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four elements of true love. The first is maitri, which can be translated as loving-kindness or benevolence.
Understanding is the essence of love. If you cannot understand, you cannot love.
The second element of true love is compassion, karuna
The third element of true love is joy, mudita
The fourth element is upeksha, equanimity or freedom.
Being rich is an obstacle to loving.
To love is to recognize; to be loved is to be recognized by the other.
To be loved is to be recognized, and you can do that several times a day.
In Buddhism, the energy that helps us to touch life deeply is called smrti, the energy of mindfulness. Everyone possesses a seed (bija) of this energy.
Really try to be there, for yourself, for life, for the people that you love.
in true love there is no place for pride.
“Dear one, I am suffering, please help.”
A misperception is something that can destroy an entire family.
The Buddha told us a number of times that we are subject to misperceptions in our everyday life. Therefore we have to pay close attention to our perceptions. There are people who hang on to their misperceptions for ten or twenty years, and during this time they continue to suffer and make other people suffer.
You must always check things out by going to the person in question and asking for his or her help: “Dear one, I am suffering so much, help me please.
samyojana, the lump of suffering within us that is translated as an “internal formation.
a bodhisattva called Avalokiteshvara, the one who has the ability to listen and to understand the suffering of others.
So if we love someone, we should train in being able to listen. By listening with calm and understanding, we can ease the suffering of another person.
The Buddha said this: “The object of your practice should first of all be yourself. Your love for the other, your ability to love another person, depends on your ability to love yourself.”
Caring for yourself, reestablishing peace in yourself, is the basic condition for helping someone else.
Buddhist meditation is based on the principle of nonduality. This means that if we are mindfulness, if we are love, we are also ignorance, we are also suffering, and there is no reason to suppress anything at all.
When the seed of anger manifests on the level of our conscious mind, our immediate awareness, it is because the seed of anger is in the depths of our consciousness, and then we begin to suffer. Our immediate awareness is something like
our living room. The task of the meditator is not to chase away or to suppress the energy of anger that is there but rather to invite another energy...
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In Buddhism we say that mindfulness is the energy of Buddha.
Mindfulness is the energy that makes it possible for us to be aware of what is happening in the present moment.
“I know that you are there, little anger, my old friend. Breathe—I am taking care of you now.”
The flower is on its way to becoming refuse, but the refuse is also on its way to becoming a flower. This is the nonduality principle of Buddhism: there is nothing to throw away.
If a person has never suffered, he or she will never be able to know happiness.
If a person does not know what hunger is, he o...
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know the joy of eating every day. Thus pain and suffering are a necessary condition of our unde...
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suffering helps us to understand, that it nurtures our compassion, and that for this reason it is vitally necessary for us.
I know that I am happiness and that I am also suffering, that I am understanding and that I am also ignorance.
“If this exists, that exists.
So there should be no conflict, no violence, between one element of our being and another element of our being.
And speaking of destinations, we may as well ask ourselves, what is our final destination? The cemetery, perhaps?
In that case, why are we in a hurry to get there?
Life does not lie in that direction. Life is her...
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walk like a person who is free,
walk in such a way that the Kingdom of God is possible in the here and now,
This is because thinking prevents us from living deeply in the present moment in our everyday life.
I think, therefore I am really not there.
I am determined to practice deep listening. I am determined to practice loving speech.
“Breathing in—I know that he is alive in my arms; breathing out—I am very glad about it.”
practice calm, to practice stopping, and to practice looking deeply.
samatha—stopping, concentration, calm.
Nirvana is the foundation of our being, just as water is considered to be the essence of all waves.
“There is a world, but there is no birth and there is no death, there is no high and no low, no being and no nonbeing.”
The Buddha is one thing, but the notion of Buddha is another. Another
“If you meet the Buddha on your way, you must kill him.” You have to kill the notion of Buddha so that the real Buddha can be revealed to you.
Fear is born from our ignorance, from our concepts regarding life,
