This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun
The image of the Buddha on the altar is clearly not a divinity or Sage. It is a representation, an artistic image ... that points back to human who realized the highest wisdom. The Buddha cultivated his nature to an awakened state. The image symbolizes his realization of humanity's potential and aspiration for the highest goodness and compassion. When you bow, symbolically you honor your own potential for great wisdom. Furthermore, bowing is good exercise. It is not idol worship, which is superstitious and passive. Bowing to the Buddha is a practice of a principle; it is dynamic and active.
Anger | Blame | Conduct | Good | Ignorance | Mind | Praise |
Hung Tzu-ch'eng, also Hong Zicheng or Hóng Zìchéng, born Hong Yingming
Every one of us is endowed with great mercy and compassion.
Harm | Joy | Mind | Misfortune | Misfortune |
Do not overrate what you have received, nor envy others. He who envies others does not obtain peace of mind.
Where duty is plain delay is both foolish and hazardous; where it is not, delay may be both wisdom and safety.
All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions. Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.
Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun
As human beings, we are close to the demons and far from the Buddhas. We can become a demon king any time we want. If we wish to become a Buddha, however, we must cut through dense thickets of evil views. We have to cast out deviant views and constantly cultivate proper views before we can escape the demons' nets.
Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun
Now that you have a chance to leave the home-life and become disciples of the Buddha, you should realize that the causes and conditions for this are hard to meet with in hundreds of millions of eons. Therefore, you should uphold the precepts as you would your very life. For if you don't, then although you may still be in the world, you are like walking corpses and you will be of no benefit to the world. After leaving home, we should have backbone, determination, and integrity. We ought to be useful vessels within Buddhism, establishing merit and virtue, and establishing the teachings.
Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly
In considering one gateway into this life of holy obedience, let us dare to venture together into the inner sanctuary of the soul, where God meets man in awful immediacy. There is an indelicacy in too-ready speech.
Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly
Do not mistake me. Our interest just now is in the life of complete obedience to God, not in amazing revelations of His glory graciously granted only to some. Yet the amazing experiences of the mystics leave a permanent residue, a God-subdued, a God-possessed will. States of consciousness are fluctuating. The vision fades. But holy and listening and alert obedience remains, as the core and kernel of a God-intoxicated life, as the abiding pattern of sober, workaday living. And some are led into the state of complete obedience by this well-nigh passive route, wherein God alone seems to be the actor and we seem to be wholly acted upon. And our wills are melted and dissolved and made pliant, being firmly fixed in Him, and He wills in us. But in contrast to this passive route to complete obedience most people must follow what Jean-Nicholas Grou calls the active way, wherein we must struggle and, like Jacob of old, wrestle with the angel until the morning dawns, the active way wherein the will must be subjected bit by bit, piecemeal and progressively, to the divine Will.
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