#buddhism

I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity. The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain. ↗

— Pico Iyer

#buddhism #japan #kyoto #quiet #stillness

When all that’s left of us is the pure untainted consciousness without form, we’ll know what it means when the last human breath expires. ↗

— Zeena Schreck

#buddha #buddhism #death #left-hand-path #religion

When I missed the physical body of my partner, I meditated on its parts, tossed by the waves, torn, dispersed, and deteriorated. When memories of our lives together became acute and intense, I breathed. I breathed through each wave of yearning, of regret, of guilt, of what-could-have-been. Every time I asked him, “Where are you?” A quiet voice immediately responded, “I am here. I have never left you.” I did not only lose a partner. I lost my childhood all over again. I lost my soul mate. I lost the accepting father and the gentle mother that he was to me. I lost the dream of a “normal life,” which I had tried so hard to achieve. Now I had to face my own mind. ↗

— Dang Nghiem

#loss #love #dreams

People who are diagnosed as having "generalized anxiety disorder" are afflicted by three major problems that many of us experience to a lesser extent from time to time. First and foremost, says Rapgay, the natural human inclination to focus on threats and bad news is strongly amplified in them, so that even significant positive events get suppressed. An inflexible mentality and tendency toward excessive verbalizing make therapeutic intervention a further challenge. ↗

— Winifred Gallagher

#attention #buddhism #focus #meditation #therapy

Cause and effect, in the Buddhist sense, though. Any action you undertake creates a seed that will sprout when the conditions are right, creating a good or bad result." "Do you believe in it?" He doesn’t allow even a pause. “Very much so. ↗

— Jacquie Underdown

#buddhist #life #life-lessons #life

According to the Buddha's teaching the beginning of the life-stream of living beings is unthinkable. THe believer in the creation of life by God may be astonished at this reply. But if you were to ask him 'What is the beginning of God?' he would answer without hesitation 'God has no beginning', and he is not astonished at his own reply. ↗

— Walpola Rahula

#buddhism #circle-of-life #creation-of-the-universe #creationism #god

You don't understand. I only prostitute the part of the body that isn't important, and nobody suffers except my karma a little bit. I don't do big harm. You prostitute your mind. Mind is seat of Buddha. What you do is very very bad. You should not use your mind in that way ↗

— John Burdett

#prostitution #the-mind #karma

Many do not realize that we here must die. For those who realize this, quarrels end. ↗

— Anonymous

#dhammapada #theravada #buddhism

Buddhism is all about science. If science is the systematic pursuit of the accurate knowledge of reality, then science is Buddhism, Buddhism is science. ↗

— Robert A.F. Thurman

#psychology #science #spirituality #wisdom #science

On the philosophical level, both Buddhism and modern science share a deep suspicion of any notion of absolutes, whether conceptualize as a transcendent being, as an eternal, unchanging principle such as soul, or as a fundamental substratum of reality. ... In the Buddhist investigation of reality, at least in principle, empirical evidence should triumph over scriptural authority, no matter how deeply venerated a scripture may be. ~ 14th Dalai Lama in his talk to the Society for Neuroscience in 2005 in Washington. ↗

— Dalai Lama XIV

#evidence #science #scripture #science