Waking the Buddha Quotes

“The availability of cheap effective lighting alone, following Thomas Edison’s invention of the incandescent bulb in 1879, greatly extended the range of waking human consciousness, effectively adding more hours onto the day—for work, for entertainment, for study, for discovery, for consumption. Subsequently, one development led to another, and to yet another, fueled by a corporate economy in developed nations, and then later by the arms race, and then the space race, as human ambition literally outgrew the planet. It seemed that there was no limit on what humanity could achieve. But there was a flaw at the heart of that expansive optimism—namely, that humanity cannot exist as a thing apart from nature; it has no destiny but annihilation apart from the land that gave it birth.”
― Clark Strand, Waking the Buddha: How the Most Dynamic and Empowering Buddhist Movement in History Is Changing Our Concept of Religion

“According to the logic of that old, deluded world, freedom means being at liberty to come and go as we please. Such a definition of freedom is often very useful to an oppressive regime. That is because freedom, if so defined, becomes something that can then be taken away. Tsunesaburo Makiguchi said no when offered his freedom because the offer itself was deluded. His captors, who thought they were free but in reality were the “thought prisoners” of an oppressive government and the victims of a degraded religious culture that had long since capitulated on the matter of basic human rights, therefore had nothing to offer him. He was free already.”
― Clark Strand, Waking the Buddha: How the Most Dynamic and Empowering Buddhist Movement in History Is Changing Our Concept of Religion

“When we realize that our lives are one with the great and eternal life of the universe, we are the Buddha. The purpose of Buddhism is to enable all people to come to this realization.”
― Clark Strand, Waking the Buddha: How the Most Dynamic and Empowering Buddhist Movement in History Is Changing Our Concept of Religion

“That is why, in order to arrive at a suitable message for the coming millennium, Buddhism has reached clear back to its beginnings to reclaim a belief in the fundamental equality and dignity of all life and bring that teaching back to the fore.”
― Clark Strand, Waking the Buddha: How the Most Dynamic and Empowering Buddhist Movement in History Is Changing Our Concept of Religion

“In the mid-1990s, while serving as senior editor for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, I proposed a thought experiment to test whether Buddhism could spread around the globe. That test consisted of a single question: Did Buddhism have a teaching that was so universal it could pass quickly from person to person without getting stopped in its tracks, leaping across national, ethnic, economic, and even religious boundaries?”
― Clark Strand, Waking the Buddha: How the Most Dynamic and Empowering Buddhist Movement in History Is Changing Our Concept of Religion

“the religious models that had existed up until then did not adequately prepare us. Only through a process of radical self-empowerment—which Ikeda, expanding upon a term used by Toda, called Human Revolution—could human beings address issues that big. They couldn’t be dealt with effectively by any one people, nation, or religion, but only by humanity as a whole.”
― Clark Strand, Waking the Buddha: How the Most Dynamic and Empowering Buddhist Movement in History Is Changing Our Concept of Religion