Buddhist Philosophy Quotes

She said, "It's not life or death, the labyrinth." "Um, okay. So what is it?" "Suffering," she said. "Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?... Nothing's wrong. But there's always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there's a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.

Too lazy to be ambitious, I let the world take care of itself. Ten days' worth of rice in my bag; a bundle of twigs by the fireplace. Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment? Listening to the night rain on my roof, I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.

My experience with forgiveness is that it sort of comes spontaneously at a certain point and to try to force it it's not really forgiveness. It's Buddhist philosophy or something spiritual jargon that you're trying to live up to but you're just using it against yourself as a reason why you're not okay.

Sitting still is a pain in the ass.

Whether you believe in God or not does not matter so much, whether you believe in Buddha or not does not matter so much; as a Buddhist, whether you believe in reincarnation or not does not matter so much. You must lead a good life. And a good life does not mean just good food, good clothes, good shelter. These are not sufficient. A good motivation is what is needed: compassion, without dogmatism, without complicated philosophy; just understanding that others are human brothers and sisters and respecting their rights and human dignity.

The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless—one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan’s will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is—well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.

The question has often been asked; Is Buddhism a religion or a philosophy? It does not matter what you call it. Buddhism remains what it is whatever label you may put on it. The label is immaterial. Even the label 'Buddhism' which we give to the teachings of the Buddha is of little importance. The name one gives is inessential.... In the same way Truth needs no label: it is neither Buddhist, Christian, Hindu nor Moslem. It is not the monopoly of anybody. Sectarian labels are a hindrance to the independent understanding of Truth, and they produce harmful prejudices in men's minds.

We usually live our lives with the belief that "I sacrifice myself for everyone else," rather than thinking that "everyone else helps me.

We Vietnamese have two philosophies to sustain us. The Confucian tells us how to behave when fate grants us peace and order. The Buddhist trains us to accept our fate even when it brings us blood and chaos.

The Dalai Lama has said, “Don’t try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.

Truth changes with the season of our emotions. It is the shadow that moves with the phases of our inner sun. When the nights falls, only our perception can guess where it hides in the dark. Within every solar system of the soul lies a plan of what truth is--- the design God has created, in our own unique story. This is as varying as the constellations, and as turning as the tide. It is not one truth we live to, but many. If we ever hope to determine if there is such a thing as truth, apart from cultural and personal preferences, we must acknowledge that we are then aiming to discover something greater than ourselves, something that transcends culture and individual inclinations. Some say that we must look beyond ourselves and outside of ourselves. However, we don’t need to look farther than what is already in each other. If there was any great plan from a higher power it is a simplistic, repetitious theme found in all religions; the basic core importance to unity comes from shared theological and humanistic virtues. Beyond the synagogue, mosques, temples, churches, missionary work, church positions and religious rituals comes a simple “message of truth” found in all of us, that binds theology---holistic virtues combined with purpose is the foundation of spiritual evolution. The diversity among us all is not divided truth, but the opportunity for unity through these shared values. Truth is the framework and roadmap of positive virtues. It unifies diversity when we choose to see it and use it. It is simple message often lost among the rituals, cultural traditions and socializing that goes on behind the chapel doors of any religion or spiritual theology. As we fight among ourselves about what religion, culture or race is right, we often lose site of the simple message any great orator has whispered through time----a simplistic story explaining the importance of virtues, which magically reemphasizes the importance of loving one another through service.

Westereners often think that the East is one vast Buddhist temple, which is rather like thinking the West is one vast Carthusian monastery. If the [Western people who like Buddhism] were to visit the East, he'd certainly experience many new things, but he'd find first, that the food is under lock and key and second, that humans are considered to be a miserable, destructive, greedy lot, just as they are in the West.

Zen is the very awareness of the dynamism of life living itself in us—and aware of itself, in us, as being the one life that lives in all.

13. A Buddha In Tokyo in th Meiji era there lived two prominent teachers of opposite characteristics. One, Unsho, an instructor in Shingon, kept Buddha's precepts scrupulously. He never drank intoxicants, nor did he eat after eleven o'clock in the morning. The other teacher, Tanzan, a professor of philosophy at the Imperial University, never observed the precepts. When he felt like eating he ate, and when he felt like sleeping in the daytime he slept. One da Unsho visited Tanzan, who was drinking wine at the time, not even a drop of which is supposed to touch the tongue of a Buddhist. "Hello, brother," Tanzan greeted him. "Won't you have a drink?" "I never drink!" exclaimed Unsho solemnly. "One who never drinks is not even human," said Tanzan. "Do you mean to call me inhuman just because I do not indulge in intoxicating liquids!" exclaimed Unsho in anger. "Then if I am not human, wht am I?" "A Buddha," answered Tanzan.

If at the present day it has found a warm welcome among certain circles in Europe, it is because all those who hope to derive from humanitarianism a moral code of human kindness for the acceptance of an atheistic society are already implicitly Buddhists.

Buddhist philosophy points out that the true nature of all forms is essentially formless. Forms do not have an existence of their own, but rather they arise together, and are mutually dependent on one another. Everything in the world of form is constantly changing, constantly dying, and constantly being reborn—which is why Buddhists say that there is no-self; no form that has an existence in and of itself.

Buddhist philosophy, notion of mutually dependent origination, everything originates together, mutually dependent. it is close to implicate order, which says that everything comes out of a good and everything is interrelated, and that underlying it there is no substance that can be defined. that also give rise to karma, but karma too becomes changeable since even our own state of mind is part of the whole, and when it changes, the whole changes, so the karma changes.

Because there's no missing puzzle piece. And there's no great mystery to solve. I'm perfect and complete exactly as I am. The world is perfect and complete exactly as it is. An my practice is learning to accept that fact regardless of what desire tells me.

If you want the shortest version of my answer to the question of why Buddhism is true, it's this: Because we are animals created by natural selection. Natural selection built into our brains the tendencies that early Buddhist thinkers did a pretty amazing job of sizing up, given the meager scientific resources at their disposal. Now, in light of the modern understanding of natural selection and the modern understanding of the human brain that natural selection produced, we can provide a new kind of defense of this sizing up.

...The spiritual Oriental teachers say a person has three forms of mind,'' Beatrice was explaining to him once, while they were on break between one lesson and another at university, ''which are the dense mind, the subtle level and the ultra-subtle mind. Primary Consciousness, or the dense mind, is that existential, Sartrean mind which is related to our senses and so it is guided directly by human primitive instincts; in Sanskrit, this is referred to as ālaya-vijñāna which is directly tied to the brain. The subtle mind comes into effect when we begin to be aware of our true nature or that which in Sanskrit is called Ātman or self-existent essence that eventually leads us to the spiritual dimension. Ultimately there is the Consciousness-Only or the Vijñapti-Mātra, an ultra-subtle mind which goes beyond what the other two levels of mind can fabricate, precisely because this particular mind is not a by-product of the human brain but a part of the Cosmic Consciousness of the Absolute, known in Sanskrit as Tathāgatagarbha, and it is at this profound level of Consciousness that we are able to achieve access to the Divine Wisdom and become one with it in an Enlightened State.'' ''This spiritual subject really fascinates me,'' the Professor would declare, amazed at the extraordinary knowledge that Beatrice possessed.'' ''In other words, a human being recognises itself from its eternal essence and not from its existence,'' Beatrice replied, smiling, as she gently touched the tip of his nose with the tip of her finger, as if she was making a symbolic gesture like when children are corrected by their teachers. ''See, here,'' she had said once, pulling at the sleeve of his t-shirt to make him look at her book. ''For example, in the Preface to the 1960 Notes on Dhamma, the Buddhist philosopher from the University of Cambridge, Ñāṇavīra Thera, maintains those that have understood Buddhist teachings have gone way beyond Existential Thought. And on this same theme, the German scholar of Buddhist texts, Edward Conze, said that the possible similarity that exists between Buddhist and Existential Thought lies only on the preliminary level. He said that in terms of the Four Noble Truths, or in Sanskrit Catvāri Āryasatyāni, the Existentialists have only the first, which teaches everything is ill. Of the second - which assigns the origin of ill to craving - they have a very imperfect grasp. As for the third and fourth, which consist of letting go of craving, and the Noble Eightfold Path that leads to liberation from the cycle of rebirth in the form of Nirvāṇa - these are unheard of. Knowing no way out, the Existentialists are manufacturers of their own woes...

Conquer your mind before you conquer the world.

If you put these two fundamental Buddhist ideas together—the idea of not-self and the idea of emptiness—you have a radical proposition: neither the world inside you nor the world outside you is anything like it seems.

We must not despair the evanescent nature of time or our brief existence; we must embrace our delectable moment on earth. Life is a fantastic dream where we rejoice in the incomparable beauty of this misty world of ethereal sensations and sentiments. Buddha said, “It is better to travel well than to arrive.” We must swim with the tide and rejoice in life of memory, dreams, and the beauty that is transpiring before our very eyes. Indian Buddhist teacher and philosopher Nagarjuna advises in “The Diamond Sutra,” to enjoy the dream world, “Thus shall you think of this fleeting world: A star at dawn, a bubble in the stream; a flash of lightening in a summer cloud; a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

For Nishitani, then, the only way beyond nihilism is through nihilism. And here Nishitani borrows from the Buddhist concept of śūnyatā, conventionally translated as “nothingness” or “emptiness.” In contrast to the relative nothingness of modern nihilism, which is privative, and predicated on the absence of being (that is, an ontology), Nishitani proposes an absolute nothingness, which is purely negative and predicated on a paradoxical foundation of non-being (that is, a meontology). “Emptiness

Hinduism cannot live without Buddhism, nor Buddhism without Hinduism. Then realise what the separation has shown to us, that the Buddhists cannot stand without the brain and philosophy of the Brahmins, nor the Brahmin without the heart of the Buddhist.

We all are wearing many hundred glasses of different colors. Therefore, everyone sees the world in different views. Somehow, if we could remove those glasses, we can see the world with real colors. Name of the most difficult to remove glass is ‘there are permanent things of mine.

याता लोचन-गोचरं यदि विधेर् एणेक्षणा सुन्दरी नेयं कुङ्कुम-पङ्क-पिञ्जर-मुखी तेनोज्झिता स्यात् क्षणम् । नाप्यामीलित-लोचनस्य रचनाद् रूपं भवेद् ईदृशं तस्मात् सर्वम् अकर्तृकं जगद् इदं श्रेयो मतं सौगतम् ।। (Subhāṣita-Ratna-Koṣa 440) If this gazelle-eyed beauty had crossed the creator’s eyes, he could never have let her go. And surely, he couldn’t have produced these features with his eyes closed. From this we see that the Buddhists have it right: There is no creator.

If you take the negative as absolute and definitive, however, you increase your worries and anxiety, whereas by broadening the way you look at a problem, you understand what is bad about it, but you accept it. This attitude comes to me, I think, from my practice and from Buddhist philosophy, which help me enormously.

The satyr, as the Dionysiac chorist, dwells in a reality sanctioned by myth and ritual. That tragedy should begin with him, that the Dionysiac wisdom of tragedy should speak through him, is as puzzling a phenomenon as, more generally, the origin of tragedy from the chorus. Perhaps we can gain a starting point for this inquiry by claiming that the satyr, that fictive nature sprite, stands to cultured man in the same relation as Dionysian music does to civilization. Richard Wagner has said of the latter that it is absorbed by music as lamplight by daylight. In the same manner, I believe, the cultured Greek felt himself absorbed into the satyr chorus, and in the next development of Greek tragedy state and society, in fact everything that separates man from man, gave way before an overwhelming sense of unity that led back into the heart of nature. This metaphysical solace (which, I wish to say at once, all true tragedy sends us away) that, despite every phenomenal change, life is at bottom indestructibly joyful and powerful, was expressed most concretely in the chorus of satyrs, nature beings who dwell behind all civilization and preserve their identity through every change of generations and historical movement. With this chorus the profound Greek, so uniquely susceptible to the subtlest and deepest suffering, who had penetrated the destructive agencies of both nature and history, solaced himself. Though he had been in danger of craving a Buddhistic denial of the will, he was saved through art, and through art life reclaimed him.

There was not a philosopher of any notoriety who did not hold to this doctrine of metempsychosis, as taught by the Brahmans, Buddhists, and later by the Pythagoreans, in its esoteric sense, whether he expressed it more or less intelligibly. Origen and Clemens Alexandrinus, Synesius and Chalcidius, all believed in it; and the Gnostics, who are unhesitatingly proclaimed by history as a body of the most refined, learned, and enlightened men, * were all believers in metempsychosis. Socrates entertained opinions identical with those of Pythagoras; and both, as the penalty of their divine philosophy, were put to a violent death. The rabble has been the same in all ages. Materialism has been, and will ever be blind to spiritual truths. These philosophers held, with the Hindus, that God had infused into matter a portion of his own Divine Spirit, which animates and moves every particle. They

The hero is the man of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved. Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be a continuous “recurrence of birth” a rebirth, to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified—and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn. The first step, detachment or withdrawal, consists in a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world, macro- to microcosm, a retreat from the desperation's of the waste land to the peace of the everlasting realm that is within. But this realm, as we know from psychoanalysis, is precisely the infantile unconscious. It is the realm that we enter in sleep. We carry it within ourselves forever. All the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are there, all the magic of childhood. And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of our self, are there; for such golden seeds do not die. If only a portion of that lost totality could be dredged up into the light of day, we should experience a marvelous expansion of our powers, a vivid renewal of life. We should tower in stature. Moreover, if we could dredge up something forgotten not only by ourselves but by our whole generation or our entire civilization, we should indeed become the boon-bringer, the culture hero of the day—a personage of not only local but world historical moment. In a word: the first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside, and there to clarify the difficulties, eradicate them in his own case (i.e., give battle to the nursery demons of his local culture) and break through to the undistorted, direct experience and assimilation of what C. G. Jung has called “the archetypal images.” This is the process known to Hindu and Buddhist philosophy as viveka, “discrimination.

Equanimity is the learned capacity to experience pain without added suffering.

If there is no any patience, forbearance and forgiveness. Then there is no peace.

Chwen Hih (Hu dai shi), known as Chwen the Great. He is said to have been accustomed to wear a Confucianist hat, a Buddhist robe, and Taoist shoes.

Though you might conquer in battle A thousand times a thousand men, You're the greatest battle-winner If you conquer just one - yourself.

Pain does not differentiate between rich and poor or Christian and Buddhist. It brings the same feelings to everyone.

Indeed, if we could experience the full cognitive gamut of eating an orange, that experience in itself would have to be classed as “mystical.

Buddhism has become for me a philosophy of action and responsibility. It provides a framework of values, ideas, and practices that nurture my ability to create a path in life, to define myself as a person, to act, to take risks, to image things differently, to make art. The more I prize Gotama's teachings free from the matrix of Indian religious thought in which they are entrenched and the more I come to understand how his own life unfolded in the context of his times, the more I discern a template for living that I can apply at this time in this increasingly secular and globalized world.

What benefit have the Hindus derived from their contact with Christian nations? The idea generally prevalent in this country about the morality and truthfulness of the Hindus evidently has been very low. Such seeds of enmity and hatred have been sown by the missionaries that it would be an almost Herculean task to establish better relations between India and America... If we examine Greek, Chinese, Persian, or Arabian writings on the Hindus, before foreigners invaded India, we find an impartial description of their national character. Megasthenes, the famous Greek ambassador, praises them for their love of truth and justice, for the absence of slavery, and for the chastity of their women. Arrian, in the second century, Hiouen-thsang, the famous Buddhist pilgrim in the seventh century, Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, have written in highest terms of praise of Hindu morality. The literature and philosophy of Ancient India have excited the admiration of all scholars, except Christian missionaries.

Dualism is an isolating sense of separation, a feeling of being fully on one's own in life, unconnected to others, to the natural world, to the whole of reality. Overcoming dualism is the cure for suffering.

For 2,500 years, Buddhists have systematically studied the essence and causes of happiness, which is why there is a growing interest among the scientific community both in their philosophy and their meditation practices.

Siddhartha Gautama—the historical Buddha—has been called the earliest significant nontheist. As happens in every major spiritual movement, Buddha’s followers quickly heaped layers of superstition on top of what had been perfectly naturalistic teachings. But many modern expressions of Buddhism are utterly nontheistic. If, upon learning a bit about Buddhist philosophy you find it attractive, look into your local Buddhist communities. You’ll find many ways to be Buddhist without gods.

Any critique of Islam is denounced as an expression of Western Islamophobia, Salman Rushdie is denounced for unnecessarily provoking Muslims and being (partially, at least) responsible for the fatwa condemning him to death, and so on. The result of such stances is what one should expect in such cases: the more the Western liberal Leftists probe into their guilt, the more they are accused by Muslim fundamentalists of being hypocrites who try to conceal their hatred of Islam. [T]his constellation perfectly reproduces the paradox of the superego: the more you obey what the Other demands of you, the guiltier you are. It is as if the more you tolerate Islam, the stronger its pressure on you will be. What this implies is that terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, are not really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term--what they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the US: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers' way of life. If today's so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist's search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued and fascinated by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation. The passionate intensity of a fundamentalist mob bears witness to the lack of true conviction; deep in themselves, terrorist fundamentalists also lack true conviction--their violent outbursts are proof of it. How fragile the belief of a Muslim would be if he felt threatened by, say, a stupid caricature in a low-circulation Danish newspaper? Fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists' conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identify from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization. The problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but, rather, that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. This is why our condescending politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only makes them more furious and feed their resentment. The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite: the fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that, secretly, they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them.

Just as I do not see how anyone can expect really to understand Kant and Hegel without knowing the German language and without such an understanding of the German mind as can only be acquired in the society of living Germans, so a fortiori I do not see how anyone can understand Confucius without some knowledge of Chinese and a long frequentation of the best Chinese society. I have the highest respect for the Chinese mind and for Chinese civilisation; and I am willing to believe that Chinese civilisation at its highest has graces and excellences which may make Europe seem crude. But I do not believe that I, for one, could ever come to understand it well enough to make Confucius a mainstay. I am led to this conclusion partly by an analogous experience. Two years spent in the study of Sanskrit under Charles Lanman, and a year in the mazes of Patanjali's metaphysics under the guidance of James Woods, left me in a state of enlightened mystification. A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys lay in trying to erase from my mind all the categories and kinds of distinction common to European philosophy from the time of the Greeks. My previous and concomitant study of European philosophy was hardly better than an obstacle. And I came to the conclusion seeing also that the 'influence' of Brahmin and Buddhist thought upon Europe, as in Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and Deussen, had largely been through romantic misunderstanding that my only hope of really penetrating to the heart of that mystery would lie in forgetting how to think and feel as an American or a European: which, for practical as well as sentimental reasons, I did not wish to do

Greek philosophers, beginning with Thales, were men of speculative temperament. What is the world made of? What are the elements and the processes by which the world is transformed? Greek philosophy and science were born together, of the passion to know. The Buddha’s aim was not to know the world or to improve it but to escape its suffering. His whole concern was salvation. It is not easy for us in the West to understand or even name this Buddhist concern. To say that the Buddhists had a “philosophy” would be misleading.

I was raised as a churchgoer but I wasn't a practising Christian. I wasn't an agnostic or atheist either. My view is that we should all take a bit from every religion and philosophy. I'm not a Buddhist but I like Buddhist philosophies, in particular. They give you a very good structure that you can build your life around. For instance, I definitely believe in karma, the idea that what goes around, comes around. I wondered whether Bob was my reward for having done something good, somewhere in my troubled life. - Chapter 21

Anyone who engages in Buddhist meditation is subscribing to the bizarre doctrine that they do not actually exist, that they have no soul, that they are not a Self. They are agreeing with the extraordinary proposition that Nature - inexplicably - deals in creating pointless illusions.

I was perplexed by the failure of teachers at school to address what seemed the most urgent matter of all: the bewildering, stomach-churning insecurity of being alive. The standard subjects of history, geography, mathematics, and English seemed perversely designed to ignore the questions that really mattered. As soon as I had some inkling of what 'philosophy' meant, I was puzzled as to why we were not taught it. And my skepticism about religion only grew as I failed to see what the vicars and priests I encountered gained from their faith. They struck me either as insincere, pious, and aloof or just bumblingly good-natured. (p. 10)

Mathematicians initially overcame the problem of denoting empty spaces in decimal place-value notation by drawing a space-holder dot where there was a missing entry. This was probably first tried out around 3000 bce in the temples of Sumer, not far from what would become Baghdad. The innovation was passed on to both the Babylonians and the Persians, but it was in India that the use of a circle gave rise to the present-day symbol 0 for zero. It was also the Indians who named that symbol sunya, meaning emptiness or the void, linking it to a fundamental concept in Indian Buddhist philosophy.29 From this word came the Arabic zifr and hence the English ‘cipher’.30

Those who had seen eyes like hers before understood instantly that she was a woman who had suffered, but wore it well, with dignity and grace. Rather than dragging her down into depression, her pain had lifted her into a peaceful place. She was not a Buddhist, but shared philosophies with them, in that she didn’t fight what happened to her, but instead drifted with it, allowing life to carry her from one experience to the next. It was that depth and wisdom that shone through her work. An acceptance of life as it really was, rather than trying to force it to be what one wanted, and it never could be. She was willing to let go of what she loved, which was the hardest task of all. And the more she lived and learned and studied, the humbler she was. A monk she had met in Tibet called her a holy woman, which in fact she was, although she had no particular affinity for any formal church. If she believed in anything, she believed in life, and embraced it with a gentle touch. She was a strong reed bending in the wind, beautiful and resilient.

And the Buddha pointed out that his confusion was justified, for 'the dharma is profound, difficult to see, difficult to understand, peaceful, excellent, beyond the sphere of logic, subtle, and to be understood by the wise'. The reason for this is that it is not readily comprehended by one who holds a different view and has different learnings and inclinations, different involvements and instruction. It is clear from this statement that the conception of nibbāna in beyond logical reasoning, not because it is an Ultimate Reality transcending logic, but because logic or reason, being the 'slave of passions', makes it difficult for one who has a passion for an alien tradition to understand the conception of nibbāna.

As a displaced community, Tibetans often speak of learning to look to the future without forsaking tradition. And as Tibetans continue their flight from Tibet to India or Nepal and then scatter farther and farther away from the physical land of Tibet, the conversations on identity and culture become more crucial and complex. As the distance increases so does the desperation in keeping Tibet as the eventual home, our aspired home. Yet it is the loss of Tibet and its very distance that also awakens us to view patriotism and identity in new ways that are not guided solely by Buddhist philosophy. Self-assertion- an approach avoided in the past because of the Buddhist aspiration to prevent focus on the self- enters our identity as Tibetans.

THE STOICS COULD HAVE given us a philosophy of life without explaining why it is a good philosophy. They could, in other words, have left adoption of their philosophy of life as a leap of faith, the way Zen Buddhists do with theirs. But being philosophers, they felt the need to prove that theirs was the “correct” philosophy of life and that rival philosophies were somehow mistaken.

This is the version of the emptiness doctrine that makes sense to me, and it’s the version most widely accepted by Buddhist scholars: not the absence of everything, but the absence of essence. To perceive emptiness is to perceive raw sensory data without doing what we’re naturally inclined to do: build a theory about what is at the heart of the data and then encapsulate that theory in a sense of essence.

Well,' I answered, 'when a Westerner discusses, say, Hindu-ism or Buddhism, he is always conscious of the fundamental differences between these ideologies and his own. He may admire this or that of their ideas, but would naturally never consider the possibility of substituting them for his own. Because he a priori admits this impossibility, he is able to contemplate such really alien cultures with equanimity and often “with sympathetic appreciation. But when it comes to Islam - which is by no means as alien to Western values as Hindu or Buddhist philosophy this Western equanimity is almost invariably disturbed by an emotional bias. Is it perhaps, I sometimes wonder, because the values of Islam are close enough to those of the West to constitute a potential challenge to many Western concepts of spiritual and social life?

Perhaps it would sound too paradoxical to say that these two saints saved us from Spirituality; a dreadful doom. Perhaps it may be misunderstood if I say that St. Francis, for all his love of animals, saved us from being Buddhists; and that St. Thomas, for all his love of Greek philosophy, saved us from being Platonists. But it is best to say the truth in its simplest form; that they both reaffirmed the Incarnation, by bringing God back to earth.

Father Norris Clarke, S.J., my philosophy professor at Fordham, went to Tibet once, on his own, just to converse with the Buddhist monks there. After a day of delightful conversation with the Buddhist abbot about their religions, the abbot said, “Obviously, our two religions are very different. But I think they are also very similar in their root in the depths of the human heart. I would like to test this idea, with your permission. Here are four of my priests who speak good English. I will ask you and them the same question and compare your answers. I have never asked them this question before. The question is this: What is the first requirement for any religion at all?” Father Clarke thought that was an excellent experiment, so he agreed. He and the four monks wrote their answers on five pieces of paper. When the papers were unfolded and read, the very same single word was found on all five of them. The word was gratitude.

The Wheel of Life is painted on the outside walls of many Tibetan and Bhutanese monasteries in order to educate people in the basics of Buddhism. Yet it is not often found in Japan. In fact, Japanese Buddhists don't think or talk much at all about rebirth in the Six Realms. When they do talk about the afterlife, they tend to speak of becoming a Buddha, attaining Nirvana, or going to the Pure Land—expressions that they often use rather vaguely to mean roughly the same thing.

The Sravaka (literally ‘hearer,’ the name given by Mahayana Buddhists to contemplatives of the Hinayana school) fails to perceive that Mind, as it is in itself, has no stages, no causation. Disciplining himself in the cause, he has attained the result and abides in the samadhi (contemplation) of Emptiness for ever so many aeons. However enlightened in this way, the Sravaka is not at all on the right track. From the point of view of the Bodhisattva, this is like suffering the torture of hell. The Sravaka has buried himself in Emptiness and does not know how to get out of his quiet contemplation, for he has no insight into the Buddha-nature itself. Mo Tsu When Enlightenment is perfected, a Bodhisattva is free from the bondage of things, but does not seek to be delivered from things. Samsara (the world of becoming) is not hated by him, nor is Nirvana loved. When perfect Enlightenment shines, it is neither bondage nor deliverance. Prunabuddha-sutra

Contentment is an underrated state of mind in consumer cultures. We hardly know how to recognize it or what to do when we feel content. Maybe we think it’s boring. Or maybe the cynic inside us doesn’t believe it really exists. In Buddhist philosophy, contentment is highly valued as a state free of desire. When you are content, you are actually okay with everything just as it is. In that moment you are not struggling with any complaints or dissatisfactions. You are fully present to yourself and the world around you. A relaxed body, a calm mind, a sense of well-being—nothing more is needed. Can you recognize this state? You realize you don’t need to go to the store to get anything; you have enough. You don’t need to be entertained by sensory stimulus; you have enough. You don’t need to fill a gaping hole of hunger, anger, loneliness, or exhaustion; you are okay just as you are. This is quite a powerful teaching for combating the endless marketing of dissatisfaction.

The feeling of inner detachment and isolation is not in itself an abnormal phenomenon but is normal in the sense that consciousness has withdrawn from the phenomenal world and got outside time and space. You will find the clearest parallels in Indian philosophy, especially in Yoga. In your case the feeling is reinforced by your psychological studies. The assimilated unconscious apparently disappears in consciousness without trace, but it has the effect of detaching consciousness from its ties to the object. I have described this development in my commentary on the Golden Flower. It is a sort of integration process and an anticipation of consciousness. The cross is an indication of this, since it represents an integration of the 4 (functions). It is perfectly understandable that, when consciousness detaches itself from the object, the feeling arises that one does not know where one stands. Actually one is standing nowhere, because standing has a below and an above. But there one has no below and above at all, because spatiality pertains to the world of the senses, and consciousness possesses spatiality only when it is in participation with that world. It is a not-knowing, which has the same positive character as nirvana in the Buddhist definition, or the wu-wei, not-doing, of the Chinese, which does not mean doing nothing. The profound doubt you seem to be suffering from is quite in order as it simply expresses the detachment of consciousness and the resultant explanation of the objective world as an illusion.

Buddhist thought and modern psychology converge on this point: in human life as it’s ordinarily lived, there is no one self, no conscious CEO, that runs the show; rather, there seem to be a series of selves that take turns running the show—and, in a sense, seizing control of the show. If the way they seize control of the show is through feelings, it stands to reason that one way to change the show is to change the role feelings play in everyday life. I’m not aware of a better way to do that than mindfulness meditation.

Whether one is looking at the so-called Age of Reason, the Middle Ages, the modern age, or the pre-Christian era, gnostic philosophy remains the same dynamic, liberating power. Existing in time, it points beyond time. It calls us to wake up from materialist vision to a more profound, higher, and more centered perception. Whether the expression of the gnosis is apparently Christian, classical, Jewish, magical, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, Eastern, or Western, the wisdom of the ages speaks to us as it did to our ancestors—if we choose to listen.

If to a person religion means reading books and obeying every single word from it without the slightest bit of reasoning, then such perception would only bring destruction upon the person and the world. Also there are people who use the words from those books to justify their own filthy actions. Let’s take a conservative Muslim, for example. Say, the conservative Muslim male Homo sapiens (I won’t call such creature a human, regardless of the religion, since his action here shows no sign of humanity) is found to be beating his wife. Now, if someone says to him “this is wrong”, he would naturally reply, “this is a divine thing to do, my book says so”. Now, if a Christian says “my book is older, so you should stop obeying your book and start obeying mine”, there will come the Buddhist, and say, “my book is much older still, obey mine”. Then will come the Jew, and say, “my book is even older, so just follow mine”. And in the end will come the Hindu and say “my books are the oldest of all, obey them”. Therefore referring to books will only make a mess of the human race and tear the species into pieces.

God is a man. God is a woman. God is a child. God is a grownup. God is a person. God is a father. God is a mother. God is a brother. God is a sister. God is a parent. God is Christian. God is Muslim. God is Buddhist. God is Hindu. God is love. God is black. God is white. God is brown. God is red. God is Spirit. God is light. God is movement. God is energy. God is nature. God is power. God is thoughts. God is words. God is expressions. God is experiences. God is reality. God is the sky. God is the stars. God is the planets. God is the world. God is the universe.

The Buddha isn’t a god or deity to be worshipped. He was a rebel and an overthrower, the destroyer of ignorance, the great physician who discovered the path to freedom from suffering. The Buddha left a legacy of truth for us to experience for ourselves. The practices and principles of his teachings lead to the direct experience of liberation. This is not a faith-based philosophy, but an experiential one. The point of the spiritual revolution is not to become a good Buddhist, but to become a wise and compassionate human being, to awaken from our life of complacency and ignorance and to be a buddha.

I have given a brief explanation of the various meanings of dharma according to the Abhidharma, but what I want to say next is much more important. In Mahayana Buddhism, and especially in Dōgen Zenji's teachings, the meaning of dharma has more depth. According to the concepts we accept, we think that everything exists as objects outside the self. For example, we usually think that all phenomenal things that appear before our eyes, or this twentieth-century human society, have existence outside our individual self. We believe that when we are born we appear on this world's stage, and when we die we leave that stage. All of us think this way. But the truth is that this common-sense concept is questionable. Mahayana Buddhism began from a reexamination of this common-sense attitude. I'll give you one of my favorite examples. I am looking at this cup now. You are also looking at the same cup. We think that we are looking at the very same cup, but this is not true. I am looking at it from my angle, with my eyesight, in the lighting that occurs where I am sitting, and with my own feelings or emotions. Furthermore, the angle, my feeling, and everything else is changing from moment to moment. This cup I am looking at now is not the same one that I will be looking at in the next moment. Each of you is also looking at it from your own angle, with your eyesight, with your own feelings, and these also are constantly changing. This is the way actual life experience is. However, if we use our common-sense way of thinking, we think we are looking at the very same cup. This is an abstraction and not the reality of life. Abstract concepts and living reality are entirely different. The Buddhist view is completely different from our ordinary thinking. Western philosophy's way of thinking is also based on abstractions. It assumes that all of us are seeing the same cup. Greek philosophers went further and further in their abstractions until they came up with the concept of the idea that cannot be seen or felt. One example is Venus, the goddess of beauty. In the real world, no woman is as well-proportioned as Venus, or embodies perfect beauty as she does. Yet the Greeks idealized beauty and created a statue of Venus, just as they had thought of the "idea" of a circle that is abstracted from something round. In other words, the Greek way of thinking is abstraction to the highest degree. Buddhism is different. Buddhism puts emphasis on life, the actual life experience of the reality of the self.

He and Egan also spoke for hours on the phone many nights. One topic they wrestled with was his belief, which came from his Buddhist studies, that it was important to avoid attachment to material objects. Our consumer desires are unhealthy, he told her, and to attain enlightenment you need to develop a life of nonattachment and nonmaterialism. He even sent her a tape of Kobun Chino, his Zen teacher, lecturing about the problems caused by craving and obtaining things. Egan pushed back. Wasn’t he defying that philosophy, she asked, by making computers and other products that people coveted? “He was irritated by the dichotomy, and we had exuberant debates about it,” Egan recalled.

Buddhists Believe In Reincarnation Buddhists don’t believe reincarnation but they believe in rebirth. Reincarnation is about endless and set identity that moves from life to another, having the same emotions and memories with it. While rebirth on the other hand doesn’t carry any memories or emotions you had in your past life, it is simply a small inscription of them in what’s we called karma. Reincarnation and rebirth are rationally different concepts. Reincarnation is a belief that every person has a soul, and the soul travels to another body once their previous body dies.  Rebirth explains that there’s no permanent thing in the world. Every living creature is a nonstop accumulation of changing conditions that establish the body and mind.

As technology advances, the world shrinks. Because of the internet and social media, we have access to more people from more cultures than ever before—many of us now know sincere Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and people of other religious traditions. This creates a wonderful opportunity to get to know people outside of our immediate cultural context and to share the gospel far and wide. But living in a pluralistic society (different religions coexisting in the same space) means we are being exposed to more opinions, ideas, religious philosophies, and values than ever before. This can influence Christians to adopt a type of religious pluralism (the belief that all religions are equally valid). Sincerity, not truth, becomes the new criterion for salvation.

Buddhist Psychology You can use enlightening Buddhist practices to transform your life. Unfortunately, many people do not know it, but the Buddhist Dharma, or teaching, is actually a scientific system of psychology, developed in India and further refined in Tibet. It is a psychology that works. I call it a „joyous science of the heart“ because it is based on the idea that while unenlightened life is full of suffering, you are completely capable of escaping from that suffering. You can get well. In fact, you already are well; you just need to awaken to that fact. And how do you do this? By analyzing your thought patterns. When you do, you realize that you are full of „misknowledge“ - misunderstandings of yourself and the world that lead to anger, discontent, and fear. The target of Buddhist practice and the constant theme of this book is the primal misconception that you are the center of the universe, that your „self“ is a fixed, constant, and bounded entity. When you meditate on enlightened insights into the true nature of reality and the boundlessness of the self, you develop new habits of thinking. You free yourself from the constraints of your habitual mind. In other words, you teach yourself to think differently. This in turn leads you to act differently. And voila! You are on the path to happiness, fulfillment, and even enlightenment. The battle for happiness is fought and won or lost primarily within the mind. The mind is the absolute key, both to enlightenment and to life. When your mind is peaceful, aware, and under your command, you will be securely happy. When your mind is unaware of its true nature, constantly in turmoil, and in command of you, you will suffer endlessly. This is the whole secret of the Dharma. If you recognize delusion, greed, anger, envy, and pride as the main enemies of your well-being and learn to focus your mind on overcomming them, you can install wisdom, generosity, tolerance, love, and altruism in their place. This is where enlightened psychology can be most useful. Psychology and philosophy are really one entity in Buddhism. They are called the inner science, the science of the human interior. In the flow of Indian history, it is fair to say that the Buddha was a great explorer of the human interior rather than some sort of religious prophet. He came into the world at a time when people were just beginning to experiment with self-exploration, but mostly in an escapist way, using their focus on the inner world to run away from the sufferings of life by entering a supposed realm of absolute quiet far removed from everday existence. The Buddha started out exploring that way too, but then realized the futility of escapism and discovered instead a way of being happier here and now. (pp. 32-33)

Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years - I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue. My thoughts turn to something I read once, something the Zen Buddhists believe. They say that an oak tree is brought into creation by two forces at the same time. Obviously, there is the acorn from which it all begins, the seed which holds all the promise and potential, which grows into the tree. Everybody can see that. But only a few can recognize that there is another force operating here as well - the future tree itself, which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from nothingness to maturity. In this respect, say the Zens, it is the oak tree that creates the very acorn from which it was born.

The teachings of impermanence and lack of independent existence are not difficult to understand intellectually; when you hear these teachings you may think that they are quite true. On a deeper level, however, you probably still identify yourself as “me” and identify others as “them” or “you.” On some level you likely say to yourself, “I will always be me; I have an identity that is important.” I, for example, say to myself, “I am a Buddhist priest; not a Christian or Islamic one. I am a Japanese person, not an American or a Chinese one.” If we did not assume that we have this something within us that does not change, it would be very difficult for us to live responsibly in society. This is why people who are unfamiliar with Buddhism often ask, “If there were no unchanging essential existence, doesn’t that mean I would not be responsible for my past actions, since I would be a different person than in the past?” But of course that is not what the Buddha meant when he said we have no unchanging atman or essential existence. To help us understand this point, we can consider how our life resembles a river. Each moment the water of a river is flowing and different, so it is constantly changing, but there is still a certain continuity of the river as a whole. The Mississippi River, for example, was the river we know a million years ago. And yet, the water flowing in the Mississippi is always different, always new, so there is actually no fixed thing that we can say is the one and only Mississippi River. We can see this clearly when we compare the source of the Mississippi in northern Minnesota, a small stream one can jump over, to the river’s New Orleans estuary, which seems as wide as an ocean. We cannot say which of these is the true Mississippi: it is just a matter of conditions that lets us call one or the other of these the Mississippi. In reality, a river is just a collection of masses of flowing water contained within certain shapes in the land. “Mississippi River” is simply a name given to various conditions and changing elements. Since our lives are also just a collection of conditions, we cannot say that we each have one true identity that does not change, just as we cannot say there is one true Mississippi River. What we call the “self ” is just a set of conditions existing within a collection of different elements. So I cannot say that there is an unchanging self that exists throughout my life as a baby, as a teenager, and as it is today. Things that I thought were important and interesting when I was an elementary or high school student, for example, are not at all interesting to me now; my feelings, emotions, and values are always changing. This is the meaning of the teaching that everything is impermanent and without independent existence. But we still must recognize that there is a certain continuity in our lives, that there is causality, and that we need to be responsible for what we did yesterday. In this way, self-identity is important. Even though in actuality there is no unchanging identity, I still must use expressions like “when I was a baby ..., when I was a boy ..., when I was a teenager. ...” To speak about changes in our lives and communicate in a meaningful way, we must speak as if we assumed that there is an unchanging “I” that has been experiencing the changes; otherwise, the word “change” has no meaning. But according to Buddhist philosophy, self-identity, the “I,” is a creation of the mind; we create self-identity because it’s convenient and useful in certain ways. We must use self-identity to live responsibly in society, but we should realize that it is merely a tool, a symbol, a sign, or a concept. Because it enables us to think and discriminate, self-identity allows us to live and function. Although it is not the only reality of our lives, self-identity is a reality for us, a tool we must use to live with others in society.

Bored with Pisit today, I switch to our public radio channel, where the renowned and deeply reverend Phra Titapika is lecturing on Dependent Origination. Not everyone’s cup of chocolate, I agree (this is not the most popular show in Thailand), but the doctrine is at the heart of Buddhism. You see, dear reader (speaking frankly, without any intention to offend), you are a ramshackle collection of coincidences held together by a desperate and irrational clinging, there is no center at all, everything depends on everything else, your body depends on the environment, your thoughts depend on whatever junk floats in from the media, your emotions are largely from the reptilian end of your DNA, your intellect is a chemical computer that can’t add up a zillionth as fast as a pocket calculator, and even your best side is a superficial piece of social programming that will fall apart just as soon as your spouse leaves with the kids and the money in the joint account, or the economy starts to fail and you get the sack, or you get conscripted into some idiot’s war, or they give you the news about your brain tumor. To name this amorphous morass of self-pity, vanity, and despair self is not only the height of hubris, it is also proof (if any were needed) that we are above all a delusional species. (We are in a trance from birth to death.) Prick the balloon, and what do you get? Emptiness. It’s not only us-this radical doctrine applies to the whole of the sentient world. In a bumper sticker: The fear of letting go prevents you from letting go of the fear of letting go. Here’s the good Phra in fine fettle today: “Take a snail, for example. Consider what brooding overweening self-centered passion got it into that state. Can you see the rage of a snail? The frustration of a cockroach? The ego of an ant? If you can, then you are close to enlightenment.” Like I say, not everyone’s cup of miso. Come to think of it, I do believe I prefer Pisit, but the Phra does have a point: take two steps in the divine art of Buddhist meditation, and you will find yourself on a planet you no longer recognize. Those needs and fears you thought were the very bones of your being turn out to be no more than bugs in your software. (Even the certainty of death gets nuanced.) You’ll find no meaning there. So where?

a Chinese poem says: Entering the forest, he does not disturb a blade of grass; Entering the water, he does not cause a ripple. For the image represents a number of qualities which are, in fact, aspects of the same thing. It represents the sage’s freedom and detachment of mind, a skylike consciousness in which experience moves without leaving any stain. As another poem says: The bamboo shadows sweep the stairs, But stir no dust. Yet, paradoxically, this detachment from is also a harmony with, for the man who goes into the forest without disturbing a blade of grass is a man in no conflict with nature. Like the Native American scouts, he walks without a single twig cracking beneath his feet. Like the Japanese architects, he builds a house which seems to be a part of its natural surroundings. The image also represents the fact that the way of the sage cannot be traced and followed, since no authentic wisdom can be imitated. Each man must find it for himself, because there is really no way of putting it into words, of reaching it by any specific methods or directions. But there is actually the most intimate connection between these two apparently separate uses of the metaphor—the way of the sage, on the one hand, and the impermanence of life, on the other. And the connection reveals the one deepest and most central principle of those Asian philosophies which so puzzle the Western mind by identifying the highest wisdom with what, to us, seems the doctrine of abject despair. Indeed, the word despair in a particular sense is the proper translation of the Hindu–Buddhist term nirvana—to “de-spirate,” to breathe out, to give up the ghost. We cannot understand how the Asians manage to equate this despair with ultimate bliss—unless, as we are prone to suppose, they are after all a depraved and spineless people, long accustomed to fatalism and resignation.

On a break from the tour, I went south to Bali, a place the choreographer Toni Basil, whom Eno and I had met during the Bush Of Ghosts sessions, had recommended as being transporting and all about performance. I rented a small motorcycle and headed up into the hills, away from the beach resort. I soon discovered that if one saw offerings of flowers and fruit being brought to a village temple compound in the afternoon, one could be pretty certain that some sort of ritual performance would follow there at night. Sure enough, night after night I would catch dances accompanied by gamelan orchestras and shadow-puppet excerpts from the Hindu Ramayana--epic and sometimes ritual performances that blended religious and theatrical elements. (A gamelan is a small orchestra made up mainly of tuned metallic gongs and xylophone-like instruments--the interplay between the parts is beautiful and intricate.) In these latter events some participants would often fall into a trance, but even in trance there were prescribed procedures. It wasn't all thrashing chaos, as a Westerner might expect, but a deeper kind of dance. As In Japanese theater, the performers often wore masks and extreme makeup; their movements, too, were stylized and "unnatural." It began to sink in that this kind of "presentational" theater has more in common with certain kinds of pop-music performance that traditional Western theater did. I was struck by other peripheral aspects of these performances. The audiences, mostly local villagers of all ages, weren't paying attention half the time. People would wander in and out, go get a snack from a cart or leave to smoke a bidi cigarette, and then return to watch some more. This was more like the behavior of audiences in music clubs than in Western theaters, where they were expected to sit quietly and only leave or converse once the show was over. The Balinese "shows" were completely integrated into people's daily lives, or so it seemed to me. There was no attempt to formally separate the ritual and the show from the audience. Everything seemed to flow into everything else. The food, the music, and the dance were all just another part of daily activity. I remembered a story about John Cage, who, when in Japan, asked someone what their religion was. The reply was that they didn't have a strict religion--they danced. Japanese do, of course, have Buddhist and Shinto rituals for weddings, funerals, and marriages, but a weekly thing like going to church or temple doesn't exist. The "religion" is so integrated into the culture that it appears in daily gestures and routines, unsegregated for ordinary life. I was beginning to see that theatricality wasn't necessarily a bad thing. It was part of life in much of the world, and not necessarily phony either.

Most religions and philosophies have consequently taken a very different approach to happiness than liberalism does.3 The Buddhist position is particularly interesting. Buddhism has assigned the question of happiness more importance than perhaps any other human creed. For 2,500 years, Buddhists have systematically studied the essence and causes of happiness, which is why there is a growing interest among the scientific community both in their philosophy and their meditation practices. Buddhism shares the basic insight of the biological approach to happiness, namely that happiness results from processes occurring within one’s body, and not from events in the outside world. However, starting from the same insight, Buddhism reaches very different conclusions. According to Buddhism, most people identify happiness with pleasant feelings, while identifying suffering with unpleasant feelings. People consequently ascribe immense importance to what they feel, craving to experience more and more pleasures, while avoiding pain. Whatever we do throughout our lives, whether scratching our leg, fidgeting slightly in the chair, or fighting world wars, we are just trying to get pleasant feelings. The problem, according to Buddhism, is that our feelings are no more than fleeting vibrations, changing every moment, like the ocean waves. If five minutes ago I felt joyful and purposeful, now these feelings are gone, and I might well feel sad and dejected. So if I want to experience pleasant feelings, I have to constantly chase them, while driving away the unpleasant feelings. Even if I succeed, I immediately have to start all over again, without ever getting any lasting reward for my troubles. What is so important about obtaining such ephemeral prizes? Why struggle so hard to achieve something that disappears almost as soon as it arises? According to Buddhism, the root of suffering is neither the feeling of pain nor of sadness nor even of meaninglessness. Rather, the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness and dissatisfaction. Due to this pursuit, the mind is never satisfied. Even when experiencing pleasure, it is not content, because it fears this feeling might soon disappear, and craves that this feeling should stay and intensify. People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them. This is the aim of Buddhist meditation practices. In meditation, you are supposed to closely observe your mind and body, witness the ceaseless arising and passing of all your feelings, and realise how pointless it is to pursue them. When the pursuit stops, the mind becomes very relaxed, clear and satisfied. All kinds of feelings go on arising and passing – joy, anger, boredom, lust – but once you stop craving particular feelings, you can just accept them for what they are. You live in the present moment instead of fantasising about what might have been.

Buddhist salvation (nirvana) comes primarily from ethical excellence. If anything is rewarded, or is possibly its own reward, as we say, it is virtue not ritual. Ethical excellence is open to individuals of any social class. It does not depend on creedal religious beliefs of any sort. The universe somehow keeps track of the moral quality of one’s actions (karma), and it rewards and punishes according to that moral quality. As Gombrich writes: “I do not see how one could exaggerate the importance of Buddha’s ethicisation of the world, which I regard as a turning point in the history of civilisation.

Although none of the Buddhist sects in the countries where Buddhism is a settled tradition conceive the self naturalistically—most are dualist and thus consider mental states to be nonphysical—and although hardly any sects deny rebirth, Buddhism is being adopted and changed by people who are naturalists, agnostics, and atheists. The great appeal of Buddhism to secular naturalists of the “spiritual but not religious” type comes from the original Buddhism lending itself so easily to being demythologized or naturalized and it remaining nonetheless ethically extremely serious. The world, recall, is ethicized.

I came to understand later that the requirement to extirpate anger in the Buddhist and Stoic cases has to do with the primacy of ethics in both philosophies. The aim of ethics is to do good, to reduce pain and suffering (dukkha), and, if possible, to bring happiness in its stead. Anger, at least in one standard mode, aims to hurt, to do harm, to inflict suffering. And one should never aim to do that.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a meditation teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, has said, “Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.” What he meant is that if you want to liberate yourself from the parts of the mind that keep you from realizing true happiness, you have to first become aware of them, which can be unpleasant.

It is true that philosophy is quite aware of the Buddhistic picture of life, of the sorrows and sicknesses which drag him down at times. That is why it makes equanimity a leading item of the inner work upon himself, why it becomes so necessary. But it is also true that moments, moods, and glimpses are also possible when there is uplift, and he can confirm for himself that the human link with the higher power is a very real thing.

Popper's falsifiability thesis resonates with a major methodological principle in my own Tibetan Buddhist philosophical tradition. We might call this the "principle of the scope of negation." This principle states that there is a fundamental difference between that which is "not found" and that which is "found not to exist." If I look for something and fail to find it, this does not mean that the thing I am seeking does not exist. Not seeing a thing is not the same as seeing its non-existence.

But according to Buddhist philosophy, self-identity, the “I,” is a creation of the mind; we create self-identity because it’s convenient and useful in certain ways. We must use self-identity to live responsibly in society, but we should realize that it is merely a tool, a symbol, a sign, or a concept. Because it enables us to think and discriminate, self-identity allows us to live and function.

This science of bringing incarnations was alive in adi shaiva tradition and even in tibetan buddhist tradition. Reincarnation is neither theory nor philosophy nor concept. It is a science.

Even emptiness can become a thing. That’s what happened in Buddhist philosophy: philosophers started talking about emptiness as if emptiness were God, as if emptiness were the very substance of life. They started talking of nothing as if nothing were something. Nothing is only a word. In nature, no does not exist. No is man’s invention. In nature, everything is yes. In nature, only the positive exists. The negative is man’s invention.

Nothing is certain, even though the world is changing

[Dick] had absorbed Hume's argument that we cannot verify causality (that B follows A does not prove that A caused B), Bishop Berkeley's demonstration that physical reality cannot be objectively established (all we have are sensory impressions that seem to be real), and Kant's distinction between noumena (unknowable ultimate reality) and phenomena (a priori categories, such as space and time, imposed upon reality by the workings of the human brain). From Jung he adopted the theory of projection: The contents of our psyches strongly color our perceptions. As a coup de grace, Phil's study of Vedic and Buddhist philosophy led to a fascination with maya: True reality is veiled from unenlightened human consciousness. We create illustory realms in accordance with our fears and desires.

Because its philosophy and practice are so difficult, Buddhism began as an elite religion. But Mahāyāna Buddhism did not forget the masses, and offered them an easier road to salvation: praying to buddhas, bodhisattvas, and gods.

Though Buddhism adopted large numbers of deities from other religions, it is essentially atheistic. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) praised Buddhism as a religion that had done away with the concept of God. Buddhist deities do not by any means represent the highest existence; they are thought of as standing below the Buddha, protecting the Buddha and the Dharma. Gods are above the realm of human beings, but the buddha-realm is above all existences, and it is human beings, not the gods, that are able to reach this state. It is not easy, for it takes enormous amounts of religious training, but theoretically human beings are able to surpass the gods.

We have seen how the Buddhist conception of the universe underwent numerous changes over time. If we view those shifts as changing responses to the problem of human suffering, we can see a steady progression in one direction: Buddhists gradually ceased to regard life as suffering.

As people gradually stopped thinking of suffering as a threat, Buddhist cosmology, which had been constructed on the terror of suffering, steadily lost its connection to everyday reality. What had originally been a living belief turned into myth.

Can new inspiration spring from Buddhist cosmology's ashes? Let us look first at the idea of transmigration. Many modern people view it as outmoded, but I believe that it has many points relevant to the world today. The body of a dead worm returns to the earth, and its constituents change and become grass. This grass is eaten and becomes part of a cow, and eventually people eat the cow. Then they, too, return to the earth and become worms. If we pursued a single atom of nitrogen, we would probably find that it circulated among Gosāla's 1,406,600 kinds of living beings. People are born, and people die. They experience a variety of emotions such as anger, love, and hate, and die with their minds unsettled. They are followed, in turn, by others beginning their lives of anger, love, and hate. Human life is thus full of delusions, which actually have no absolute existence. Transmigration is the intuitive expression of this meaningless round of birth and death.

The mainstream of Chinese Ch'an provided the background tradition for Buddhism in Vietnam, particularly Vietnamese Zen Buddhism. An Indian monk and student of the third patriarch of Chinese Ch'an, Sêng-ts'an, a Chinese monk and disciple of the prominent master Pai-chang, and a second Chinese monk and follower of the famous Hsüeh-t'ou founded the first three schools of Zen Buddhism in Vietnam. Other schools of Buddhist philosophy and practice were also introduced to the country, and various indigenous sects grew up around celebrated Vietnamese masters. In the later development of Vietnamese Zen, the Lâm-Tế (C. Lin-chi, J. Rinzai) branch of practice came to the country and found firm basis for its growth through the innovations of a talented Vietnamese master, so that today most Buddhist monks, nuns, and laymen in Vietnam belong to the Lâm-Tế Zen tradition.

As Zen is a discipline and not a philosophy, it directly deals with life; and this is where Zen has developed its most characteristic features.

Despite all the challenges and opportunities Zen Buddhism has faced in the modern era—including the rise of a more socially conscious and committed Engaged Buddhism, the breakdown of a clear distinction between monastics and lay practitioners, and the dissolution of gender discrimination in Western adaptations of Zen institutions (see Chapters 14, 16, and 18)—arguably there have not been any fundamental doctrinal challenges on a level comparable to the contemporary questioning of the very meaning of "God" by many progressive Christian theologians and philosophers. A possible exception is a preference for metaphorical-psychological over literal-cosmological interpretations of Buddhist doctrines such as the Six Realms of Rebirth and the Pure Land by many modern Zen teachers, but even this is hardly without traditional precedent (see Chapters 12 and 23).

As will be on display throughout this book, Zen has all along been an ironically "iconoclastic tradition." Some of its canonical stories include Bodhidharma (fifth–sixth centuries) telling Emperor Wu that he has gained no karmic merit from all of his meritorious activities, and that the most sacred truth is that that there is nothing sacred; depictions of Huineng (seventh century) tearing up the sutras; Linji (ninth century) encouraging his students to "kill the Buddha"; Ikkyū (fifteenth century) writing erotic poetry about his steamy love affair during the last decade of his life with a blind musician; and "an older woman of Hara" (seventeenth century) boldly retorting "Hey, you aren't enlightened yet!" after she told the eminent master Hakuin of her luminously enlightening experience and he tested her by saying that "Nothing can shine in your asshole. " Contemporary Zen Buddhists should feel free to carry on this irreverent and iconoclastic tradition of destroying false idols of Zen—but only insofar as they have sufficiently imbibed its true spirit and are doing so in a genuine effort to keep it alive and let it thrive.

The Abhidharmakośa describes the universe as follows. A cycle of wind (vāyumaṇḍala) floats in space (ākāśa). This wind circle is disk-shaped [ten to the the fifty-ninth power] yojanas in circumference and 1,600,000 yojanas in depth. (There are various explanations concerning the length of a yojana; one says it is about seven kilometres.) Resting on the wind circle is a disk of water (jalamaṇḍala); it has a diameter of 1,203,450 yojanas and a depth of 800,000 yojanas. Above the water circle is a disk-shaped layer of golden earth (kāñcanamaṇḍala) of the same diameter and 320,000 yojanas in depth. Its upper surface supports mountains, seas, and islands. To visualize the composition more easily, imagine a basin (the water circle) placed on top of a washtub (the wind circle), with a birthday cake (the golden earth circle with mountains) surmounting it.

There are nine mountain ranges on the surface of the golden earth layer. Towering in the very centre is Mount Sumeru, with seven ranges forming concentric squares around it.

Mount Sumeru, with a height of some 560,000 kilometres, is far taller than the tallest mountain in the Himalayas. The name Sumeru (sometimes Śumeru) recalls Sumer (or Sumer), the centre of an ancient Mesopotamian civilization. The similarity in names seems to be no more than a coincidence, however. The earliest appearance of the mountain's name in literature is in the Mahābhārata, the great Indian epic composed between the fourth century B.C.E. and the fourth century C.E., where it is called Meru. Buddhism no doubt adopted the name from that source. By adding the eulogistic Indo-Aryan prefix su- ("wonderful"), we get Sumeru.

Buddhism divides living beings into five types: gods (deva), human beings (manusya), animals (tiryañc), spirits of the dead (pert), and inhabitants of the hells (naraka). These states of existence, among which living beings transmigrate (are reborn) depending on their karma, are called the five or six paths (see figure 14).

All living beings within the "realm of desire" (kāma-dhātu). Human beings and animals live together on the surface of the Mount Sumeru realm. Spirits and demonic gods live 500 yojanas under the earth, and the inhabitants of the hells, even deeper. Gods of various types live in the upper places, in the realm of form (rūpa-dhātu) and beyond that, in the realm of formlessness (ārūpya-dhātu). The realm of desire, form, and formlessness are known collectiveness as the "three realms" (tri-dhātu), in other words, the three kinds of worlds in which living beings exist. Tri-dhātu is a synonym for the universe as a whole, or for all existence.

Most religious cosmologies include the existence of hells somewhere in the universe, and Buddhism is no exception. "Hell" is a translation of the Indic word naraka (or niraya), "devoid of happiness." The hells are mentioned in a large number of Buddhist sūtras, either as a single entity, as in the Verses on the Law (Dhammapada, 4th-3d century B.C.E.), or as a system of individually named hells, as in the Abhidharma commentaries (very early Buddhist writings). They were certainly not systematized into an elaborate structure such as we see in the Abhidharmakośa for a very long time.

It is a common pattern in Asian religions that hells below complement heavens above. In Buddhism, just as there are many hells, there are countless numbers of devas, and a multitude of heavens, summarized in figure 17.

On the summit of Mount Sumeru is the heaven of the thirty-three gods (trays-triṃśāḥ), whose roles are also somewhat mysterious, except for Indra.

So far we have seen a universe with inhabitants living on the earth, in hells, in the realm of the hungry spirits, and in heavens. It shares many elements with the cosmologies of other religions. Buddhism, though, is perhaps unique in positing an additional realm of dhyāna practitioners above the realm of gods. This consists of the "realm of form" (rūpa-dhātu) and the "realm of formlessness" (ārūpya-dhātu). Form (rūpa) is that which has shape and is characterized by constant change and destruction. Rūpa-dhātu, therefore, is where those having form dwell. Of course the possession of form is a condition shared also by those who occupy the realm of desire (kāma-dhātu). Nevertheless when we speak of the realm of form we do not include the realm of desire, for those who dwell there have gained release from all desires, so that only their physical bodies remain. This is the realm of those who practice dhyāna ("meditation"), which includes the two practice softball "quieting the mind" and "observing the nature of things." Buddhist priests, and indeed we ourselves, may climb to a realm higher than that inhabited by the gods by pursuing the practice of meditation to its limits.

When asked why the wind circle upholding the Sumeru realm did not disperse, Indian scholars said that it was held together by the force of karma ("action") of living beings. Indians believed that all action leaves behind results; good actions leave good results, and evil actions leave evil results. Therefore, action does not disappear as soon as it is completed. An unseen force remains, the consequence of both individual actions and the actions of all living beings taken together. Buddhism calls the entirety of action, including its results, combined karma or common karma. It is this combined karma that prevents the wind circle from dispersing.

The idea of karma and transmigration are the foundation of Buddhist cosmology, whose purpose is to illuminate their nature and relationship to human existence. Unlike the modern scientific view of the cosmos, Buddhist cosmology is meaningless without the human element.

Transmigration (saṃsāra) means the repeated cycle of birth and death in this realm of delusion. Literally "flowing together," saṃsāra is an expression of living beings buffeted by waves and at the mercy of water, perhaps a powerful river whose current carries us from place to place. As we have seen, rebirth has five or six destinations. The Abhidharmakośa gives five—the inhabitants of hells, hungry spirits, animals, human beings, and devas. This is the Sarvāstivādin point of view; other schools gave six, the above five plus the asuras. In Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, the version favoring six paths gained popularity, and th expression "transmigration among the six paths" is well known throughout East Asia.

The gods, too, are inhabitants of the realm of delusion. They may have received the most pleasant existence of the six paths, but they are still subject to the three poisons of greed, anger, and ignorance, so they may eventually fall into the realms of the hells or the hungry spirits.

The idea of rebirth is also reflected in biographies of the Buddha. The Buddha experiences a variety of previous births, during which he practices his religious discipline and appears as a perfected being. The Jātakas, tales of the Buddha's former lives, relate how he amasses great numbers of virtues. In some of them, he is shown as having been born previously as a monkey or a deer.

Of equal importance to the idea of transmigration is the concept of karma. Karma (also karman) means "action," and it consists of both action and its power of influence. "Action" does not refer just to bodily movements, but also includes the actions of speech and mind. An action's power of influence is not confined to this life but extends to future lives as well.

Karma affects the destiny of the entire natural realm, not only that of the individual. For example, when the universe is about to come into being, a subtle wind begins to stir, and what causes it to quicken is "the indirect force of the karma of the various living beings." The water that eventually develops is prevented from dispersing because "it is maintained by the force of the karma of all living beings." This force also creates the hells and the heavens. In Buddhism, this combined karmic force is called common karma.

Karma functions automatically, without the need of some kind of godlike arbitrator. Meritorious acts give rise to good results, and evil causes adverse results. This is a law analogous to natural law. Each person receives upon him- or herself that retribution or rewards for his or her own acts. That is why Buddhist texts do not say "to be punished" or "to be thrown into hell," as though a god were the agent, but rather "to receive retribution" and "to fall into hell.

The idea of transmigration hardly appears in the Hindu Ṛg Veda (12th–8th century B.C.E.), though by the time the new religious movements arose in the sixth to fifth centuries B.C.E., most of the important ones included a philosophy of transmigration, outstanding examples being Buddhism, Jainism, and the religion of the Ājīvikas. We also find the idea in Brahmanism in the new literature called the Upaniṣads.

What we should note is that the Greeks believed that the soul transmigrated, while Buddhism denied the existence of a soul. In the Buddhist work Milinda's Questions (Milindapañha, compiled in the 1st century B.C.E.–1st century C.E.), the Greek King Menandros (Menander) questions the Buddhist Nāgasena about the seeming contradiction between the Buddhist ideas of rebirth and a non-self. The king asks how rebirth takes place without anything transmigration, and Nāgasena replies as follows: "It is as if, sire, some person might light a lamp. Would it burn all night long?" "Yes, revered sir, it might burn all night long." "Is the flame of the first watch the same as the flame of the middle watch?" "No, reverend sir." "Is the flame of the middle watch the same as the flame of the third watch?" "No, reverend sir." "Is it then, sire, that the lamp in the first watch was one thing, the lamp in the middle watch another, and the lamp in the last watch still another?" "O no, reverend sir, it was burning all through the night inn dependence on itself." "Even so, sire, a continuity of dramas ["beings, existences, persons"] runs on; one uprises, another ceases; it runs on as though there was no before, no after; consequently neither the one [dhamma] nor another is reckoned as the last consciousness." This passage states the belief of Buddhists that there is no continuous and eternal "I." While the lamp burns, the flame changes from moment to moment, yet it is as if it were the same flame. The flame of the first watch is the "I" of the present, and the flame of the middle watch is the "I" of the future.

A buddha's mission is to rescue living beings trapped in the worlds of transmigration. A buddha appears in the world as a result of his aspiration toward enlightenment in former existences and his accumulation of various kinds of practice in a single world system (or, some say, in a trichiliocosm, described in chapter 4). Śākyamuni, th Buddha who appeared in India, was one such buddha.

To attain enlightenment is not an easy thing. The Japanese call a person who has died hotoke, which means "buddha." Under the influence of Christianity, there has also been a recent tendency in Japan for mothers to explain a father's death to children by saying that he has gone to heaven. I hesitate to shatter children's dreams, but according to Buddhism those fathers are almost certainly not in heaven. In Buddhism, death alone cannot make a person a buddha; in all likelihood the dead person would merely be reborn in a hell or as a hungry spirit. To attain enlightenment, and to enter heaven, demands effort and faith.

According to Indian tradition, fundamental truth cannot be attained through daily, busy life, but only by the concentrated mind. The concentration of mind is variously called yoga, samādhi, or dhyāna. Yoga (etymologically the same as the English yoke) means "attaching the mind to one object," "concentrating the mind on one thing." Samādhi means "putting together (the mind which always tends to disperse)." The Hindu yoga school probably started before the common era, but its most important scripture, the Yoga-sūtra, was composed by Patañjali around the fifth century C.E. Many new yogic sects subsequently developed. One of them, Haṭhayoga (haṭha, "force, pertinacity") which developed after the twelfth century C.E., specializes in bodily training, in the belief that the body's function and the spirit's function are inseparable.

To understand the worldview of Buddhism, it is necessary to comprehend the concept of the thousand-cubed great-thousand-world, or trichiliocosm. We begin by examining what a "single world" consists of. The Chinese translation of the Abhidharmakośa describes its horizontal limits in the expression, "The Iron Mountains [Cakravāḍa] encircle a single world." A single world thus includes Mount Sumeru, its surrounding mountain ranges and seas, and four landmasses. The vertical boundaries are not as clear, but appear to extend from the circle of wind to Brahmā's world, the First Dhyāna heavens of the realm of form. The heaven of the greatest of all the gods is therefore the upper limit of a single world (see figure 21). The higher dhyāna practitioners in the realms of form and formlessness, and the buddhas, are beyond this world, but all the other five (or six) types of beings dwell in the single world. The world also includes one sun, one moon, and the stars. In modern terms, a single world may equal the solar system.

A thousand single worlds are called a "small-thousand-world." (Small thousand means "one thousand.") In modern terms, this would be a galaxy. One thousand small-thousand-worlds make a medium-thousand world. "Medium-thousand" is dvi-sāhasra (literally, "2,000"), a term used to mean 1,000 [to the second power], that is, a million worlds. One thousand medium-thousand-worlds make a great-thousand world. "Great-thousand" (try-sāhasra, literally, "3,000") denotes 1,000 [to the third power], that is, one billion worlds. A great-thousand-world is also called a "thousand-cubed- great-thousand-world" (try-sāhasra-mahāsāhasro loka-dhātuḥ), or trichiliocosm. These worlds all experience the Buddhist cycle of existence and disappearance together, so they can be called a single unit in term so destiny.

The concept of the trichiliocosm is closely linked with Buddhist theories about time and human destiny. Buddhist thought is generally clouded with pessimism, and this is nowhere more obvious than in its concept of time. The notion of an eternal round of birth and death is an intolerable thought.

In the Abhidharmakośa, time units finish with "year" (saṃvatsara). There is, however, another enormous unit of time that we could add, the kalpa, which is so long that it cannot be calculated in years. (The Chinese transliterated kalpa as kiap and translated it as "great time." In the Japanese game of Go there is a rule known as kō [Japanese for kiap] to prevent stalemates through constant repetition. Without it, the game could continue indefinitely.)

The universe, with its multiple worlds and variety of living beings, eternally repeats a cycle of fourfold change (see figure 23). Each of the four periods lasts twenty intermediate kalpas, so one complete cycle takes eighty intermediate kalpas. The cycle includes the Kalpa of Dissolution (Saṃvartakalpa); the Kalpa of Nothingness (Saṃvartasthāyi-kalpa), during which the world remains dissolved; the Kalpa of Creation (Vivartakalpa); and the Kalpa of Duration of the created world (Vivartasthāyikalpa). That the cycle starts with dissolution is a very Indian way of thinking, as is the custom of calculating the month from the full moon.

The Kalpa of Dissolution begins when beings are no longer reborn in the hells. When all living beings disappear from the hells, the hells themselves vanish. The process is repeated in the abode of hungry spirits and animals. As for human beings, when one person is reborn in a First Dhyāna heavens, when one of their number is reborn in a Second Dhyāna heaven and experiences the joy resulting form samādhi, all the others receive an impetus to enter samādhi and be reborn there. When the karma of living beings that created the world is finally exhausted (because there are no more living beings in the world), seven suns appear and burn up the wind circle, water circle, golden earth layer, Mount Sumeru, the four landmasses, and the Brahmā palace at the highest point of the First Dhyāna heavens. Being who escaped, so to speak, to the Second Dhyāna can evade this catastrophe. When the hells and the abodes of the hungry spirits and animals finally disappear, evil ones living in the human world might clap their hands in glee, saying, "Now I can do anything I want to. There is now no longer any place below the human realm to which I can fall." Similarly, those who entered the hells just before their final dissolution would no doubt rejoice that their period of torment would be very short. Their joy would be premature, however. The Abhidharmakośa says that the inhabitants of hells who have not yet received their full measure of punishment would be transferred by the force of their karma to a hell in another universe.

The Kalpa of Creation begins when a tiny wind begins to blow "through the indirect force of the karma of living beings" (who and where these living beings are is not clear). The wind circle forms, then the water circle, the golden earth layer, the soil, the four landmasses, and Mount Sumeru. The palaces and abodes reappear exactly as they were before, peopled by the rebirth in lower realms of those who had escaped to the Second Dhyāna heavens at the time of the period of dissolution. Some beings are born in the Brahmā palaces in the highest First Dhyāna heaven, some in the lower Para-nirmita-vaśavartin and Nirmāṇarati heavens and other heavens of the realm of desire, some in the Pūrvavideha, Jambudvīpa, Aparagodānīya, or Uttarakuru, and some in the lower realms—those of animals or hungry spirits, or hell. When the universe has been thus filled from top to bottom with living beings, the Kalpa of Creation ends. During this time, the human life span is "infinite.

In this way the universe follows the cycle of dissolution, nothingness, creation, and duration of what is created. The length of one such cycle (eighty intermediate kalpas) is called a "great kalpa" (mahākalpa).

According to Buddhism, the human life span today has diminished to around a hundred years, and will continue to decrease. That we are living in a time of increasing evil is a common idea among ancient people.

According to Buddhist theory, the Buddha's teachings degenerate over three periods. These are called the period of the True Dharma, when teaching, practice, and attainment of emancipation are all possible; the period of Counterfeit Dharma, when only teaching and practice of Buddhism remain and emancipation is impossible; and the period of the Decay of the Dharma, when only the Buddhist teachings survive. One theory states that the first period lasted five hundred years after the death of Śākyamuni and the second, one thousand years, whereas the third will continue for ten thousand years. Another theory makes the first and second periods last one thousand years and the third, ten thousand.

Buddhists consider a personal encounter with a buddha a rare chance, and an occasion for deep gratitude. The rarity of this opportunity is emphasized by the Buddhist saying that it is as difficult for a living being to be born human and to encounter the Buddha as for a blind turtle that raises its head above the surface of the sea only once in a hundred years to put its head in a hole in a floating log. This metaphor encourages the devotee to pursue religious training.

In northwest India around the third century C.E., the belief grew that Maitreya would be the next buddha, following Śākyamuni. At present accumulating religious training as a bodhisattva, Maitreya is the focus of hope of those born too late to enjoy Śākyamuni's salvation. All the same, he is not due to appear until 5,670,000,000 years after Śākyamuni's death.

Much of Buddhist cosmology seems fantastical. The physical layout of the cosmos has a logic mostly unrelated to what we know of the universe, and the mathematical calculations consist of apparently arbitrary numbers which, however, are strangely precise. Naturally, ideas such as the centrality of the Indian experience to the cosmology and the existence of hells inside the earth do not hold true today. All the same, we do not necessarily gain by interpreting Buddhist cosmology purely in terms of geography and revealing all its deficiencies, for to a certain extent it was constructed as a symbolic representation. For example, we may infer that the authors of the cosmology depicted it symbolically from the first, given the overly schematic description of the universe and the too-artificial numbers of the worlds' dimensions. Of course those authors did not come out and say that their cosmology was symbolic. Because of the boldness of expression though, both speakers and hearers must have understood it as being so. If we comprehend it in this way, we can appreciate the sophistication of ancient Buddhist cosmology. It explained graphically, in a way that is easy to memorize, the entire picture of the world and the universe. In this sense it is of little import the the individual numbers and configurations do not match reality.

While in Hīnayāna Buddhism the Buddha appears and disappears in the universe, in Mahāyāna thought the Buddha is the universe itself, eternal existence. This idea was probably influenced by the notion of Brahmā, Brahmanism's fundamental principle of the universe, and by Hinduism's concept of the gods Viṣṇu and Śiva.

Mahāyāna Buddhism arose in India around the first century C.E. It can be classified into three periods: early, or dynamic (1st century C.E. to 4th century C.E.), middle, or scholastic (4th–mid-7th century), and late, or esoteric (mid-7th–early 13th century).

Sahā refers to the world in which we live, the stage for Śākyamuni's appearance and the object of his teaching. Sahā, "a place where suffering is endured," (and its variant Sabhā, "confused congregation") appears to derive from the Sanskrit word sabhaya, meaning "a land of fear." All these words describe the world as a realm of defilements, filled with suffering.

Mahāyāna thought posits not just one buddha, but many buddhas throughout the universe. . . . They possess their own lands, apart from the Sahā world, in which they teach. These are called buddha-lands, buddha-realms, or pure lands. Best known are the Realm of Profound Joy or Akṣobhya Buddha, the Pure Lapis-lazuli World of Bhaiṣajya-guru Buddha, and the Pure Land of Sukhāvati of Amida (Amitābha/Amitāyus). Resembling buddha-lands, though not strictly identical, is the Tuṣita heaven, one of the six heavens of the realm of desire and the dwelling place of bodhisattvas prior to their appearance on earth as buddhas. Śākyamuni descended to Jambudvīpa from there, and at present Maitreya, the future buddha, lives there. Another place resembling buddha-lands is Mount Potalaka, said to be located in the sea south of India, where Avalokitśvara Bodhisattva dwells. The Sahā world might seem to be the buddha-land of Śākyamuni; it is not, however, a "pure land," but rather a defiled realm, and thus is quite distinct from the buddha-lands. Śākyamuni, moreover, is a historical person and other buddhas are mythological or metaphysical beings.

In the pre-Mahāyāna Abhidharmakośa, the Buddha is described as gaining liberation from the three realms of desire, form, and formlessness and returning to nothingness. Such a return to complete nothingness (termed nirupadhiśeṣa-nirvāṇa, "nirvāṇa without residue") was the goal of pre-Mahāyāna Buddhists. They had no concept of a buddha that retains form and is active in a buddha-land. In Mahāyāna Buddhism, though, the buddhas resolve to train themselves to build their own buddha-lands and work eternally to bring to those lands all the living beings now lost in delusion. We of Sahā can be reborn virtually only in Sukhāvatī, because Amitābha is the only buddha who offers us an effective means for rebirth there (i.e., nembutsu, calling upon Amitābha). Though Śākyamuni and Amitābha have completely different origins, the Pure Land sūtras depict Śākyamuni as expounding Amitābha's teachings.

There are two theories concerning the location of Amitābha Buddha's pure Land of Sukhāvastī. One places it within the three realms, and the other places it outside them. The reason for this division of opinion lies in the fact that classical cosmology did not speak of buddha-lands. All agree, however, that Sukhāvatī is "ten myriads of a hundred millions of buddha-lands to the west of Sahā," an expression found in the Chinese translations of the Smaller and Larger Sukhāvatī-vyūha sūtras.

As the Chinese translation of the name Sukhāvatī suggests, it is a land of supreme joy. The Sanskrit is of similar meaning: “that which possesses ease and comfort.” Sukhāvatī is not subject to the sufferings that plague this world and, furthermore, it is a land of surpassed beauty. It is described as having seven tiers of balustrades, seven rows of nets, and seven rows of trees, all adorned with four jewels (gold, silver, lapsis lazuli, and crystal). There is a lake of the seven jewels (gold, silver, lapis lazuli, crystal, a kind of big shell [tridacna gigas], coral, and agate), filled with water having the eight virtues. The bottom of the lake is gold sand. On the four sides of the lake are stairs (galleries) made of the four jewels. Above are towers and palaces also adorned with the seven jewels. Above are towers and palaces also adorned with the seven jewels. In the lake bloom lotus flowers as large as chariot wheels. The blue lotus flowers emit a blue light, and the yellow, red, and white lotus flowers emit light of corresponding colors. They all give forth a sweet fragrance. The delightful sound of heavenly music can be hard, and in the morning, at noon, and in the evening mandārava flowers fall from the sky and gently pile up on the golden ground. Every morning the inhabitants of the Pure Land gather these flowers with the hems of their robes and make offerings of them to myriads of buddhas in other lands. At mealtime they return to their own land, where they take their meal and stroll around. There are many kinds of birds—swans, peacocks, parrots, sharikas, kalaviṅkas, and jīvaṃjīvakas, which sing with beautiful voices, proclaiming the teachings of the Buddha. When living beings hear this song, they think about the Buddha, Dharma (“law,” or his teachings), and Saṅgha (“community of believers”). When the gentle breezes blow, the rows of four-jeweled trees and jeweled nets give forth a gentle music, like a beautiful symphony. In this land dwell Amitābha Buddha and his two attendants, the bodhisattvas Avalokitśvara and Mahāsthāmaprāpta. At their feet are those virtuous beings who have been reborn in that land because of their ardent faith. All, however, are male; women of deep faith are reborn here with male bodies. The female sex, considered inferior and unfortunate, has no place in Sukhāvatī. All people, says Śākyamuni, should ardently wish for rebirth in that land and become the companions of the most virtuous of all beings. People cannot hope for rebirth there just by performing a few good deeds, however. If living beings meditate eagerly upon the name of Amitābha for even one day with an undisturbed mind, Amitābha and his holy retinue will appear before them to receive them at the end of Life. They will enter the Pure Land with unperturbed hearts.

The idea of Sukhāvatī certainly grew out of a concept of a material paradise, but early on it became allied with an elevated spiritual and ethical outlook, the teaching of the Buddha as rescuer, in which Amitābha Buddha, lord of Sukhāvatī, saves those who meditate upon him. Classical Buddhism taught that salvation must occur by one's own efforts ("self-power"). Those who had lost hope in salvation through their own efforts flocked to the new teaching of salvation through the power of another, i.e., of Amitābha Buddha. At first, people attracted to this new teaching were probably motivated by a desire to escape from suffering into what was conceived of as a materially satisfying land. But Sukhāvatī was soon linked with the idea of good and evil, and those who sought to be reborn in Sukhāvatī did so out of despair at their own evil. A good example of such a thinker iS Shinran (1173–1262 C.E.), the Japanese priest who founded the True Pure Land (Jōdo Shin) sect. Modern Pure Land thought resembles Christianity in many ways—the strong monotheistic coloration, salvation through the Buddha (God), the concern with good and evil rather than with suffering and pleasure. In the mid-twentieth century, Kamegai Ryōun, a Jōdo Shin sect priest, converted to Christianity on the grounds that the Jōdo Shin sect was preparing the road leading to Christianity. It certainly seems possible that in its two thousand years, Pure Land thought has been influenced by Christian ideas (by the Christian Nestorian sect of Ch'ang-an in east-central China, for example).

Buddhist cosmology according to the Hīnayāna tradition centers on (1) the realm of Mount Sumeru, (2) dharmas (the Buddha's teachings), and (3) the notion that the Buddha (Śākyamuni) is a historical person. In Mahāyāna Buddhism, (1) the various "buddha-realms" are more prominent than Mount Sumeru, (2) the Buddha (or buddhas) takes precedence over dharmas, and (3) the Buddha is a superhuman (cosmological) existence.

All matter is said to be made up of the "four great elements" (catvāri mahā-bhūtāni): earth, water, fire, and wind. Whereas the paramāṇus [atoms] are matter, the four great elements seem to be energy. They are not the physical earth, water, fire, and wind that we see or feel around us; they are invisible, though they do occupy space. As energy, the four great elements constitute paramāṇus, and it is only when numbers of paramāṇus congregate that we are able to perceive earth, water, fire, or wind themselves, or any other matter that exists.

In Buddhism, the common Sanskrit term for "universe" is loka-dhatū. It refers to a place that has come into existence through the karma (actions and their enduring results) produced by living beings. The universe is also maintained by karma and disintegrates through the action of karma. In later Buddhism, it was believed that the loka-dhatū existed within the human mind. The term universe came to have such a strong connotation of human life and destiny that it almost ceased to connote the universe as a spatial entity.

Although transmission lineages in Zen begin with the Seven Buddhas of Antiquity, the seventh of which is Shakyamuni Buddha, many Zen practitioners do not understand the core of their practice to depend on the historical existence of even Shakyamuni Buddha, much less the six mythical Buddhas that are said to have preceded him. If historical scholarship were to one day prove that Jesus was a fictional character made up by the authors of the New Testament, that would be doctrinally devastating to Christianity. Christians would have to fundamentally rethink their understanding of the Incarnation as a unique historical event. By contrast, many Zen Buddhists have said that even were it to be revealed someday that Shakyamuni Buddha did not exist as a historical person, the core teachings and practices of Zen Buddhism would remain unaffected.

Starting in the sixth century in China, Zen was formed by way of a creative synthesis of Buddhist teachings and practices imported from India with the Chinese traditions of Confucianism and especially Daoism. Centuries later, starting in the twelfth century, Zen was brought to Japan, where for eight centuries it has developed in conjunction with Japanese culture and Shintō sensibilities. Over the course of the last century, Zen has been imported to the United States and other Western countries, initially from Japan and later also from Korea, China, and Vietnam.

Though we have translated deva as "god" and "deity," there is a vast difference between Indian gods and the modern Judeo-Christian idea of a deity. The Buddhist being that is closest to the Judeo-Christian notion of God is the Buddha. We cannot, though, in the narrowest sense of the word, call the Buddha a god.

At first, the Buddha meant Śākyamuni alone. Even today that remains true in countries that follow the Theravāda (a type of pre-Mahāyāna) tradition. At a very early period in Buddhist history, however, there arose the idea of the seven buddhas of the past: Vipassin (in Pali, Vipśyin in Skirt), Sikhin (Śikhin), Vessabhū (Viśvabhū), Kakusandha (Krakucchanda), Ko ṇāgamana (Kanakamuni), Kassapa (Kāśyapa), and Sākyamuni (Śākyamuni). It is interesting to note that though Sākyamuni is the most recent of the buddhas, he is still considered a buddha of the past. As Mahāyāna developed, the buddhas of the past grew in number. In the Larger Sukhāvatī-vyūha (ca. 100 C.E.), eighty buddhas are said to have made their appearance while Amitābha Buddha was still training (the Chinese translation puts this number at fifty-three). The names of the seven buddhas of the past do not appear in this sūtra, perhaps indicating that the eighty buddhas belong to an even earlier period.

In modern times, the idea of existential suffering has further weakened. Human life is no longer regarded as a realm of suffering but instead as a setting for the actualization of human happiness.

Here we seem to have arrived at the terminus of Buddhist cosmology as a practical philosophy. It is a point all ancient views of the universe have finally reached. As knowledge is disseminated in ever-greater amounts, people have sought out the rational and overturned old dogmas.

Buddhist cosmology is a spiritual legacy of the past, yet it remains a force capable of stirring the imagination of people today. Like old ceremonial garments no longer worn, it retains an attraction for us and can transport our minds to the spiritual world of ancient and medieval people, in the same way that the Greek myths, though they have lost their significance as a religion, continue to maintain their hold on our imagination.

Pessimism regards this world as imperfect, but it does not deny everything. In these terms, Indian Buddhism is certainly pessimistic, for it denies that the reality of this world is anything more than transmigratory existence. But it has one clear purpose, liberation, and it sets out along a defined road, religious training. Transmigration and liberation from transmigration: these are the two wheels of the chariot of Indian Buddhism, indispensable to its view of human life.

Buddhist texts often emphasize how being intelligent and knowing a lot, while certainly helpful, are not the same as being skillful in life—nor are they as effective in awakening us from unhealthy, self-destructive ways of living. Calling certain ways of living "skillful" and others "unskillful" implies that these are capacities that can be cultivated, skills that can be acquired through practice. Although some people might seem to have more or less innate talent for a particular skill, or were raised din a way that emphasized or reinforced that skill, the development of skill is a possibility open to anyone and everyone. And they are always matters of degree.

Although practice doesn't ever make "perfect," it almost always makes "better.

The Buddha imagines his role not predominantly as a philosopher, mystic, prophet, or warrior against evil but instead as a physician, a healer.

The basic Buddhist insight is that if much suffering is self-caused through habitual maladaptive behavior, then much suffering can also be alleviated through the intentional development of a skillful life of health and awareness.

We will all make mistakes, we will all get sick, we will all be diminished by aging, and, against every fragment of our willpower, we will all be ruthlessly eliminated by the powers of death. What Buddhist philosophy of life asks is, given that the world just is this way, and given that both joy and pain are inevitable parts of life, what would a healthy, insightful response to the sheer fact of this reality be?

What Vimalakirti demonstrates in every aspect of his life is the ability to excel at the most sophisticated teachings and practices of Buddhist monastic culture while simultaneously living a very worldly life. By picturing this conjunction of presumed opposites in the life of its central character, the sutra suggests a possibility for Buddhism that no one had previously imagined. It claims boldly that the highest and most refined achievements of Buddhism are in fact open to anyone regardless of their vocation in life.

Although we all begin our transformative practice, if we begin at all, focused entirely on all the good it will do for us as individuals, the long-term effect of these practices is to loosen that inevitable self-absorption and help us to see that liberation is not so much for the self as it is from the self.

Either you live the life of a layperson or you live a monastic life― one or the other. That was the standard assumption. Yet Vimalakirti is pictured as a layperson who at least in certain respects lives like a monk.

Vimalakirti's solitude is a state of mind rather than a living arrangement.

Different generations think and speak differently and crossing those cultural barriers takes wisdom and empathetic rapport.

While the elders are mostly set in their mental ways, and while the middle-aged folks are busy scratching out a living, the children can be remarkably flexible of mind. They are often able to envision ways of being that are fundamentally different and occasionally better than the customs and habits of their families and communities.

The bodhisattva's practice is aimed not at the suppression of desire but at its reorientation to a purpose larger than individual gain and personal pleasure.

Vimalakirti's aim was to live in accordance with his vow of compassion for all living beings, and he is described as doing that in every conceivable context. So if we're businesspeople, we see what it would mean to be principled in our pursuit of profit. If we're landlords, we get a model of a relationship to tenants that is fair and respectful. If we're Buddhist meditators who shun loud, complicated urban settings, we are given an image of someone who maintains mindfulness even in the most troubling, complex circumstances.

The bodhisattva vow is to be there with us and for us, not above us or beyond us.

A truly meditative life seeks to be more thoroughly exposed to the world rather than sealed off from it.

The point of bodhisattva practice is to cultivate a life that is physically, mentally, and spiritually passionate in its encounter with all dimensions of human experience.

To renounce active life in the world rather than one's own grasping and clinging is to forgo the chance to awaken.

The Vimalakīrti Sūtra names generosity as an essential feature of Buddhist enlightenment. The Buddha and enlightened bodhisattvas are pictured as generous above all else. They give themselves—their time, their resources, their wisdom, and their compassionate action—to all living beings. As with other human virtues, though, their generosity is not innate. It "arises dependent" upon specific causes and conditions that need to be cultivated. Bodhisattvas' ability to give is the result of a discipline of mental training. They have trained their minds to respond to others in a spirit of open generosity by visualizing the plight of suffering beings and all of the ways that they might help alleviate their suffering. Meditating repeatedly on possible acts of giving, they strive to internalize deep feelings of generosity so that when real opportunities for giving appear, generosity comes forth naturally and spontaneously.

The motives for giving are numerous, each rationale showing us something basic about who we really are behind the act of giving.

Acts of self-promotional generosity are nonetheless still acts of giving. In most cases that is better than no giving at all.

What is the basis of freedom and why is it so satisfying? Vimalakirti says that in an authentic moment of giving we are "free of the habits of 'I' and 'mine'" (32), that the feeling derives from being "without grasping," "without attachment" (32), and "free of the habitual notion of possession" (25). He says further than in a generous act we are "joyful and without regret" because the weight of our "selves" has been momentarily lifted. That sense of exhilarating selflessness is what generates "the great joy of the bodhisattva" (57). In being able to give, we feel some degree of elation, a sense of being lifted out of ourselves into an experience of liberation that is buoyant and joyful, even if momentary.

Working past deeply embedded habits of self-absorption is extremely difficult, precisely because these habits are so much a part of our cumulative character, the result of literally millions of unconscious acts generated out of concern for our own safety and well-being. For this reason, the Vimalakīrti Sūtra insists that practices of generosity must be accompanied by skillfully honed wisdom and that we should always be on the lookout for false forms of generosity.

Rules are social conventions that generalize what would be good to do in situations of a certain kind. Although these rules are a convenient standard against which to judge the quality of our actions, the variety and uniqueness of moral situations require a fine-tuned sense of perception and judgment to determine when and how the rules apply to particular circumstances.

The sutra pictures Vimalakirti living his bodhisattva vow, that is, caring as much about the well-being of others as he does about his own. He lives selflessly, as though he has or is "no isolated self," because his sense of identity now encompasses his relations with others. The self/other dichotomy has been transformed in the paramita of morality. The boundaries that once defined his identity in opposition to others have been enlarged to include others. That is a significant dimension of what it means to live selflessly. Although Buddhist texts routinely refer to this as an experience of "no-self," it could just as easily be described as an expansion of the self, an enlargement empowered by a profound reverence for the whole of life.

The Sanskrit word kṣānti, frequently translated as "tolerance," means being "able to endure," "able to withstand," "unaffected by" situations in the world that would overwhelm and undermine the rest of us. It indicates a deep composure and strength of character that allow the bodhisattva to face enormous difficulties without collapsing under the pressures of fear and anxiety.

Buddhist teachings on the capacity for tolerance are related to the realization that human suffering is an inevitable factor in our lives and that everything depends on how we respond to the impact of pain, threats, and a whole range of difficulties.

We respond badly to fear, overindulge in emotions of loss, and fall into despairing surrender far too easily. Living skillfully requires that we work in advance to examine our response patterns under such pressures, and that we transform the counterproductive ways we face up to all the difficulties of life.

True justice demands deep understanding, and neither self-righteous anger nor revenge can bring that about.

Desires are the source of drive and aspiration in human life. They provide the energy for a whole range of human accomplishments, including the spiritual quest for awakening. Bodhicitta, the thought of enlightenment for all living beings, evolves in the minds of bodhisattvas to become the primal desire, the deepest source of energy.

One of the implications of this sutra is not only that ordinary lay life is an acceptable role for dedicated Buddhists but also that this form of life is well positioned for a range of practices inspired by the bodhisattva vow of wise, compassionate involvement in the world.

If the contemplative practices of meditation are ultimately for active life, then long-term monastic retreat from active life might not be the best way to deepen its effects, at least not always or for everyone.

For Vimalakirti, everything—every encounter, every problem, frustration, and issue—is an opportunity for practice.

The universe is largely indifferent to us and when it rages, anyone in its path will suffer.

Enlightenment is is the point of practice, but if you cling to any conception of enlightenment too rigidly that idea and that clinging will at some point stand in the way of its attainment.

Although bodhisattva vows may all aim in the same direction, the particular intentions of each bodhisattva would inevitably vary. We all work out of our own background, our own genealogy and family heritage, our own dispositions, characters, and problems. No one can just start from scratch wherever they choose. We have no choice but to begin right where we are, with all of the trajectories and all of the issues that have already shaped our lives.

In the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), who followed Kant, she is a grown-up child, a creature of arrested development, fitted only for taking care of men. Schopenhauer, the author of The World as Will and Idea, was a Buddhist, a believer in magic and mysticism, an animal lover who never married and who was thoroughly anti-democratic.

A common fate of Eastern traditional disciplines is currently their execrable employment by Western gurus and pop-psychologists. Whether it is antique Chinese wisdom, Buddhist lore, Yoga, Sufism, or whatever, the alert critic should take most of it with the proverbial pinch of salt, while not denying a basis in more authentic practice for the more viable ingredients of such traditional psychology.

Listen to how dramatically Walpola Rahula, a Buddhist monk who in 1959 published an influential book called What the Buddha Taught, put the matter: “According to the teaching of the Buddha, the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of ‘me’ and ‘mine,’ selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities, and problems. It is the source of all the troubles in the world from personal conflicts to wars between nations. In short, to this false view can be traced all the evil in the world.

Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In all these years, what all must have been in the very room where you are now: all birds, animals, trees, mountain, sand, fires, storms, ocean. And before Earth, cosmic dust and vacuum. Basically your room is eternity. You are in the lap of eternity.

Hence, the ultimate purpose of the world lies not within the world but in transcendence of the world. Just as you would not be conscious of space if there were no objects in space, the world is needed for the Unmanifested to be realized. You may have heard the Buddhist saying: “If there were no illusion, there would be no enlightenment.” It is through the world and ultimately through you that the Unmanifested knows itself. You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold. That is how important you are!

In fact, those who want to learn about wisdom must of necessity draw on the tradition of the fairly remote past. For centuries almost everyone has been silent on the subject. Philosophers, of whom some "love of wisdom" might be expected, have increasingly turned to the critical examination of knowledge, and are largely engaged in active disparagement of all that once passed of "wisdom." Nor has the effect of scientific and technical progress been any more propitious. What, indeed, could be more "unscientific" than the pursuit of wisdom-with its concern for the meaning of life, with its search for ends, purposes and values worthy of being pursued, with its desire to penetrate beyond the appearance of things to their true reality?

Sonnet of A Religious Person I spent years as a Christian, I didn't find God. I spent years as a Muslim, I didn't find God. I spent years as Hindu and Sikh, Still there was no inkling. I spent years as Buddhist and Atheist, Still I understood nothing. I did it all, prayers, rituals, meditation, None of it brought me serenity. For serenity has been all along, At the feet of the ailing humanity. I shelved all scriptures and stood as human. Kindness alone is the sign of a religious person.

A Koan is a riddle or dialectic meditation device used in Zen Buddhist practice that is intentionally designed to, at least on the surface, be unclear and obscure. Its point is not to provide a conclusion or answer to the question presented, but rather, to disregard the relevance of the answer, to detach itself from the functions of conclusion and singular resolution. There are over a thousand known Koan that follow this format, used to test and challenge Zen Buddhists, and reveal the obscurity and limits of the mind. In general, life is uncertain, confusing, and paradoxical. As hard as we work against this, it mostly remains so. No matter our efforts, every time we believe we have some understanding or control over life, like water in the palm of the hand, the tighter we squeeze, the further it eludes our grip. Sciences, religions, and philosophies make sense of the world through various methods, some more successful than others, but nonetheless, all face the inevitable limits of themselves, the human mind, and the time in which they are erected. By sheer lack of alternatives, we understand the world with thoughts and words. Through which, we can create systems of order and understanding like logic, story, social structure, and so on. This can greatly assist our ability to survive, coexist, communicate, deal with physical stuff, and so on. However, thoughts and words, of course, can only describe and understand the world with thoughts and words. As a result, they cannot make sense of what exists beyond thoughts and words, which a great measure of life arguably does. Like any tool thinking and language are limited to the confines of their abilities. Like a hammer cannot screw in a screw, and a nail cannot cut a board of wood, the human mind cannot make sense of the mindless. A hammer can perhaps smash a screw in, and a nail can perhaps split a board of wood like the mind can perhaps consider life, but none of these items or tools fully suit the jobs they are carrying out, and thus, will fall short in their abilities to properly complete them. A Koan embodies this notion. As opposed to most stories, ideas, and answers that attempt to fight against the concept of obscurity and absurdity in life by using defined structure, logic, and resolutions, the Koan harmonizes with the absurdity of life and disregards the need for conclusive answers. In rough terms, Zen Buddhism, in general, is founded on this synchronization with the obscure and abstract.

the Buddhist philosophy means by “letting go of attachment.” It’s similar to the Christian concept, “God’s will be done.

In order to understand the Buddhist teaching we must start from the idea that to the man it had in mind the ātmā-brahman, the immortal and immutable "I" identical with the supreme essence of the universe, would not be a concept "conforming to reality" (yathā-bhūtaṁ), based, that is to say, on the actual evidence of experience, but rather that it would be only a speculation, a creation of philosophy or theology.

The passage from purely individual consciousness to this saṁsaric consciousness that includes indefinite possibilities of existence, both "infernal" and celestial—this, fundamentally, is the basis of the whole Doctrine of Awakening. We are not dealing here with a "philosophy" but with an experience that, to tell the truth, is not the sole property of Buddhism. Traces and echoes of it are also to be found in other traditions, both Eastern and Western: in the West, particularly in terms of secret knowledge and of initiatory experience. The theory of universal pain, of life as pain, does not represent, in this respect, anything other than something completely external and, as we have already said, profane. Where it has been widely diffused it refers only to the forms of a popular exposition.

The most basic division in Buddhism is between the Theravada school and the Mahayana school. My own meditative tradition, Vipassana, derives from the Theravada lineage. It is within the Mahayana lineage (to which Quang Duc belonged) that you find the most radically broad conception of illusion. Some Mahayana Buddhists even subscribe to a "mind-only" doctrine that, in its more extreme incarnations, dismisses the things we "perceive" via consciousness as, pretty literally, figments of our imagination. This strand of Buddhist thought-the strand that most obviously resonates with the movie The Matrix-isn't dominant within Mahayana Buddhism, much less within Buddhism at large. But even mainstream Buddhist thinkers accept some version of the concept of emptiness, a subtle idea that is hard to capture in a few words (or in many words) but certainly holds, at a minimum, that the things we see when we look out on the world have less in the way of distinct and substantial existence than they seem to have. And then there is the famous Buddhist idea that the self-you know, your self, my self-is an illusion. In this view, the "you" that you think of as thinking your thoughts, feeling your feelings, and making your decisions doesn't really exist. If you put these two fundamental Buddhist ideas together-the idea of not-self and the idea of emptiness-you have a radical proposition: neither the world inside you nor the world outside you is any- thing like it seems.

But someone may ask, is there any real reason why these sages, whether Buddhist or Stoic, should not recapture the soul of the child? One fact prevents them, according to Wust; they have broken away from the filial relationship with the Supreme Spirit, and this alone is what enables a man to have a child-like attitude towards the ultimate secret of things. This relationship is automatically destroyed by the triumph of naturalistic philosophy, which depersonalised the supreme principle of the universe: for to this view necessity can only appear as either fate or blind chance; and a man weighed down by such a burden is in no state ever to regain his vanished delight and absolute trust. He can no longer cling to the deep metaphysical optimism, wherein the primal simplicity of the creature in the morning of life joins the simplicity of the sage - better here to call him the saint - who, after journeying through experience, returns to the original point of the circle; the happy state of childhood which is almost the lost paradise of the human mind.

The hands of blue time united the mast of a sailboat. And I was captain on that deck of shadows, at the helm, I, too, a shadow resisting impermanence, asking: Is all or any of it real or am I riding myself into a mystery?