The Diamond Sutra Quotes

“understanding the nature of things just as they are. Why? Because: So you should view all of the fleeting worlds:
A star at dawn, a bubble in the stream;
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud;
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.”
― Mu Soeng, The Diamond Sutra: Transforming the Way We Perceive the World

“saving all beings knowing full well that there is no one to save.”
― Mu Soeng, The Diamond Sutra: Transforming the Way We Perceive the World

“Some of them taught that all worldly things are unreal, because [they are] a result of the perverted views. Only that which transcends worldly things and can be called “emptiness,” being the absence of them all, is real. Others said that everything, both worldly and supramundane, both absolute and relative, both Samsara and Nirvana, is fictitious and unreal and that all we have got is a number of verbal expressions to which nothing real corresponds.”
― Mu Soeng, The Diamond Sutra: Transforming the Way We Perceive the World

“This wisdom is not formulaic and cannot be captured in words, for it has gone beyond words to a place where direct realization rather than conceptual verbalization is the essential mode of being.”
― Mu Soeng, The Diamond Sutra: Transforming the Way We Perceive the World

“inspire people to move from a totally information-based orientation toward the transformattive integration of insights from the wisdom traditions with their own experience.”
― Mu Soeng, The Diamond Sutra: Transforming the Way We Perceive the World

“experience. Direct perception into one’s own experience allows a practitioner to become free of the concepts of self or no-self, dharmas or no-dharmas. This awareness or direct perception has meant, for practitioners, an expansion of self-imposed boundaries of “self ” and a merging, so to speak, with the true or universal self. It cannot be cautioned too often that in pure experience, linguistic terms do not suffice. The Buddha also gives this warning in this passage.”
― Mu Soeng, The Diamond Sutra: Transforming the Way We Perceive the World

“It is a perfection that does not aim at completion; rather, it is wisdom based on practice through which one is always progressing toward the ideal.”
― Mu Soeng, The Diamond Sutra: Transforming the Way We Perceive the World

“The bodhisattva vow provides the context and the inspiration to motivate the individual to gain insight into shunyata (emptiness), the essential nature of all phenomena, which leads to an experience of tathata (of suchness), of things as they are in their essential nature, of the mutual identity of phenomenal and transcendent reality. At the same time they cultivate karuna (compassion) for all those still caught in delusions, and help them through upaya (skillful means) so that they too may become free and attain buddhahood”
― Mu Soeng, The Diamond Sutra: Transforming the Way We Perceive the World

“For the practitioner, the understanding of wisdom and compassion—and the inherent tension between the two—is not to be resolved on a theoretical level, but to be experienced in one’s own mind and body. In this way one finds emptiness and compassion to be mutually supportive rather than mutually contradictory.”
― Mu Soeng, The Diamond Sutra: Transforming the Way We Perceive the World