World

Dharma with a Zen tone

/ Debra / 2 Comments

Troubled and confused is life in the three worlds
It’s not just the way things are today
Things have always been like this
Because you fail to realize the truth
You spend a lifetime chasing about
Reading the Buddhist scriptures, you become
caught up in names and forms
and never return
Practicing Zen, you become attached to nirvana
and end up being mired there
It reminds me of Master Tung-shan’s apt words:
“The moment you set foot outside the gate
Grasses are sprouting everywhere”

~ Ryokanzen garden 12sep14

Where hatred…

/ Debra

Where hatred, pride, jealousy, desire and stupidity decrease, not only conflicts but also epidemics and natural calamities in the world will decrease as well, like smoke disappearing when a fire is extinguished. ~ Kyabje Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

 

Leading….

/ Debra / 2 Comments

If you are not leading a morally upright life, you cannot expect to sit down on a little pillow and find yourself secluded from sense desires, secluded from unwholesome states of mind. If there is not sufficient morality, there is too much to desire, too much hate or fear, too much to worry about. ~ Leigh Brasington, “A Mind Pure, Concentrated, and Bright”

 

The Perverted Notion of “I”

/ Debra / 2 Comments

The mind, dividing experiences into subject and object, first identifies with a subject, “I”, then with the idea of “mine”, and starts to cling to “my body”, “my mind”, and “my name”. As our attachment to these three notion grows stronger and stronger, we become more and more exclusively concerned with our own well-being.All our striving for comfort, our intolerance of life’s annoying circumstances, our preoccupation with pleasure and pain, wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity, praise and blame, are due to this idea of “I”.

~ Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

Relying on the Dream world

/ Debra

Self-deception seems always to depend upon the dream world, because you would like to see what you have not yet seen rather than what you now seeing. You will not accept that whatever is here now is what is, nor are you willing to go with the situation as it is. Thus, self-deception always manifests itself in terms of trying to create or recreate a dream world, the nostalgia of the dream experience.

~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche