Buddhism Quotes (145 Quotes)

Art is frozen Zen.

Following the Smell of Flowers As told by Taisen Deshimaru Roshi A master was walking in the mountains. When he came back, one of his disciples asked him 'Master, where do you go to walk 'In the mountain' Answered the master. The disciple insisted, 'But what path did you take What did you see' The master answered, 'I followed the smell of flowers, and I wandered with the young shoots.' We must let ourselves be guided by the dharma of the Buddha and have confidence in the grass and the flowers that grow, without goal or ego, naturally and unconsciously. The master's answer flows from the spring of wisdom. True wisdom is created beyond knowledge and memory.

Zen Makes use, to a great extent, of poetical expressions Zen is wedded to poetry.

Learning Zen is a phenomenon of gold and dung. Before you understand it, it's like gold after you understand it, it's like dung.

Two colors of light to symbolize stages in Buddha's life, just as different levels in the monument symbolize different stages in his life. The temple tells the entire history of Buddhism through its elaborate designs and sculptures. I wanted my design to help tell the story of the temple and the story of the people who built it.

Koan. A presentation of the harmony of the Universal and the Particular a theme of Zazen to be made clear. A classic Mondo, or a Zen story.

I made a photograph of a garden in Kyoto, the Zen garden, which is a rectangle. But a photograph taken from any one point will not show, well it shows a rectangle, but not with ninety degree angles.

The First Amendment commands government to have no interest in theology or ritual it admonishes the government to be interested in allowing religious freedom to flourish -- whether the result is to produce Catholics, Jews, or Protestants, or to turn the people toward the path of Buddha, or to end in a predominantly Moslem nation, or to produce in the long run atheists or agnostics. On matters of this kind, government must remain neutral. This freedom plainly includes freedom from religion with the right to believe, speak, write, publish and advocate antireligious programs.

I've often toyed with what Jesus, Moses or Buddha would look like today. I think a 7-year-old handicap little girl seems ideal. I didn't want her to be an action hero, I wanted the opposite - for her to have more power than all of them put together.

To invoke the Buddha's name you have to understand the dharma of invoking. If it's not present in your mind, your mouth chants an empty name. As long as you're troubled by the three poisons or by thoughts of yourself, your deluded mind will keep you form seeing the Buddha and you'll only waste your effort. Chanting and invoking are worlds apart. Chanting is done with the mouth. Invoking is done with the mind. And because invoking comes from the mind, it's called the door to awareness. Chanting is centered in the mouth and appears as sound. If you cling to appearances while searching for meaning, you won't find a thing....

But to take refuge in the Buddha, the Dhammas and the Sangha and to see with real understanding the four noble truths

Zen, per se, is not just an art, it's not just a religion, it's a realisation.

To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.

Why don't the names of Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius offend people? The reason is that these others didn't claim to be God, but Jesus did.

Golf is a spiritual game. It's like Zen. You have to let your mind take over.

For the Platonic or Aristotelian philosophy, it is of no importance whether Plato or Aristotle ever lived. For the mystical practice of an Indian, Persian, Chinese, or Neo-Platonic mystic it is a matter of indifference whether Rama, Buddha, Laotse, or Por.

Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.

We need a resolute struggle against the priest, whether he be called the pastor, the abbot, the rabbi, the patriarch, the mullah, or the pope. At a certain stage this struggle must be transformed into the struggle against God, whether he be called Jehovah, Jesus, Buddha, or Allah.

The quest for this unwearied peace is constant and universal. Probe deeply into the teaching of Buddha, Maimonides, or a Kempis, and you will discover that they base their diverse doctrines on the foundation of a large spiritual serenity. Analyze the prayers of troubled, overborne mankind of all creeds, in every ageand their petitions come down to the irreducible common denominators of daily bread and inward peace. Grown men do not pray for vain trifles. When they lift up their hearts and voices in the valley of tears they ask for strength and courage and understanding.

Buddha means awareness, the awareness of body and mind that prevents evil from arising in either.

The only Zen you find on tops of mountains is the Zen you bring there

Many spiritual teachers - in Buddhism, in Islam - have talked about first-hand experience of the world as an important part of the path to wisdom, to enlightenment.

The script was a synthesis of making mythology relevant in a modern context, relating quantum physics to Zen Buddhism, investigating your own life.

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. The religion which based on experience, which refuses dogmatic. If there's any religion that would cope the scientific needs it will be Buddhism....

FREEMASONS, n. An order with secret rites, grotesque ceremonies and fantastic costumes, which, originating in the reign of Charles II, among working artisans of London, has been joined successively by the dead of past centuries in unbroken retrogression until now it embraces all the generations of man on the hither side of Adam and is drumming up distinguished recruits among the pre-Creational inhabitants of Chaos and Formless Void. The order was founded at different times by Charlemagne, Julius Caesar, Cyrus, Solomon, Zoroaster, Confucious, Thothmes, and Buddha. Its emblems and symbols have been found in the Catacombs of Paris and Rome, on the stones of the Parthenon and the Chinese Great Wall, among the temples of Karnak and Palmyra and in the Egyptian Pyramids --always by a Freemason.

True zazen is surrendering every moment. But surrendering to what It really does not matter what we call it God or the Tao or the Dharma or the Buddha or our true nature.... It is the act of letting go, of surrendering, that matters. The very act of letting go opens us up completely.

I think all sorts of things do help, in terms of Buddhism, in terms of therapy. I think people choose things that they need that are going to help them. And obviously, I've seen my father do some magnificent work.

Regarding R. H. Blyth Blyth's four volume Haiku became especially popular at this time 1950's because his translations were based on the assumption that the haiku was the poetic expression of Zen. Not surprisingly, his books attracted the attention of the Beat school, most notably writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac, all of whom had a prior interest in Zen.

What I can do is find the keys that will plug into my own 30 years of training in Buddhism, and find things that are parallel or resonant in the work that I have done.

I named it the Zen Fencing Academy for my hero, a gentleman by the name of Joe Odom, who sadly passed away last year. He was my role model as a fencer and as an instructor. He founded a club in Pittsburgh, Fencers For Fun, as a method of keeping kids off the streets. He always came to (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) to help us out because we didn't have a coach. We always referred to him as the 'Zen master of fencing'. He was that wise old Pat Morita kind of character.

My personal philosophy stems from the deep understanding of martial arts and Chinese culture, and especially in the past eight years, the Buddhism thoughts shaped my ideology.

Bodhidharma Even if a buddha or bodhisattva should suddenly appear before you, there's no need for reverence. This mind of ours is empty and contains no such form. Those who hold onto appearances are devils. They fall from the Path. Why worship illusions.

The sacrifice which causes sorrow to the doer of the sacrifice is no sacrifice. Real sacrifice lightens the mind of the doer and gives him a sense of peace and joy. The Buddha gave up the pleasures of life because they had become painful to him.

To consider only one other such witness: the followers of the Buddha have at least as much right to appeal to individual and social experience in support of the authority of the Eastern saviour.

Larger and finer meanings are read into the older legends of the plants, and the universality of certain myths is expressed in the concurrence of ideas in the beginnings of the great religions. One of the first figures in the leading cosmologies is a tree of life guarded by a serpent. In the Judaic faith this was the tree in the garden of Eden the Scandinavians made it an ash, Ygdrasil Christians usually specify the tree as an apple, Hindus as a soma, Persians as a homa, Cambodians as a talok this early treee is the vine of Bacchus, the snake-entwined caduceus of Mercury, the twining creeper of the Eddas, the bohidruma of Buddha, the fig of Isaiah, the tree of Aesculapius with the serpent around his trunk.

The teachings of Buddha are eternal, but even then Buddha did not proclaim them to be infallible. The religion of Buddha has the capacity to change according to times, a quality which no other religion can claim to have...Now what is the basis of Buddhism If you study carefully, you will see that Buddhism is based on reason. There is an element of flexibility inherent in it, which is not found in any other religion.

Blessed are those, who don't have money to spare for share market, for they shall never loss their sleep. Thus spake, Share Market Buddha.

Green politics at its worst amounts to a sort of Zen fascism; less extreme, it denounces growth and seeks to stop the world so that we can all get off.

A handful of men working within the Zen sect of Buddhism created gardens in fifteenth-century Japan which were, and still are, far more than merely an aesthetic expression. And what is left of the earlier Mogul gardens in India suggests that their makers were acquainted with what lay behind the flowering of the Sufi movement in High Asia and so sought to add further dimensions to their garden scenes.

'In Zen, practitioners use kung-an (koans) as subjects for meditation until their mind comes to awakening. There is a big difference between a kung-an and a math problem the solution of the math problem is included in the problem itself, while the response to the kung-an lies in the life of the practitioner. The kung-an is a useful instrument in the work of awakening, just as a pick is a useful instrument in working on the ground. What is accomplished from working on the ground depends on the person doing the work and not just on the pick. The kung-an is not an enigma to resolve this is why we cannot say that it is a theme or subject of meditation.

He wasn't raised as a Christian, and he had never found any kind of religion to settle down with. He thought he'd found something that worked for him. It's not worshipping the devil. It's nothing ritualistic. It's about the pursuit of knowledge. He explained to me that there can be Satanic Christians. It gave him the peacefulness and serenity of Buddhism. It was a real peaceful thing.

A koan is a Zen presentation in the form of a Zen challenge.

Belief is always most desired, most pressingly needed where there is a lack of will, for the will, as emotion of command, is the distinguishing characteristic of sovereignty and power. That is to say, the less a person knows how to command, the more urgent is his desire for one who commands, who commands sternly - a God, a prince, a caste, a physician, a confessor, a dogma, a party consciene. From whence perhaps it could be inferred that the two world religions, Buddhism and Christianity, might well have had the cause of their rise, and especially of their rapid extension, in an extraordinary malady of the will.

I play a female Indiana Jones, a professor who hunts down precious objects, like a bowl that belonged to the Buddha. They tailored the role to me: I wanted to be smart, funny, and to kick some ass.

To Buddha, the second figure in the painting, life on earth was bitter, filled with attachments and desires that led to suffering.

I am nobody's disciple. I don't belong to any belief system. I love people from all over the world and I never compare them. They are all unique, a Zarathustra is a Zarathustra, a Mahavira is a Mahavira, a Buddha is a Buddha, a Jesus is a Jesus, a Moses is a Moses... they are so unique that you should not make one of them a criterion that everybody else has to fit with.

All of the religions - with the exception of Tibetan Buddhism, which doesn't believe in a heaven - teach that heaven is a better place. At the end of the program, I say that heaven is a place where you are happy. All of the religions have that in common.

Buddhism has had a major effect on who I am and how I think about the world. What I have learned is that I like all religions, but only parts of them.

Five hundred years before Christ some physicians of ancient India, working under the influence of the Lord Buddha, advanced the art of healing to so perfect a state that they were able to abolish surgery, although the surgery of their time was as efficient, or more so, than that of the present day.

The mind is the Buddha, and the Buddha is the mind.