Great Throughts Treasury

"Compassion is a far greater and nobler thing than pity. Pity has its roots in fear, and a sense of arrogance and condescension, sometimes even a smug feeling of “I’m glad its not me.”"

"Everything is inextricably interrelated: We come to realize we are responsible for everything we do, say, or think, responsible in fact for ourselves, everyone and everything else, and the entire universe."

"How we live now can cost us our entire future."

"People who have no strong belief in a life after this one will create a society fixated on short-term results, without much thought for the consequences of their actions."

"To learn how to die is to learn how to live; to learn how to live is to learn how to act not only in this life, but in the lives to come. To transform yourself truly and learn how to be reborn as a transformed being to help others is really to help the world in the most powerful way of all."

"What really counts in the final analysis, is the motivation behind our every action, and that there is no escaping the effects of our past actions, words, and thoughts, and the imprints and habits they have stamped us with. It means that we are entirely responsible, not only for this life, but for our future lives as well."

"We may idealize freedom, but when it comes to our habits, we are completely enslaved."

"With knowledge comes responsibility."

"At the heart of all religions is the certainty that there is a fundamental truth, and that this life is a sacred opportunity to evolve and realize it."

"That realization of impermanence is paradoxically the only thing we can hold onto, perhaps our only lasting possession. It is like the sky, or the earth. No matter how much everything around us may change or collapse, they endure."

"Modern society seems to me a celebration of all the things that lead away from the truth, make truth hard to live things that lead away from the truth, make truth hard to live for, and discourage people from even believing that it exists."

"The purpose of life on earth is to achieve union with our fundamental, enlightened nature. The “task” for which the “king” has sent us into this strange, dark country is realize and embody our true being."

"The key to finding a happy balance in modern lives is simplicity."

"The only thing we really have is nowness, is now. Sometimes when I teach these things, a person will come up to me afterward and say: “All this seems obvious! I’ve always known it. Tell me something new.” I say to him or her: “Have you actually understood, and realized, the truth of impermanence? Have you so integrated it with your every thought, breath, and movement that your life has been transformed? Ask yourself these two questions: Do I remember at every moment that I am dying, and everyone and everything else is, and so treat all beings at all times with compassion? Has my understanding of death and impermanence become so keen and so urgent that I am devoting every second to the pursuit of enlightenment? If you can answer ‘yes’ to both of these, then you have really understood impermanence.”"

"What is our life but this dance of transient forms? Isn’t everything always changing: the leaves on the trees in the park, the light in your room as you read this, the seasons, the weather, the time of day, the people passing you in the street? And what about us? Doesn’t everything we have done in the past seem like a dream now? The friends we grew up with, the childhood haunts, those views and opinions we once held with such single-minded passion: We have left them all behind. "

"To embody the transcendent is why we are here."

"There are no barriers whatever between what we call “life” and what we call “death.” The radiant power and warmth of the compassionate heart can reach out to help in all states and all realms."

"Everything can be used as an invitation to meditation."

"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest?a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in"

"A powerful way to evoke compassion is to think of others as exactly the same as you."

"Above all else, we need to nourish our true self-what we can call our buddha nature-for so often we make the fatal mistake of identifying with our confusion, and then using it to judge and condemn ourselves, which feeds the lack of self-love that so many of us suffer from today. How vital it is to refrain from the temptation to judge ourselves or the teachings, and to be humorously aware of our condition, and to realize that we are, at the moment, as if many people all living in one person. And how encouraging it can be to accept that from one perspective we all have huge problems, which we bring to the spiritual path and which indeed may have led us to the teachings, and yet to know from another point of view that ultimately our problems are not so real or so solid, or so insurmountable as we have told ourselves."

"Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature. Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation. Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing. And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature."

"All too often people come to meditation in the hope of extraordinary results, like visions, lights, or some supernatural miracle. When no such thing occurs, they feel extremely disappointed. But the real miracle of meditation is more ordinary and much more useful."

"As a Buddhist, I view death as a normal process, a reality that I accept will occur as long as I remain in this earthly existence. Knowing that I cannot escape it, I see no point in worrying about it. I tend to think of death as being like changing your clothes when they are old and worn out, rather than as some final end. Yet death is unpredictable: We do not know when or how it will take place. So it is only sensible to take certain precautions before it actually happens."

"As long as you cultivate stillness, you may enjoy peace, but whenever your mind is a little bit disturbed, deluded thoughts will set in again."

"As Stephen Levine says: When your fear touches someone?s pain it becomes pity; when your love touches someone?s pain, it becomes compassion."

"At the time of Buddha, there lived an old beggar woman called Relying on Joy. She used to watch the kings, princes, and people making offerings to Buddha and his disciples, and there was nothing she would have liked more than to be able to do the same. But she could only beg enough oil to fill a single lamp. However, as she placed it before Buddha she made this wish: "I have nothing to offer but this tiny lamp. But through this offering, in the future may I be blessed with the lamp of wisdom. May I free all beings from their darkness. May I purify all their obscurations, and lead them to enlightenment." That night, the oil in all the other lamps went out. But the beggar woman's lamp was still burning at dawn, when Buddha's great disciple Maudgalyayana came to collect the lamps. He saw no reason why one lamp was still alight and tried to snuff it out. But whatever he did, the lamp kept burning. Buddha had been watching all along, and said: "Maudgalyayana, do you want to put out that lamp? You cannot. You could not even move it, let alone put it out. If you were to pour the water from all the oceans over this lamp, it still wouldn't go out. The water in all the rivers and lakes of the world could not extinguish it. Why not? Because this lamp was offered with devotion, and with purity of heart and mind. And that motivation has made it of tremendous benefit."

"Death is a vast mystery, but there are two things we can say about it: It is absolutely certain that we will die, and it is uncertain when or how we will die. The only surety we have, then, is this uncertainty about the hour of our death, which we seize on as the excuse."

"Devote the mind to confusion and we know only too well, if we?re honest, that it will become a dark master of confusion, adept in its addictions, subtle and perversely supple in its slaveries. Devote it in meditation to the task of freeing itself from illusion, and we will find that, with time, patience, discipline, and the right training, our mind will begin to unknot itself and know its essential bliss and clarity."

"Don?t let us take doubts with exaggerated seriousness nor let them grow out of proportion, or become black-and-white or fanatical about them. What we need to learn is how slowly to change our culturally conditioned and passionate involvement with doubt into a free, humorous, and compassionate one. This means giving doubts time, and giving ourselves time to find answers to our questions that are not merely intellectual or philosophical, but living and real and genuine and workable. Doubts cannot resolve themselves immediately; but if we are patient a space can be created within us, in which doubts can be carefully and objectively examined, unraveled, dissolved, and healed. What we lack, especially in this culture, is the right undistracted and richly spacious environment of the mind, which can only be created through sustained meditation practice, and in which insights can be given the change slowly to mature and ripen."

"Devotion to the spiritual master becomes the purest, quickest, and simplest way to realize the nature of our mind and all things. As we progress in it, the process reveals itself as wonderfully interdependent We, from our side, try continually to generate devotion the devotion we arouse itself generates glimpses of the nature of mind, and these glimpses only enhance and deepen our devotion to the master who is inspiring us. So in the end devotion springs out of wisdom devotion and the living experience of the nature of mind becomes inseparable, and inspire one another."

"Dzogchen meditation is subtly powerful in dealing with the arisings of the mind, and has a unique perspective on them. All the risings are seen in their true nature, not as separate from Rigpa, and not as antagonistic to it, but actually as none other?and this is very important?than its self-radiance, the manifestation of its very energy. Say you find yourself in a deep state of stillness; often it does not last very long and a thought or a movement always arises, like a wave in the ocean. Don?t reject the movement or particularly embrace the stillness, but continue the flow of your pure presence. The pervasive, peaceful state of your meditation is the Rigpa itself, and all risings are none other than this Rigpa?s self-radiance. This is the heart and the basis of Dzogchen practice. One way to imagine this is as if you were riding on the sun?s rays back to the sun: ?. Of course there are rough as well as gentle waves in the ocean; strong emotions come, like anger, desire, jealousy. The real practitioner recognizes them not as a disturbance or obstacle, but as a great opportunity. The fact that you react to arisings such as these with habitual tendencies of attachment and aversion is a sign not only that you are distracted, but also that you do not have the recognition and have lost the ground of Rigpa. To react to emotions in this way empowers them and binds us even tighter in the chains of delusion. The great secret of Dzogchen is to see right through them as soon as they arise, to what they really are: the vivid and electric manifestation of the energy of Rigpa itself. As you gradually learn to do this, even the most turbulent emotions fail to seize hold of you and dissolve, as wild waves rise and rear and sink back into the calm of the ocean. The practitioner discovers?and this is a revolutionary insight, whose subtlety and power cannot be overestimated?that not only do violent emotions not necessarily sweep you away and drag you back into the whirlpools of your own neuroses, they can actually be used to deepen, embolden, invigorate, and strengthen the Rigpa. The tempestuous energy becomes raw food of the awakened energy of Rigpa. The stronger and more flaming the emotion, the more Rigpa is strengthened."

"Don?t worry about anything. Even if you find your attention wandering, there is no particular ?thing? you have to hold onto. Just let go, and drift in the awareness of the blessing. Don?t let small, niggling questions distract"

"Don't you notice that there are particular moments when you are naturally inspired to introspection? Work with them gently, for these are the moments when you can go through a powerful experience, and your whole worldview can change quickly."

"Each time the losses and deceptions of life teach us about impermanence, they bring us closer to the truth. When you fall from a great height, there is only one possible place to land: on the ground ? the ground of truth. And if you have the understanding that comes from spiritual practice, then falling is in no way a disaster, but the discovery of an inner refuge."

"Even Buddha died. His death was a teaching, to shock the naive, the indolent, and the complacent, to wake us up to the truth, that everything is impermanent and death an inescapable fact of life. As he was approaching death, Buddha said: Of all footprints that of the elephant is supreme. Of all mindfulness meditations that on death is supreme."

"I sit quietly and rest in the nature of mind; I don't question or doubt whether I am in the "correct" state or not. There is no effort, only rich understanding, wakefulness, and unshakable certainty. When I am in the nature of mind, the ordinary mind is no longer there. There is no need to sustain or confirm a sense of being: I simply am."

"I think there are many aspects to mind, but if we simplify them, there are fundamentally two. That is to say, the relative aspect of a mind, which is, if I use an example, they're the cloud level of the mind, which is where all our thoughts are, emotions are, where we desire, all the negative emotion exists. And that is the relative aspect of mind, where we all have the confusion. In fact in that state, there we have change, we have death, we have birth. But then behind the cloud-like mind is an intrinsic nature of mind or fundamental awareness, which is like the sky, which is beyond birth and death. So what the teachings really introduce, is show us to be introduced to this fundamental nature of, intrinsic nature of mind, which in Tibetan teachings is called nature of mind. But when you say -- I want to make this clear, because when you say nature of mind, it's not exclusive to the nature of mind alone. In fact from that comes an understanding, a wisdom which could really have a deep insight into not only the nature of our human experience but also the nature of the universe. So that's really -- the nature of mind, I would say, is the fundamental basis of the Tibetan teachings, and perhaps the understanding of the nature of mind is the greatest contribution, because when you really look into that -- that the mind is the universal ordering principle -- all the happiness and suffering, if you really look and examine, comes from nowhere but our minds."

"If all we know of mind is the aspect of mind that dissolves when we die, we will be left with no idea of what continues, no knowledge of the new dimension of the deeper reality of the nature of mind. So it is vital for us all to familiarize ourselves with the nature of mind while we are still alive. Only then will we be prepared for the time when it reveals itself spontaneously and powerfully at the moment of death; be able to recognize it "as naturally," the teachings say, "as a child running into its mother's lap"; and by remaining in that state, finally be liberated."

"Fortunate ones, mingle your mind with the Dharma and the happiness of Buddhahood will manifest within you!"

"I mean, in fact life is a dream, particularly when we wake up from it. Just as also sometimes when we're dreaming we do not know we are dreaming. It looks very real. And that's why it's interesting, is that in this teaching, for when you're trained, because how can we then come to prepare for the after-death state, in the sense that we have not died yet, so how can we come to know? It's by working with mind. First of all, by kind of -- how do you say? -- by working with, for example, with meditation, to work with the awake state, to really find the kind of openness, the gap into -- like just as when there are gaps in the clouds it reveals the sky. In the same manner, even though we have thoughts, it seems like they seem to be continuous, just as with a movie. It gives the illusion of continuity, but actually there are different frames. So therefore in many ways, you see, there are always gaps in our thoughts. And when the past thought has ceased, and the future thought has not yet arisen, there in this gap is revealed our nature. So there are these gaps of wakening the possibility, and meditation is a tool to work with during the awake time, during the daytime. And the dream yoga and the sleep practices, are to work in the dream state, you know. So both of these are kind of trainings, to train the awareness, because in many ways -- and the Tibetan teachings speak of that, that the bardo, after you die, it's very much like sleep, like a dream, but on a much more gigantic, on a more, kind of -- how do you say? -- enormous, much grander level. That's why the training begins with working with like sleep and dreams, to know just as like when we go to sleep sometimes -- you see, when we go to sleep, just before we dream, we really don't have much awareness left."

"How many of us are swept away by what I have come to call an 'active laziness'? It consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues."

"How hollow and futile life can be when it's founded on a false belief in continuity and permanence."

"How often attachment is mistaken for love! Even when the relationship is a good one, love is spoiled by attachment, with its insecurity, possessiveness, and pride; and then when love is gone, all you have left to show for it are the souvenirs of love, the scars of attachment."

"Imagine that you had gone all your life without ever washing, and then one day you decide to take a shower. You start scrubbing away, but then watch in horror as the dirt begins to ooze out of the pores of your skin and stream down your body. Something must be wrong: You were supposed to be getting cleaner and all you can see is grime. You panic and fling yourself out of the shower, convinced that you should never have begun. But you only end up even more dirty than before. You have no way of knowing that the wisest thing to do is to be patient and to finish the shower. It may look for a while as if you are getting even dirtier, but if you keep on washing, you will emerge fresh and clean. It?s all a process, the process of purification."

"I think generally speaking people think, particularly in the modern world, really think of death as kind of a tragedy, something to be feared. But what these teachings offer is the opportunity of transformation. For someone who's really a practitioner -- it is said a supreme practitioner meets death with joy; a mediocre practitioner meets death without apprehension; an ordinary practitioner meets death without regrets. So that what is happening, the wonderful thing about it, from the spiritual teachings that I have tried to outline, this whole teaching, in the book, to give really the understanding, is that when you die, when the dissolution -- that means when the process of death begins -- there is the outer dissolution of our body and the elements, but there is inner dissolution, where what is happening is like -- what is extraordinary to realize is that actually all that clouds our mind actually dies. There is actually a gap, a natural gap; like your anger dies, your desire, all the thought states of desire die, and ignorance dies. And so there comes a gap in which the true nature of mind, which is sometimes, from the teachings related to death and dying in this particular Tibetan tradition, known as the state of clear light, the fundamental nature of clear light, or the grand luminosity, and it's in that, if one has been prepared, familiar with this, during one's life -- that means if you're familiar with the nature of mind -- then at that moment one recognizes. But even though it happens to everybody, if there is not the recognition, then, you see -- like, for example, I have very bad eyesight, so if I take off my glasses I don't see you very clearly. So it's not that you're not there; you're very much there, but I do not see you. Just as if you do not, if the recognition, even though the ground luminosity appears, but that you were not able to recognize it. So the teachings equip you. That's why also when you die, to really let go of your attachment and aversion and yearning; it says at the moment of death to let go of attachment and to enter and to strengthen, to clear what is the teaching, and to create a peaceful environment which really helps, so that you can use it to the understanding and the recognition. That's why in the teaching, in the book I try to show how important for us it is to really create that last moment, the most important moment in one's life, as peaceful, as inspiring as possible. Because there is really opportunity for liberation. As is said in the teachings, "In an instant, complete enlightenment; in an instant, complete confusion.""

"It is important to remember always that the principle of egolessness does not mean that there was an ego in the first place, and the Buddhists did away with it. On the contrary, it means there was never any ego at all to begin with. To realize that is called 'egolessness.'"

"In the teachings we speak of three different states of bardos. Like if you were to say, there's life, there's dying, there's death, there's rebirth. The life is, you see, this life itself; dying is the process of dying, and when the anger, desire, ignorance, all those that obscure our nature of mind, dies, revealing the fundamental luminosity, and then there comes the after-death state, where the clear light, or the intrinsic radiance, appears, which is traditionally in the teaching called the bardo of dharmata. And when that happens, death. And then the next is bardo of becoming. Now, what is interesting is that actually if you were to use a kind of comparison that when you go to sleep it's like a dying, and that state before you dream, that state which many of us are not aware of, because it's such a subtle state of consciousness that only someone who's really trained in the advanced practice of meditation can be aware of; that is the state of bardo of dharmata. And then the bardo of becoming is because in the state of bardo of dharmata there is no really mental body, only the body of light; whereas in the bardo of becoming, which is before you take on the rebirth, in that transition period, bardo plane, you have a mental body. And that bardo of becoming is compared to like a dream."

"Just as space is not defined by the objects moving through it, we are much bigger than our thoughts and emotions."

"Just as if you put your finger into water, it will get wet, and if you put it into fire, it will burn, so if you invest your mind in the wisdom mind of the Buddhas, it will transform into their wisdom nature."