Buddha Quotes

“There is no holy life. There is no war between good and evil. There is no sin and no redemption. None of these things matter to the real you. But they all matter hugely to the false you, the one who believes in the separate self. You have tried to take your separate self, with all its loneliness and anxiety and pride, to the door of enlightenment. But it will never go through, because it is a ghost.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment

“There was one monk who never spoke up. His name was Vappa, and he seemed the most insecure about Gautama coming back to life. When he was taken aside and told that he would be enlightened, Vappa greeted the news with doubt. “If what you tell me is true, I would feel something, and I don’t,” he said. “When you dig a well, there is no sign of water until you reach it, only rocks and dirt to move out of the way. You have removed enough; soon the pure water will flow,” said Buddha. But instead of being reassured, Vappa threw himself on the ground, weeping and grasping Buddha’s feet. “It will never happen,” he moaned. “Don’t fill me with false hope.” “I’m not offering hope,” said Buddha. “Your karma brought you to me, along with the other four. I can see that you will soon be awake.” “Then why do I have so many impure thoughts?” asked Vappa, who was prickly and prone to outbursts of rage, so much so that the other monks were intimidated by him. “Don’t trust your thoughts,” said Buddha. “You can’t think yourself awake.” “I have stolen food when I was famished, and there were times when I stole away from my brothers and went to women,” said Vappa. “Don’t trust your actions. They belong to the body,” said Buddha. “Your body can’t wake you up.” Vappa remained miserable, his expression hardening the more Buddha spoke. “I should go away from here. You say there is no war between good and evil, but I feel it inside. I feel how good you are, and it only makes me feel worse.” Vappa’s anguish was so genuine that Buddha felt a twinge of temptation. He could reach out and take Vappa’s guilt from his shoulders with a touch of the hand. But making Vappa happy wasn’t the same as setting him free, and Buddha knew he couldn’t touch every person on earth. He said, “I can see that you are at war inside, Vappa. You must believe me when I say that you’ll never win.” Vappa hung his head lower. “I know that. So I must go?” “No, you misunderstand me,” Buddha said gently. “No one has ever won the war. Good opposes evil the way the summer sun opposes winter cold, the way light opposes darkness. They are built into the eternal scheme of Nature.” “But you won. You are good; I feel it,” said Vappa. “What you feel is the being I have inside, just as you have it,” said Buddha. “I did not conquer evil or embrace good. I detached myself from both.” “How?” “It wasn’t difficult. Once I admitted to myself that I would never become completely good or free from sin, something changed inside. I was no longer distracted by the war; my attention could go somewhere else. It went beyond my body, and I saw who I really am. I am not a warrior. I am not a prisoner of desire. Those things come and go. I asked myself: Who is watching the war? Who do I return to when pain is over, or when pleasure is over? Who is content simply to be? You too have felt the peace of simply being. Wake up to that, and you will join me in being free.” This lesson had an immense effect on Vappa, who made it his mission for the rest of his life to seek out the most miserable and hopeless people in society. He was convinced that Buddha had revealed a truth that every person could recognize: suffering is a fixed part of life. Fleeing from pain and running toward pleasure would never change that fact. Yet most people spent their whole lives avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure. To them, this was only natural, but in reality they were becoming deeply involved in a war they could never win.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha

“Kau luar biasa, karena kau diciptakan untuk dicintai.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment

“Apakah penampilanku satu-satunya hal yang membuatku berharga? Jika begitu, jangan tatap aku. Wajahku bisa menyembunyikan hati yang palsu.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment

“Beginilah keadaan yang akan berlangsung. Jika kau menginginkan pujian dan senyuman, datangi saja orang lain. Aku tidak berada di sini untuk memujimu.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment

“Everyone was asleep, totally unconscious about their true nature.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha

“And so it came about that the demon king Mara found himself staring at a most unwelcome intruder. He glared at the naked old man sitting in lotus position before his throne. Nothing like it had happened in a long while.

“Go away,” Mara growled. “Just because you got here doesn’t mean you can’t be destroyed.”

The old man didn’t move. His yogic concentration must have been strong, because his lean brown body, as tough as the sinew showing under its skin, grew sharper in out-line. Mara would have commanded some lesser demons to torment the intruder, but these hermits weren’t so easily dismissed, so Mara bided his time.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment

“The gods command that there can be only one king. But I swear that I am no better than a common soldier today, and you are as good as kings. Each man here is part of me. So what’s left for the king to say? Only two words, but they are the two that your hearts want to
hear. Victory.And home!” Then his command cracked like a whip. “All together—move!”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment

“whatever can run can also stand still.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha

“Two journeys had to be made without companions: the journey to your death and the one to enlightenment.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha

“What is the mind for if not to find God?” he said. “The scriptures assure us that this physical world is a mask, and yet the mask isn’t physical. It’s made of illusion, and illusion is created by the mind. Do you understand? What the mind has created, only the mind can undo.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha

“The fire of passion burns out eventually. Then you dig through the ashes and discover a gem. You pick it up; you look at it with disbelief. The gem was inside you all the time. It is yours to keep forever. It is buddha.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha

“Karma keeps good and evil in balance. Karma is a divine law. When the law is violated, however innocently, it can’t be undone. One snapped thread alters the whole design; one misdeed alters a person’s destiny.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha

“Asita wasn’t hungry this day, however. There were other ways to keep the prana, or life current, going. If he did visit the demon loka, it would take enormous prana to sustain his body. There would be no air for his lungs to breathe among the demons.

He allowed the brilliant Himalayan sun to dry his body as he walked above the tree line. Demons do not literally live on moun-taintops, but Asita had learned special powers that allowed him to penetrate the subtle world. He had to get as far away as possible from human beings to exercise these abilities. The atmosphere was dense around population. In Asita’s eyes a quiet village was a seething cauldron of emotions; every person—except only small infants—was immersed in a fog of confusion, a dense blanket of fears, wishes, memories, fantasy, and longing. This fog was so thick that the mind could barely pierce it.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment

“Asita had been raised on this knowledge. He knew also that all these planes merged into each other like wet dyed cloths hung too close on the line, the blue bleeding into the red, the

red into the saffron yellow. Lokas were apart and together at the same time. Demons could move among humans, and often did. The re-verse, a mortal visiting the demon loka, was much rarer.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment

“ASITA AWOKE in the forest thinking about demons. He hadn’t for many years. He could remember glimpsing one or two in the past, on the fringes of a famine or a battle, wherever bodies were being harvested. He knew the misery they caused, but misery was no longer Asita’s
concern. He had been a forest hermit for fifty years. The affairs of the world had been kept far away, and he passed whole days in a hidden cave when he retreated even from the affairs of animals, much less those of men.

Now Asita knelt by a stream and considered. He distinctly saw demons in his mind’s eye. They had first appeared in the dappled sunlight that fell on his eyelids at dawn. Asita slept on boughs strewn over the bare ground, and he liked the play of light and shadow across his eyes in the early morning. His imagination freely saw shapes that reminded him of the market village where he grew up. He could see hawking merchants, women balancing water jugs on
their heads, camels and cara-vans—anything, really—on the screen of his closed eyes.

But never demons, not before this morning. Asita walked into the nearly freezing mountain stream, his body naked except for a loincloth. As an ascetic, he did not wear clothes, not even the robes of a monastic order. Lately he had felt an impulse to travel very high, nearly in sight of the snowcapped peaks on the north-ern border of the Sakya kingdom. Which put him close to other lokas,worlds apart from Earth. Every mortal is confined to the Earth plane, but like the dense air of the jungle tapering gradually into the thin atmosphere of the mountains, the material world ta-pered off into subtler and subtler worlds. Devas had their own lokas, as did the gods and demons. Ancestors dwelt in a loka set apart for spirits in transition from one lifetime to the next.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment

“Saat buah persik tengah matang, tak ada yang meninggalkan pasar tanpa membeli satu.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment

“Namun guru yang paling baik adalah yang mengajar tanpa bicara apa-apa”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment

“Buddha had revealed a truth that every person could recognize: suffering is a fixed part of life. Fleeing from pain and running toward pleasure would never change that fact. Yet most people spent their whole lives avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha

“Here is your safety. This is going to be your special place. When you feel confused or when someone is trying to make you what you are not, come back to this tree. Sit and close your eyes. Wait for the silence. Do nothing to make it come to you. It will come of its own accord.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha

“Gautama said. “But I am blessed, because it has taken me only five years to know who I am not.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha

“Duality makes us believe that making good decisions and avoiding bad ones is all-important. Buddha disagrees—he says that getting out of duality is all-important, and you’ll never escape as long as you keep burying yourself deeper into the game of “A-or-B?” Reality isn’t A or B. It’s both and it’s neither.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha

“1. Dukkha Life is unsatisfactory. Pleasure in the physical world is transient. Pain inevitably follows. Therefore, nothing we experience can be deeply satisfying. There is no resting place in change.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha

“Being the monarch of fear, you’ve forgotten how to be afraid yourself.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha

“He was convinced that Buddha had revealed a truth that every person could recognize: suffering is a fixed part of life. Fleeing from pain and running toward pleasure would never change that fact. Yet most people spent their whole lives avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure. To them, this was only natural, but in reality they were becoming deeply involved in a war they could never win.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha

“Who is content simply to be? You too have felt the peace of simply being. Wake up to that, and you will join me in being free.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha

“In the blink of an eye, as quickly as he had seen ten thousand previous lifetimes, he saw the human predicament. Everyone was asleep, totally unconscious about their true nature. Some slept fitfully, catching scattered glimpses of the truth. But they quickly fell asleep again. They were the fortunate ones. The bulk of human beings had no glimpse of reality.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha

“Look at the forest,” Buddha replied. “We walk through it every day and believe it to be the same forest. But not a single leaf is the same as yesterday. Every particle of soil, every plant and animal, is constantly changing. You cannot be enlightened as the separate person you see yourself to be because that person has already disappeared, along with everything else from yesterday.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha

“entered anyway, of his own free will. I’ve known fear, he thought. And fear is death’s chief weapon. Let me experience the worst torment, and then fear will lose its hold over me. The phase of hellish torment lasted a long time because every morning his broken bones and flayed skin grew back.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha

“But time stands still in the dark.”
― Deepak Chopra, Buddha