Daily Buddhist Verses

last SG · 2005-05-29T17:49:29+00:00

Our normal way of relating people is to see ourself as separate from the others.To objectify beings as separate you and make them an object of attachment is...

An Eternal Now SG

LPP: The idea of Buddhism is to clear up the citta so it drops back to purity. That's its natural state.
Q: So the citta is in its natural state when it's pure and the kilesas are eliminated?
LPP: Yes. That's really the case. Yes.
Q: So, I know that this might not be a question that has an answer, but when the citta is pure and the body dies, and I imagine then that the citta goes into Nibbana? Is that how that...?
LPP: That is Nibbana.
Q: That is Nibbana?
LPP: Yes. Really there's nothing it goes into.
Q: Ah ha
LPP: It isn't going into. That's the Safe. Just there.
Q: Yeah.
LPP: And that's what we should be, really. All of us. The thing that takes such a long time is the developing of the citta to accept that this world is not what we think it is. It always reverts to the world. It always jumps back.

An Eternal Now SG

[...]

Emptiness of mind is not nothingness, nor a state of torpor, for it possesses by its very nature a luminous faculty of knowledge, which is called Awareness. These two aspects, emptiness and Awareness, cannot be separated. They are essentially one, like the surface of the mirror and the image, which is reflected in it.

Thoughts manifest themselves within emptiness and are reabsorbed into it like a face appears and disappears in a mirror; the face has never been in the mirror, and when it ceases to be reflected in it, it has not really ceased to exist. The mirror itself has never changed. So, before departing on the spiritual path, we remain in the so-called "impure" state of samsára, which is, in appearance, governed by ignorance. When we commit ourselves to that path, we cross a state where ignorance and wisdom are mixed. At the end, at the moment of Enlightenment, only pure wisdom exists. But all the way along this spiritual journey, although there is an appearance of transformation, the nature of the mind has never changed: it was not corrupted on entry onto the path, and it was not improved at the time of realization.

The infinite and inexpressible qualities of primordial wisdom "the true nirvana" are inherent in our mind. It is not necessary to create them, to fabricate something new. Spiritual realization only serves to reveal them through purification, which is the path. Finally, if one considers them from an ultimate point of view, these qualities are themselves only emptiness.

[...]

From:
Buddha Nature
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

For the full essay:
click here

An Eternal Now SG

The natural, real Buddha nature is always inherently complete and luminous; it was thus before our parents gave birth to us, it is thus right now, and it will always be thus forever.

Originally there is not a single thing. Since theres not a single thing, what is to be called original? If you can see into this, you will save the most mental energy. When divergent thoughts arise, adamantly cut them off yourself. This is expediently called concentration and insight, but it is not reality; this mind itself is inherently concentrated and at once insightful.

Huang-po said, This mind is always intrinsically round and bright, illuminating everywhere. People of the world dont know it, and just recognize perception and cognition as mind. Drop perception and cognition, and the road to mind comes to an end. If you want to know the mind, it is not apart from perception and cognition; and yet original mind is not limited to perception and cognition either.

When you come to this, it is really essential for you to look into yourself; it is not a matter of verbal explanation. The more the talk, the further removed from the way. Those who are successful at introspection know for themselves when the time comes and do not need to ask anyone. All false imagination and emotional thoughts naturally disappear. This is the effect of learning the Way.

A thousand falsehoods do not compare to a single truth. If you are not thus, even if you consciously apply your mind, seeking effectiveness daily, it is all in the realm of impermanence, becoming and passing away.

Ta-tu (17th century)

oldkid SG

"He who by good deeds covers the evil he has done, illuminates this world like the moon freed from the clouds.

Blind is this world, here only a few possess insight. Only a few, like birds escaping from a net, go to the realm of bliss."

-extracted from Dharmapada, verse 173 & 174.

Cherrio

paperflower SG

"How should this Sutra be explained for others? By not grasping at appearances and being in unmoving thusness. Why? All conditioned dharmas Are like a dream, an illusion, a bubble or a shadow, Like dew or like a lightning flash. Contemplate them thus."

- Buddha Shakyamuni, Diamond Sutra (Vajra Prajna Paramita Sutra)

An Eternal Now SG

"Virtuous man, one who practices Complete Enlightenment of the causal ground of the Tathagata realizes that [birth and extinction] are like an illusory flower in the sky. Thus there is no continuance of birth and death and no body or mind that is subject to birth and death. This nonexistence of [birth and death and body and mind] is so not as a consequence of contrived effort. It is so by its intrinsic nature.

The awareness [of their nonexistence] is like empty space. That which is aware of the empty space is like the appearance of the illusory flower. However, one cannot say that the nature of this awareness is nonexistent. Eliminating both existence and nonexistence is in accordance with pure enlightenment.

Why is it so? Because the nature of empty space is ever unmoving. Likewise, there is neither arising nor perishing within the Tathagatagarbha. [8] It is free from conceptual knowledge and views. Like the nature of dharmadhatu, which is ultimate, wholly complete, and pervades all ten directions, such is the Dharma practice [of the Tathagata] of the causal ground."

~ The Sutra of Complete Enlightenment

An Eternal Now SG

Manjusri, you should know
that all Tathagatas,
from their original-arising causal ground,
use wisdom to enlighten
and penetrate ignorance.
Realizing that ignorance is like
a flower in the sky,
they are thus liberated from the continuance
[of birth and death].
Like a person [seen] in a dream who
cannot be found when [the dreamer] awakens,
awareness is like empty space.
It is impartial and equal, and ever unmoving.
When enlightenment pervades all ten directions,
the Buddha Path is accomplished.
There is no place where illusions vanish,
and there is no attainment
in accomplishing the Buddha Path,
for the intrinsic nature is already wholly complete.
By this, bodhisattvas
can give rise to the bodhi-mind.
Sentient beings in the Dharma Ending Age
through this practice will avoid erroneous views.

~ The Sutra of Complete Enlightenment

An Eternal Now SG

View all problems as challenges.
Look upon negativities that arise as opportunities to learn and to grow.
Don't run from them, condemn yourself, or bury your burden in saintly silence.
You have a problem? Great.
More grist for the mill. Rejoice, dive in, and investigate.

~ Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, "Mindfulness in Plain English"

An Eternal Now SG

All meditation must begin with arousing deep compassion.
Whatever one does must emerge from an attitude of love and benefitting others.

~ Milarepa

An Eternal Now SG

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons.
They were not made for humans any more than
black people were made for white, or women created for men.

~ Alice Walker

http://www.acres.org.sg/issues_crueltyfree.html

An Eternal Now SG

Are we interested in exploring this amazing affair of myself from moment to moment?

A somber day, isn't it? Dark, cloudy, cool, moist and windy. Amazing, this whole affair of the weather!

We call it weather, but what is it really? Wind. Rain. Clouds slowly parting. Not the words spoken about it, but just this darkening, blowing, pounding and wetting, and then lightening up, blue sky appearing amid darkness, and sunshine sparkling on wet grasses and leaves. In a little while there'll be frost, snow and ice covers. And then warming again, melting, oozing water everywhere. On an early spring day the dirt road sparkles with streams of wet silver. Sowhat is weather other than this incessant change of earthly conditions and all the human thoughts, feelings and undertakings influenced by it? Like and dislike. Depression and elation. Creation and destruction. An ongoing, ever-changing stream of happenings abiding nowhere. No real entity weather exists anywhere except in thinking and talking about it.

Now, is there such an entity as me or I? Or is it just like the weatheran ongoing, ever-changing stream of ideas, images, memories, projections, likes and dislikes, creation and destruction, that thought keeps calling I, me, Toni, and thereby solidifying what is evanescent? What am I really, truly, and what do I merely think and believe I am?

Are we interested in exploring this amazing affair of myself from moment to moment? Is this, maybe, the essence of this work? Exploring ourselves attentively, beyond the peace and quiet that we are seeking and maybe finding occasionally? Coming upon an amazing insight into this deep sense of separation that we call me and other people, me and the world, without any need to condemn or overcome?

Most human beings take it for granted that I am me, and that me is this body, this mind, this knowledge and sense of myself that feels so obviously distinct and separate from other people and from the nature around us. The language in which we talk to ourselves and to each other inevitably implies separate me's and you's all the time. All of us talk I-and-you talk. We think it, write it, read it, and dream it with rarely any pause. There is incessant reinforcement of the sense of me, separate from others. Isolated, insulated me. Not understood by others. How are we to come upon the truth if separateness is taken so much for granted, feels so commonsense?

The difficulty is not insurmountable. Wholeness, our true being, is here all the time, like the sun behind the clouds. Light is here in spite of cloud cover.
What makes up the clouds?

(What Is This Me? by Toni Packer)

An Eternal Now SG

Though one should live a hundred years not seeing the Truth Sublime,
yet better, indeed, is a single day's life of one who sees the Truth Sublime.

~ Buddha

An Eternal Now SG

Reverend Mahakasyapa, the Maras who play the devil in the innumerable universes of the ten directions are all bodhisattvas dwelling in the inconceivable liberation, who are playing the devil in order to develop living beings through their skill in liberative technique. – Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra

An Eternal Now SG

Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.9 per cent
Of everything you think,
And of everything you do,
Is for yourself
And there isn't one.

Wei Wu Wei, Ask The Awakened

An Eternal Now SG

"Always recognize the dreamlike qualities of life and reduce attachment and aversion. Practise good-heartedness toward all beings. Be loving and compassionate, no matter what others do to you. What they will do will not matter so much when you see it as a dream. The trick is to have positive intention during the dream. This is the essential point. This is true spirituality."

~ CHAKDUD TULKU ~

An Eternal Now SG

Support beings with all your heart and protect them like your own body. Indifference towards beings must be avoided like poison. Though some Buddhists obtain a lesser enlightenment due to indifference, the bodhi of Perfect Buddhas is obtained by not abandoning living beings.

Nagarjuna, Bodhicittavivarana 82-83

paperflower SG

"All things, material and spiritual, originate from one source and are related as if they were one family. The past, present, and future are all contained in the life force. The universe emerged and developed from one source, and we evolved through the optimal process of unification and harmonization."

- Morihei Ueshiba, The Founder of Aikido

An Eternal Now SG

Non-duality/No-Self:

All there is is this. All there is is what's happening. And what is happening is not happening to anyone, what is happening is simply happening.... there is no one in this room.

~ Tony Parsons

There is only a subjective happening, never an action done by any entity.

~ Ramesh Balsekar

If I could teach the world a lesson it would be, no matter what you experience always remind yourself, There is no experiencer, there is no observer. If you do this long enough and often enough you will one day know what's going on. When that day comes you will realize nothing has changed, yet everything has changed. It is a feeling and a knowing. An inescapable falling away of untruth. If you think you know it then you dont. When you know it, you do. And when you do know it, no one can take it away from you.

~ Steven Norquist

I ask people this all the time and really piss them off, "Why do you meditate? What are you trying to accomplish? Why do you watch your breath?" I have never met anyone that has given me the correct answer.

The reason they don't know is because they are not enlightened. If they were, then they might not even meditate anymore, or they might, it would make no difference. You see, the simple truth that is missed by almost every meditator is this, the act of sitting there watching your breath is enlightenment. That is all. You are not doing something to gain something, just sitting there is enlightenment. That still state with calmed mind, just that is enlightenment, yet that annoying gossip over there interrupting your meditation, just that is enlightenment and that guy flipping you off in commuter traffic, just that is enlightenment. There is no doer, no experiencer, no one who acts. Manifestation emerges, actless, mindless and just that is enlightenment.

~ Steven Norquist (see: "What is enlightenment, no, I mean really, like what is it?")

When every single moment is purely nothing but the unfolding of total presence under differing conditions, there is only chirping birds, drum beats, foot steps, sky, mountainthere never was a Witness hiding anywhere!

There is no mirror reflecting
All along manifestation alone is.
The one hand claps
Everything IS!

For the purpose of discussion, I would like to introduce you one concept, it is the "seed of pre-conscious propensities";. It is a layer of bond that prevents us from seeing somethingit is very subtle, very thin, very fineit goes almost undetected. What this bond does is it prevents us from seeing what WITNESS really is and makes us constantly fall back to the Witness, to the Source, to the Center . Every moment we want to sink back to Witness, to the Center, to this Beingness, this is an illusion. It is habitual and almost hypnotic.

But what exactly is this witness we are talking about? It is the manifestation itself! It is the appearance itself! There is no Source to fall back, the Appearance is the Source! Including the moment to moment of thoughts. The problem is we choose, but all is really it. There is nothing to choose.

There is no mirror reflecting
Manifestation alone IS.

From blinking your eyes, raising a hand...jumps...flowers, sky, chirping birds, footsteps...every single moment...nothing is not it! There is just IT. The instantaneous moment is total intelligence, total life, total clarity. Everything Knows, it's it. There is no two, there is one.

There is no invisible witness hiding anywhere. Whenever we attempt to fall back to this an invisible transparent image , it is again the mind game of thought. It is the bond at work.

~ Thusness

All appearance is source. All that apparently manifests in the hypnotic
dream of separation the
world, the life story, the search for home, is one
appearing as two the nothing appearing as everything, the absolute
appearing as the particular.

~ Tony Parsons

No watcher needed, the process itself knows and rolls as Venerable Buddhaghosa writes in the Visuddhi Magga.

~ Thusness

An Eternal Now SG

(continued from previous post)

Originally posted by An Eternal Now:
This open being is not something to be practiced methodically. Toni points out that it takes no effort to hear the sounds in the room; it's all here. There's no "me" (and no problem) until thought comes in and says: "Am I doing it right? Is this 'awareness?' Am I enlightened?" Suddenly the spaciousness is gonethe mind is occupied with a story and the emotions it generates.

~ Joan Tollifson (Toni = Toni Packer)

All there is is
this. Oneness is being this . . . whatever is apparently
happening . . . reading these words, breathing, blood coursing through the
body, sounds being heard, thoughts coming and going and feelings in the
body the
sense of sitting on a seat maybe. Here is oneness being
aliveness as this.

No effort is needed for that aliveness to be. Nobody is doing aliveness. Is
anybody doing sitting on a chair? Thinking is oneness thinking "I don't get
where this is going", or "this is too simple". All is simply aliveness,
oneness, being. It cannot be taught or achieved. Who is apart from being
to achieve being? Who can lose or gain this when this is all there is?
Resisting oneness is oneness resisting. Seeking oneness is oneness seeking
itself.

Aliveness is oneness apparently happening. Aliveness is being alive. There
is only being and the nature of that being is emptiness and fullness,
nothing and everything, movement and repose.
In that wholeness arises the idea "I am a separate individual". This seems
to be the beginning of a dream called "me being someone in a world with
which I have to negotiate".

Here in this separation is the root of all fear and feeling of disquiet coming
out of a sense of loss. Again it is the appearance of oneness, and in that appearance we embark on a journey in which we meet parents, teachers,
maybe priests, bosses and lovers, and learn how to get what we think we
want seemingly through personal choice and effort. The pursuit of
pleasure and the avoidance of pain generate transient experiences of
gratification and disappointment. The whole manifestation that we call
life is simply the drama of oneness looking for itself, for all desire is the
longing for oneness.

~ Tony Parsons

...As stated earlier, a helpful concept here is compassion, a heart aspect of the practice and reality related to kindness. You see, wherever there is desire there is suffering, and wherever there is suffering there is compassion, the desire for the end of suffering. You can actually experience this. So obviously there is some really close relationship between suffering, desire and compassion. This is heavy but good stuff and worth investigating.

We might conceive of this as compassion having gotten caught in a loop, the loop of the illusion of duality. This is sort of like a dogs tail chasing itself. Pain and pleasure, suffering and satisfaction always seem to be over there. Thus, when pleasant sensations arise, there is a constant, compassionate, deluded attempt to get over there to the other side of the imagined split. This is fundamental attraction. You would think that we would just stop imagining there is a split, but somehow that is not what happens. We keep perpetuating the sense of a split even as we try to bridge it, and so we suffer. When unpleasant sensations arise, there is an attempt to get away from over there, to widen the imagined split. This will never work, because it doesnt actually exist, but the way we hold our minds as we try to get away from that side is painful. When boring or unpleasant sensations arise, there is the attempt to tune out all together and forget the whole thing, to try to pretend that the sensations on the other side of the split are not there. This is fundamental ignorance and it perpetuates the process, as it is by ignoring aspects of our sensate reality that the illusion of a split is created in the first place...

~ Dharma Dan

Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.9 per cent
Of everything you think,
And of everything you do,
Is for yourself
And there isn't one.

Wei Wu Wei, Ask The Awakened

Paradoxical though it may sound:
There is a path to walk on,
there is walking being done,
but there is no traveller.
There are deeds being done, but there is no doer.
There is a blowing of the air, but there is no wind that does the blowing.
The thought of self is an error
and all existences are hollow as the plantain tree
and as empty as twirling water bubbles.

~ Buddha

An Eternal Now SG

If you are always aware, Mogharaja, you will look at the world and see its emptiness. If you give up looking at yourself as a soul, then you will have given yourself a way to go beyond death. Look at the world like this and the King of Death (Mara) will not see you. (Sutta Nipata 1119)

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