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‘He walked down and there was that joy, that peace in his face, tranquility. So I said, “Tell me everything, we didn’t see you really for four or five days…” He said, “This is the first time that I have received all of the music for what I want to record, in a suite. This is the first time I have everything, everything ready.”

‘The text was originally discovered in 1900 by a monk in Dunhuang, China, an old outpost of the Silk Road on the edge of the Gobi Desert. The Diamond Sutra, a Sanskrit text translated into Chinese, was one of 40,000 scrolls and documents hidden in “The Cave of a Thousand Buddhas,” a secret library sealed up around the year 1,000 when the area was threatened by a neighboring kingdom.’

De Diamantsoetra is het oudste geprinte boek ter wereld, maar liefst 1.157 jaar oud!

‘But there can, I admit, be poison in words: no words are wholly without effect.’

‘Images arise and disappear and only memory gives them continuity. And memory is material — destructible, perishable, transient. On such flimsy foundations we build a sense of personal existence — vague, intermittent, dreamlike. This vague persuasion: “I-am-so-and-so” obscures the changeless state of pure awareness and makes us believe that we are born to suffer and to die.’

‘Find what you have never lost, find the inalienable.’

‘Q: Striving is painful.

M: You make it so by seeking results. Strive without seeking, struggle without greed.’

‘In ignorance the seer becomes the seen and in wisdom he is the seeing.’

‘Q: Why need I open my eyes to see a lovely flower and with my eyes closed I see it vaguely?

M: It is because your outer eyes are better than your inner eyes. Your mind is all turned outward. As you learn to watch your mental world, you will find it even more colourful and perfect than what the body can provide.’

‘Your self-image is the most changeful thing you have.’

‘Q; How am I going to get a true answer?

M: By asking a true question — non-verbally, by daring to live according to your lights. A man willing to die for truth will get it.’

‘When the sun went down begind the crags, a long shadow fell, like a curtain abruptly ending the drama of the day. Here in this cleft between mountains there was no real dusk, no mingling of light and dark.’

‘If a material thing gets broken it can be dovetailed together again; but there are no clean edges along which two people who have been apart for a long time can be stuck together. This is because the mind is a living substance, changing and ripening with every moment.’

‘Yet every such rush of feeling produces a permanent effect: it always adds a little of its hue to the normal colouring of the astral body, so that every time that the man yield himself to a certain emotion it becomes easier for him to yield himself to it again, because his astral body is getting into the habit of vibrating at that especial rate.’

‘Every thought gives rise to a set of correlated vibrations in the matter of the mental body, accompanied with a marvellous play of colour, like that in the spray of a waterfall as the sunlight strikes it. The body under this impulse throws off a vibrating portion of itself, shaped by the nature of the vibrations — as figures are made by sand on a disk vibrating to a musical note.’

‘The mental body is an object of great beauty, the delicacy and rapid motion of its particles giving it an aspect of living indiscent light, and this beauty becomes an extraordinarily radiant and entrancing loveliness as the intellect becomes more highly evolved and is employed chiefly on pure and sublime topics.’

‘A young boy sorrowing over and caressing a dead bird is surrounded by a flood of curved interwoven threads of emotional disturbance. A strong vortex is formed by a feeling of deep sadness. Looking at this most interesting and suggestive series, it is clear that in these pictures that which is obtained is not the thought-image, but the effect caused in etheric matter by its vibrations.’

‘I had once spoken in the very same way to someone else. And that very moment, above the bakul tree, over the tops of the jhāu bushes, under the yellow slice of the moon, right from the eastern to the far western bank of the Ganges, a laugh sped swiftly, a rolling laugh. I cannot describe that heart-rending laugh, the way it seemed to split the sky. I lost consciousness, and fell from the stone seat.’

‘As the darkness pressed my eyes, the shadowy shape of my wife’s languid body, the dim pallor of her loose sari, stirred me with inexorable passion. But she seemed like a shadow herself — impossible to hold in my arms.’

‘Actually, Jaykali did not say very much; she could stop even the mightiest verbal torrents with a couple of words or by saying nothing at all.’

‘The book was a piece of her parental home: a much-loved memento of her short residence in the house of her birth; a brief record of parental affection, written in round childish letters.’

‘Human beings can hate each other more than death.’

‘In order to see a fish you must watch the water.’

‘In order to see a fish you must watch the water.’

‘Before the rain stops we can hear a bird. Even under the heavy snow we see snowdrops and some new growth.’

‘The basic teaching of Buddhism is the teaching of transiency, or change. That everything changes is the basic truth for each existence.’

When we believe in our way firmly, we have already attained enlightenment.’

‘Usually when you listen to some statement, you hear it as a kind of echo of yourself. You are actually listening to your own opinion. If it agrees with your opinion you may accept it, but if it does not, you will reject it or you may even not even really hear it. That is one danger when you listen to someone.’