember what was said, but that you are free."