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Advertisements that stimulate our craving for possessions, sex, and food can be toxic.
If after reading the newspaper, hearing the news, or being in a conversation, we feel anxious or worn out, we know we have been in contact with toxins.
When you feel despair, fear, or depression, it may be because you have ingested too many toxins through your sense impressions.
If we are mindful, we will know whether we are “ingesting” the toxins of fear, hatred, and violence, or eating foods that encourage understanding, compassion, and the determination to help others.
The Buddha advised us to post a sentinel, namely mindfulness, at each of our sense doors to protect ourselves.
We need the insight that position, revenge, wealth, fame, or possessions are, more often than not, obstacles to our happiness. We
need to cultivate the wish to be free of these things so we can enjoy the wonders of life that are always available — the blue sky, the trees, our beautiful children.
look deeply into the nature of our volition to see whether it is pushing us in the direction of liberation, peace, and compassion or in the direction of suffering and unhappiness.
The food of consciousness is the fourth of the four kinds of food. There are two kinds of consciousness:
the collective and the individual. The food of consciousness means that we consume consciousness.
In the collective consciousness there are many toxic foods such as anger and despair.
find a collective consciousness to be with that is not filled with hatred and despair, where all day long the people who live there just think about compassion and helping others.
The individual consciousness also has toxins. The hells, hungry ghost, and animal realms are in us.
If we sit there and allow the negative thinking connected to past experiences to come up, we are eating the toxic matter of consciousness.
the seeds of the gods, the ashuras, the hell realms, the hungry ghosts, and the animals, are the seeds of Hearer Disciples, Self-achieved Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and fully enlightened Buddhas.
Every time we think about being abused, we are abused once again.
But actually that is not happening now; it is all over.
Thinking like this, we can be abused every day, even though our childhood may have had a great deal of happiness and sweet moments. We ruminate on our hatred, suffe...
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real happiness is possible if we can stop ingesting the nutriments that cause us to suffer.
Confucius said, “At thirty, I was able to stand on my own feet. At forty, I had no more doubts. At fifty, I knew the mandate of Earth and Sky. At sixty, I could do what I wanted without going against the path.” The last of the ten ox herding pictures in the Zen tradition is called “Entering the Marketplace with Open Hands.” You are free to come and go as you please. This is the action of non-action.
We can put an end to our suffering just by realizing that our suffering is not worth suffering for!
According to Buddhism, there are two kinds of truth, relative or worldly truth (samvriti satya) and absolute truth (paramartha satya).
Discourse on Turning the Wheel of the Dharma,
“Five Remembrances”
(1) I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old. (2) I am of the nature to have ill-health. There is no way to escape having ill-health.
(3) I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death. (4) All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them. (5) My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand.
We become arrogant when things go well, and we are afraid of falling, or being low or inadequate. But these are relative ideas, and when they end, a feeling of completeness and
satisfaction arises. Liberation is the ability to go from the world of signs to the world of true nature.
We need the relative world of the wave, but we also need to touch the water, the ground of our being...
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We shouldn’t allow relative truth to imprison us and keep us from tou...
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Looking deeply into relative truth, we penetrate the absolute. Relative and absolute truths inter-embrace. Both truths, r...
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Young people are like a source of water from the top of the mountain, always trying to go as quickly as possible. But when you become a river going through the lowland, you are much more peaceful.
You reflect many clouds and the beautiful blue sky. Being old has its own joys.
The Buddha recommends we live our daily life in this way, seeing everything in the light of interbeing.
Then we will not be caught in our small self.
We will see our joy and our suffering everywhere. We will be free, and we won’t...
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Why should we say that dying is suffering? We continue with the next generations. What is essential is to be our best while we are here. Then we continue to...
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A human being is made up of only non-human elements. To protect humans, we have to protect the nonhuman elements — the air, the water, the forest, the river, the mountains, and the animals.
The fourth notion to be removed is life span. We think that we exist only from this point in time until this point in time, and we suffer because of that notion. If we look deeply, we will know that we have never been born and we will never die.
A wave is born and dies, is higher or lower, more or less beautiful. But you cannot apply these notions to water.
The Avatamsaka Sutra
If you go deeply into any one of the teachings of the Buddha, you will find all of the other teachings in it.
“Dear Buddha, are you a living being?” We want the Buddha to confirm the notion we have of him. But he looks at us, smiles, and says, “A human being is not a human being. That is why we can say that he is a human being.” These are the dialectics of the Diamond Sutra. “A is not A. That is why it is truly A.” A flower is not a flower. It is made only of non-flower elements — sunshine, clouds, time, space, earth, minerals, gardeners, and so on. A true flower contains the whole universe. If we return any one of these non-flower elements to its source, there will be no flower. That is why we can
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Nirvana means extinction — first of all, the extinction of all concepts and notions. Our concepts about things prevent us from really touching them.
We have to destroy our notions if we want to touc...
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Look deeply to try to overcome the gap between your concept of reality and reality itself.
The Three Dharma Seals (Dharma mudra) are impermanence (anitya), nonself (anatman), and nirvana.
When we look deeply into impermanence, we see that things change because causes and conditions change. When we look deeply into nonself, we see that the existence of every single thing is possible only because of the existence of everything else. We see that everything else is the cause and condition for its existence. We see that everything else is in it.
From the point of view of time, we say “impermanence,” and from the point of view of space, we say “nonself.”
Looking deeply at impermanence, you see nonself.
