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He challenges us to realize that genuine power comes only with a clear mind and a calm heart, and that when we are not in control of our own thoughts we are actually quite powerless, nothing more than slaves to our fears, emotions, and craving. When this happens, it is not we who possess power; it is power that possesses
We believe power will get us what we most want: freedom and happiness.
there is another kind of power, a greater power: the power to be happy right in the present moment, free from addiction, fear, despair, discrimination, anger, and ignorance.
Wanting power, fame, and wealth is not a bad thing, but we should know that we seek these things because we want to be happy. If you are rich and powerful but unhappy, what’s the point of being rich and powerful?
To bring happiness to others, we must be happiness. And this is why we always train ourselves to first take care of our own bodies and minds. Only when we are solid can we be our best and take good care of our loved ones.
The secret to maintaining happiness is to nourish our love every day. Don’t allow success or craving for money and power to replace your love.
Faith is having a path that leads you to freedom, liberation, and the transformation of afflictions.
The second kind of power is diligence. You are capable of coming back to your best and highest self, but you must maintain this practice. Don’t allow yourself to get distracted and forget to practice. Practice regularly, daily, with the support of your family, friends, and community—this is diligence.
We all have a seed of anger, a seed of despair, and a seed of jealousy in us. If you live in a negative environment, the environment can trigger these seeds. If you live in a positive environment, then the seeds of craving, violence, hate, and anger are not touched, not watered easily. So it is wise for you to choose a good environment that will prevent these negative seeds from being touched often.
The second aspect of diligence is calming and replacing negative seeds that do manifest in your conscious mind. When a negative seed is triggered—the seed of despair, the seed of anger, or the seed of violence—you need to know how to help it stop manifesting and return to its original form as a seed.
There are many ways to calm a negative energy without suppressing or fighting it. You recognize it, you smile to it, and you invite something nicer to come up and replace it; you read some inspiring words, you listen to a piece of beautiful music, you go somewhere in nature, or you do some walking meditation.
The third aspect of diligence is to always invite good seeds to manifest.
The fourth aspect of diligence is trying to keep a good mental formation in the living room as long as possible.
When my left arm hurts because of rheumatism, I try to take care of it: I massage it and do everything to bring relief to my left arm. I do not get angry at my left arm. When I have a student who suffers, who is difficult, I try to practice like this. I do not get angry at her. I try to take care of her like I take care of my own arm, because getting angry at my student is getting angry at myself and will not help the situation.
Three virtues are required if we are to be true leaders: the virtue of cutting off, the virtue of loving, and the virtue of insight. The first virtue you need to use your power skillfully is the virtue of cutting off. Cutting off what? You cut off your anger, your craving, and your ignorance. Another way of saying this is “letting go.” You gradually transform your craving, anger, fear, and delusion. If you don’t have this kind of self-mastery, you can cause yourself and others great suffering, and people will not respect you.
A good leader also has the virtue of loving. You have the capacity to be affectionate, to accept, forgive, and embrace the other person with loving kindness and compassion.
People who lack compassion, love, and forgiveness suffer a lot. When you can forgive, when you can accept, you feel light, you can relate to other living beings. Without compassion, you are utterly alone. That is why compassion is the ground of happiness.
don’t have insight, they don’t have wisdom. Wisdom or insight is born from looking deeply. A genuine leader has the wisdom to show us the path out of suffering.
When we have insight, we can easily take care of difficulties, tension, and contradictions. If we don’t have it, we just go around in circles, haunted and controlled by our suffering, fear, and worries. So the third virtue is to be able to look deeply to gain insight, so we can resolve our difficulties and help other people.
There are people who complain they don’t have time for a vacation. The purpose of a vacation is to have the time to rest, but even when people go on vacation they don’t know how to rest. They may do lots of things and come back even more tired than before. We have to learn the art of deep relaxation.
Happiness, responsibility, and mindfulness are interconnected.
mindful consumption—what we eat but also what we watch, read, and listen to. We are what we consume. If we look deeply into the items we consume every day, we come to know our own nature well. We have to eat, drink, and consume, but if we do it unmindfully, we may destroy our body and our consciousness, showing lack of gratitude toward our ancestors, our parents, and future generations.
We can be mindful of what we are putting into our body and consciousness. Ask yourself, “What kind of toxins am I putting into my body today? What films am I watching today? What book am I reading? What magazine am I looking at? What kind of conversations am I having?” Mindfulness is recognizing these toxins and then putting yourself on a toxin diet. You can say to yourself, “Aware of the fact that I am bringing this and that toxin into my body and consciousness every day, making myself sick and causing suffering to my beloved ones, I am determined to prescribe for myself a proper diet. I vow
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Enter the right path and do everything you can for the protection and well-being of living beings. Then you will no longer be afraid. Even when you have to go through difficult moments, like illness, danger, or death, you’ll be at peace with yourself. This has been my experience.
Every act comes back to you. Your knife goes in, the person dies. Any harm you do to other people will come back and punish you. You alone will understand your suffering. No one else will understand your suffering, and the process of dying will be very difficult. This is why the greatest happiness is knowing you are on the right path. You don’t do anything that destroys people, animals, plants, or minerals. With that peace of mind, you can go through difficulties and dangers without fear, and you will die in peace. This is important.
No one can practice the Five Mindfulness Trainings perfectly, not even the Buddha. The goal is not to be perfect but simply to be mindful of ourselves, even when we make mistakes. If you are lost in a forest at night, you can follow the North Star to find your way out. You follow the North Star, but your goal is to get back home; it’s not to arrive at the North Star. The mindfulness trainings are like the North Star; we don’t have to be perfect in practicing them. They are our guide, and we know we’re on a good path.
understanding is the foundation of love. If you don’t understand, it is not possible for you to accept and to love.
We may be fooling ourselves. It’s important to look deeply into our deepest desire to see its true nature. If you suffer and make your loved ones suffer, there is nothing that can justify your desire.
We’re just like the fish that gets hooked. What’s appealing to you? You’re tempted, you want it, so you bite it, even though you know that it will get you. Fame, sex, power, and wealth are the four kinds of bait that have a hook.
Respect is the first ingredient of true love. Not only for mind and spirit, but for the body.
It’s like playing tennis. You can’t buy the joy of playing tennis at a store. You can buy the ball and the racket, but you can’t buy the joy of playing. To experience the joy of tennis, you have to learn, to train yourself to play.
Happiness can no longer come to you because you’ve decided that you’ll refuse everything except this one path of happiness. Of course you’re motivated by the desire to be happy and to make the people you love happy. But the idea of happiness that you have may actually be an obstacle preventing you and your beloved ones from being happy.
“If at some point in your life you adopt an idea or a perception as the absolute truth, you close the door of your mind. This is the end of seeking the truth. And not only do you no longer seek the truth, but even if the truth comes in person and knocks on your door, you refuse to open it. Attachment to views, attachment to ideas, attachment to perceptions are the biggest obstacle to the truth.”
It’s like when you climb a ladder. When you get to the fourth rung, you may think you are on the highest step and cannot go higher, so you hold on to the fourth rung. But in fact there is a fifth rung; if you want to get to it, you have to be willing to abandon the fourth rung. Ideas and perceptions should be abandoned all the time, to make room for better ideas and truer perceptions. This is why we must always ask ourselves, “Am I sure?”
Happiness becomes possible when we realize we have a path, when we know where we are going. If you don’t have the impression that you are on the right path, if you don’t know where you are going, you suffer, you feel lost and confused. Happiness is feeling that you are on the right path every moment. You don’t need to arrive at the end of the path to be happy. You are happy right here and right now.
If a nun is happy, it is not because she has power or fame but because she knows her presence is helping a lot of people. To feel that you are helpful, you are useful to society—this is happiness.
When I was a young monk, I learned that the teachings of the Buddha could be summarized in four short sentences. People asked the Buddha how to be happy, and he said that all buddhas teach the same thing: The bad things, don’t do them. The good things, try to do them. Try to purify, subdue your own mind. That is the teaching of all buddhas.*
The Buddha said that all suffering comes from the mind but all happiness also comes from the mind. To purify your mind is to transform your way of perceiving things, to remove wrong perceptions. When you remove your wrong perceptions, you also remove your anger, your hate, your discrimination, and your craving.
There are occasions when the lack of understanding between you and another is really there. You may be misunderstood by many people, and yet you don’t have to suffer. Just live your life properly and, after a while, others will correct their misperception of you. You know what is going on inside you. You know how your mind is. If every day you produce positive thinking, good ideas, with understanding and compassion; if every day you practice loving speech; if every day you do good actions, you know it yourself.
The Buddha spoke about four elements that constitute true love: the capacity to be kind and offer happiness, maitri in Sanskrit; compassion, the capacity to relieve suffering, karuna; the capacity to bring joy every day, mudita; and finally, the capacity of nondiscrimination, upeksha. When there is true love, there is nondiscrimination.
The most precious gift you can make to your loved one is not money, power, or fame, but your true presence.
When you focus on only the shortcomings in another person, you aren’t capable of seeing their good qualities. Everyone has both strengths and weaknesses. When you see only what’s wrong in another person, when you aren’t capable of seeing her good qualities, something is wrong with your perception. When you have wrong perceptions of others, it means you don’t have correct perceptions of yourself, you don’t know what your own strengths and weaknesses are.
The solution to this is to learn to look more deeply. That is real meditation. Meditation is the art of looking deeply.
This practice is wonderful because the past is still available to you. If you look deeply into it, you can learn a lot from the past and heal wounds from the past. Mindfulness of the past is very different from getting carried away in sorrow and regret. In the same way, while you are grounded in the present moment, you can bring the future into the present as an object of inquiry, and you may have many insights.
You have the right to plan your future, but you have to let go first and put your anchor down in the present.
When we live in the present moment and walk, breathe, and take care of ourselves and our loved ones, our mindfulness and concentration increase each day. Mindfulness means we know what’s going on. If our mind is filled with worry and tension, we recognize the worry and tension and breathe with them. When we look deeply into them, we see their roots. With the power of insight, we will see how to easily resolve our problems.
If you have a cow, you suffer because you are afraid of losing your cow. People in any profession have to learn not to make their work into a cow; this is a very important practice. You have to release your cows. You have to be free from your cows. The Buddha didn’t have any cows, so he was never afraid of losing them.
When fear becomes collective, when anger becomes collective, it is extremely dangerous. It is overwhelming. This is why you have to choose an environment where you’ll be influenced by a healthy, clear collective consciousness. We are easily influenced by collective thinking.
The path is the path of peace. It is my conviction that there is no way to peace—peace is the way. You have to use peaceful means to arrive at peace.
