Inner Peace Buddha Quotes

Without the fear of occasional gaffes, the willingness to be perfectly imperfect, and the heart of a child who creates chaos first thing in the morning for a parent; you are not allowing our inner child to grow. You grow in pain, not in years, and you must cross the bridge without knowing of the pain, the tears, or the trials and tribulations that you will come to have to face, but sweet child of mine, stay the happy child of mine.

It almost seems as though this roiling world is conspiring to test our patience at every turn. In fact, it is. With this in mind, we would be wise to look on our imperfect environment as a teacher rather than an antagonist. It constantly shows us that we need to be patient on an ongoing basis, not just every now and then, if we´re going to realize true inner peace, happiness, and fulfillment.

Anyone can build a house of wood and bricks, but the Buddha taught us that sort of home is not our real home. It's a home in the world and it follows the ways of the world. Our real home is inner peace.

Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.”  – The Buddha

As the Supreme Buddha once said, “The root of suffering is attachment.

If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.

The quest for this unwearied inner peace is constant and universal. Probe deeply into the teachings of Buddha, Maimonides, or a Kempis, and you will discover that they base their diverse doctrines on the foundations of a large spiritual serenity. Analyze the prayers of troubled, overborne mankind of all creeds, in every age—and their petitions come down to the irreducible common denominators of daily bread and inward peace. Grown men do not pray for vain trifles. When they lift up their hearts and voices in this valley of tears they ask for strength and courage and understanding.

Everything changes when you start to emit your own frequency rather than absorbing the frequencies around you. When you start imprinting your intent on the universe rather than receiving an imprint from existence.

On my journey from the fantastical to the practical, spirituality has gone from being a mystical experience to something very ordinary and a daily experience. Many don’t want this, instead they prefer spiritual grandeur, and I believe that is what keeps enlightenment at bay. We want big revelations of complexity that validates our perceptions of the divine. What a let down it was to Moses when God spoke through a burning bush! But that is exactly the simplicity of it all. Our spiritual life is our ordinary life and it is very grounded in every day experience. For me, it is the daily practice of kindness, mindfulness, happiness, and peace.

The idea of different countries and nationalities was purely an invention of the human mind handed down from one generation to the next, bringing war and division in its wake. This is what the Buddha meant by "In the sky there is no east or west but people create distinctions out of their minds and then believe them to be true".

I have never been a poster boy for serenity, but I knew I needed to restore some semblance of inner peace. In search of a fix much quicker than my weekly forays into the talking cure, I came upon an ancient and proven practice, one that exists in every culture and religious tradition as a means to attaining calm and an alternate plane of consciousness: an extended fast. Buddha did it, Jesus did it, even Pythagoras and George Bernard Shaw did it. It's like a Cole Porter song from the world's least-fun musical.

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)

One day the Buddha was sistting with some of his monks in the woods. They had just come back from an almsround and were ready to share a mindful lunch together. A farmer passed by, looking distraught. He asked the Buddha, "Monks, have you seen some cows going by here?" "What cows?" the Buddha responded. "Well," the man said, "I have four cows and I don't know why, but this morning they all ran aay. I also have two acres of sesame. This year the insects ate the entire crop. I have lost everything: my harvest and my cows. I feel like killing myself." The Buddha said, "Dear friend, we have been sitting here almost an hour and we have not seen any cows passing by. Maybe you should go and lookin the other direction." When the farmer was gone, the Buddha looked at his friends and smiled knowingly. "Dear friends, you are very lucky," he said. "You don't have any cows to lose.

For example, if your judgment of an event causes you to boil over with anger, then all you have done is boil over with anger. The fact that you’re angry is useless. It doesn’t change the situation and neither does it benefit the situation. All it does is cause you bodily harm because it creates stress. Buddha said “You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger.” When you choose to remain free from judgment, you accept things as they are. You look at “what is” and accept it as such. Living life free from judgment allows you to control your state of mind in every moment and in every situation.

This is a fascinating glamour of the spiritual path. It must be understood that GOD created everyone with a certain unique puzzle piece in the Divine Plan. It is only when all people fulfill their puzzle piece that the Divine Plan can work out. What the negative ego will do, however, is tell a person that it wants them to live out someone else’s puzzle piece. The negative ego feels that their puzzle piece is not glamorous enough. The negative ego may tell you to write a book, when it is not really your dharma to do so. The negative ego may want you to be famous and a player on the world stage, when that is not your puzzle piece. The negative ego may tell you that it wants you to be a channel or spiritual lecturer on a large scale, however, that is not your puzzle piece. I have seen many lightworkers and spiritual leaders get incredibly fouled up and fragmented by allowing this glamour of the negative ego to seduce them. True inner peace and fulfillment can only be found by living out the puzzle piece that is your true destiny, as GOD would have it be. This is also the puzzle piece that will bring you the greatest amount of success and the least amount of stress!

The process is very simple. Every time a negative ego thought or emotion comes up in your consciousness push it out of your mind and replace it with the Christ consciousness attitude and antidote. By not giving energy or water, so to speak, to that weed it will die within three weeks time. That is how long it takes to cement in a new habit into the subconscious mind. By not giving water to negative ego thinking and emotions and watering Christ consciousness attitudes and feelings they expand and grow. Soon, you have a habit of Christed thinking and feeling and a habit of being in inner peace and joyous all the time. The happiness you seek is an attitude and perspective that is attached to nothing outside of self, and nothing having to do with another person.

As the Bible says, “The truth will set you free.” It is time to wake up from the nightmarish illusory dream of the negative ego and to realize that the negative ego and all its hallucinations don’t really exist, we just think it does. The law of the mind, is what you think is the reality you live in. It is time, my beloved readers, to wake up from this negative dream and to instead think and live in GOD’s dream of total unconditional love, forgiveness, inner peace, equanimity, joy and bliss!

To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one's family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one's own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him." -Buddha

The most powerful way to use the mind-body connection to improve your physical and mental health is through guiding your autonomic nervous system (ANS). Every time you calm the ANS through stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), you tilt your body, brain, and mind increasingly toward inner peace and well-being.

The moment truth is organized it becomes a lie. Jesus and Buddha never created any organized religion. An organized religion becomes politics. It becomes a manipulation, control and exploitation by the priests. You don't have to be Christians or Buddhists, because your own potential is to be a buddha. Buddha taught you to become a buddha. The people who were with Buddha were not part of any organized religion. They were free and independent individuals. Buddha did not want to be anybody's guru, he simply wanted to be a friend, a fellow traveler on the spiritual path. He wanted to create as many individuals in the world with absolute freedom in their soul with no chains to Christianity or Buddhism and with no scriptures, no teachings, except for awareness. He taught spirituality, not religion. Spirituality is not a membership of any church or cult, but a quality that transforms your being and makes your inner potential blossom. Buddha was available to help his people to become buddhas. He wanted a world of buddhas, who were free from organized religions and cults, and who would find their own wings to fly in the sky. Truth brings freedom, freedom from religions, cults and scriptures. Truth brings a silence, a peace and a sense of eternity, and immortality and deathlessness. But it has nothing to do with organized religion and cults.

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.” ~ Gautama Buddha

First comes the Emotion Regulation Network. I consider this primary, because I believe that unless we have the ability to regulate our emotions, we cannot enjoy a happy life. We can’t sustain Bliss Brain for long enough to spark neural plasticity if our consciousness is easily hijacked by negative emotions like anger, resentment, guilt, fear, and shame. The Emotion Regulation Network controls our reactivity to disturbing events. Regulating emotions is the meditator’s top priority. Emotion will distract us from our path every time. Love and fear are fabulous for survival because of their evolutionary role in keeping us safe. Love kept us bonded to others of our species, which gave us strength in numbers. Fear made us wary of potential threats. But to the meditator seeking inner peace, emotion = distraction. In the stories of Buddha and Jesus in Chapter 2, we saw how they were tempted by both the love of gain and the fear of loss. Only when they held their emotions steady, refusing either type of bait, were they able to break through to enlightenment. THE HOSTILE TAKEOVER OF CONSCIOUSNESS BY EMOTION Remember a time when you swore you’d act rationally but didn’t? Perhaps you were annoyed by a relationship partner’s habit. Or a team member’s attitude. Or a child’s behavior? You screamed and yelled in response. Or perhaps you didn’t but wanted to. So you decided that next time you would stay calm and have a rational discussion. But as the emotional temperature of the conversation increased, you found yourself screaming and yelling again. Despite your best intentions, emotion overwhelmed you. Without training, when negative emotions arise, our capacity for rational thought is eclipsed. Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux calls this “the hostile takeover of consciousness by emotion.” Consciousness is hijacked by the emotions generated by fearful unwanted experiences or attractive desired ones. We need to regulate our emotions over and over again to gradually establish positive state stability. In positive state stability, when someone around us—whether a colleague, spouse, child, parent, politician, blogger, newscaster, or corporate spokesperson—says or does something that triggers negative emotions, we remain neutral. The same applies to negative thoughts arising from within our own consciousness. Positive state stability allows us to feel happy despite the chatter of our own minds. Getting triggered happens quickly. LeDoux found that it takes less than 1 second from hearing an emotionally triggering word to a reaction in the brain’s limbic system, the part that processes emotion. When we’re overwhelmed by emotion, rational thinking, sound judgment, memory, and objective evaluation disappear. But once we’re stable in that positive state, we’ve inoculated ourselves against negative influences, both from our own consciousness and from the outside world. We maintain that positive state over time, and state becomes trait.

The path dips down to Gal Vihara: a wide, quiet, hollow, surrounded with trees. A low outcrop of rock, with a cave cut into it, and beside the cave a big seated Buddha on the left, a reclining Buddha on the right, and Ananda, I guess, standing by the head of the reclining Buddha. In the cave, another seated Buddha. The vicar general, shying away from "paganism." hangs back and sits under a tree reading the guidebook. I am able to approach the Buddhas barefoot and undisturbed, my feet in wet grass, wet sand. Then the silence of the extraordinary faces. The great smiles. Huge and yet subtle. Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace not of emotional resignation but of Madhyamika, of sunyata, that has seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone or anything - without refutation - without establishing some other argument. For the doctrinaire, the mind that needs well-established positions, such peace, such silence, can be frightening. I was knocked over with a rush of relief and thankfulness at the obvious clarity of the figures, the clarity and fluidity of shape and line, the design of the monumental bodies composed into the rock shape and landscape, figure, rock and tree. And the sweep of bare rock sloping away on the other side of the hollow, where you can go back and see different aspects of the figures. Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious. The queer evidence of the reclining figure, the smile, the sad smile of Ananda standing with arms folded (much more "imperative" than Da Vinci's Mona Lisa because completely simple and straightforward). The thing about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem, and really no "mystery." All problems are resolved and everything is clear, simply because what matters is clear. The rock, all matter, all life, is charged with dharmakaya... everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. I don't know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination. Surely, with Mahabalipuram and Polonnaruwa my Asian pilgrimage has come clear and purified itself. I mean, I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for. I don't know what else remains but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise. This is Asia in its purity, not covered over with garbage, Asian or European or American, and it is clear, pure, complete. It says everything: it needs nothing. And because it needs nothing it can afford to be silent, unnoticed, undiscovered. It does not need to be discovered. It is we, Asians included, who need to discover it. The whole thing is very much a Zen Garden, a span of bareness and openness and evidence, and the great figures, motionless, yet with the lines in full movement, waves of vesture and bodily form, a beautiful and holy vision. The rest of the "city", the old palace complex, I had no time for. We just drove around the roads and saw the ruined shapes, and started on the long drive home to Kandy.

In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.” -Buddha

Living 24 hours with mindfulness is more worthwhile than living 100 years without it. – Buddha

We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.’- Buddha

According to the teachings of Buddha, there are three causes of suffering. These three “poisons”, as they are called, bring aversion, craving, and confusion. They clutter the mind and strongly influence how you think, feel, and act.

Enlightenment means an end to directionless wandering through the dreamlike passageways of life and death. It means that you have found your own home Buddha. How does the Buddha feel? Completely comfortable, at peace, and at ease in every situation and every circumstance with a sense of true inner freedom, independent of both outer circumstances and internal emotions.

As mindfulness stabilizes, you will rest more and more as awareness itself. Awareness contains mind-objects, a general term for any mental content, including perceptions, thoughts, desires, memories, emotions, and so on. Although mind-objects may dance busily with each other, awareness itself is never disturbed. Awareness is a kind of screen on which mind-objects register, like—in the Zen saying—the reflections on a pond of geese flying overhead. But awareness is never sullied or rattled by the passing show. In your brain, the neural patterns represented within awareness are highly variable, but the representational capacities themselves—the basis of the subjective experience of awareness—are generally very stable. Consequently, resting as awareness brings a beautiful sense of inner clarity and peace. These feelings are generally deepest in meditation, but you can cultivate a greater sense of abiding as awareness throughout the day. Use routine events—such as the phone ringing, going to the bathroom, or drinking water—as “temple bells” to return you to a sense of centeredness.

Mara personifies the inner hindrances to the practice, the opposite of the Buddha nature in each person.

To end suffering - not only by relieving its symptoms but by eradicating its root cause - is precisely the aim of the Buddha's teaching. We must first realize that the true cause of suffering is not outside, but inside. That is why true spiritual practice consists of working on one's own mind. The mind is very powerful. It can create happiness or suffering, heaven or hell. If, with the help of the Dharma, you manage to eliminate your inner poisons, nothing from outside will ever affect your happiness, but as long as those poisons remain in your mind, you will not find the happiness you seek anywhere in the world. (Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche)

The Supreme Buddha’s main goal was to enlighten people, so that they could live in harmony. Do you know what happened instead? They bickered. They argues over interpretations and over the “right way to study the Supreme Buddha. The disagreed, and because they disagreed they created schisms inn their own lives and branched into a thousand little sects.

If you fuse knowledge of your transcendent origin with tireless service in and for God, you will come, on earth and in this body, to know divine joy and be fed by the ceaseless passion-energy of divine love. Human and divine, inner peace and outer action, knowledge and love, will be married in you at ever greater depths to make you an ever more powerful and radiant warrior for Love and Justice in all dimensions.

To do no evil; to cultivate good; to purify one's mind: This is the teaching of the Buddhas.”–The Dhammapada

symbols of Buddhism are the lotus, dharma wheel, stupa, and the Buddha's footprint.

Also, no matter how much education we have, if the inner factor of developing our mind is missing, if the practice of compassion is missing, again there’s no peace in our life. Even if we have learned every language and have every other kind of knowledge that exists in the world, even if we have memorized and can explain all the Buddha’s teachings, all the sutras and tantras, if we have not transformed our mind, if we have not developed compassion for other beings, once more our life will be full of problems. We will still have anger and the dissatisfied minds of desire, pride, jealousy and all the other delusions; with more education, our inner problems can become even bigger than they were before.

Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others;

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” – The Buddha

Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” – The Buddha

One is not called noble who harms living beings. Only by not harming living beings one is called noble.” - The Buddha

When one speaks of the inner primordial wisdom, this means that noble bodhisattvas realize the nature of their own minds, the sugatagarbha, independently from extraneous conditions, by means of self-sprung primordial wisdom. This realization takes place in such a way that the conceptual elaboration, containing the duality of an object realized and a realizing subject, has come to complete peace. Through the power of inner realization there is correct and complete knowledge. Since noble bodhisattvas have directly realized the nature of their own minds, they possess the inner realization.

The most powerful way to use the mind-body connection to improve your physical and mental health is through guiding your autonomic nervous system (ANS). Every time you calm the ANS through stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), you tilt your body, brain, and mind increasingly toward inner peace and well-being. You can activate the PNS in many ways, including relaxation, big exhalations, touching the lips, mindfulness of the body, imagery, balancing your heartbeat, and meditation. Meditation increases gray matter in brain regions that handle attention, compassion, and empathy. It also helps a variety of medical conditions, strengthens the immune system, and improves psychological functioning. Deliberately feeling safer helps control the hardwired tendency to look for and overreact to threats. Feel safer by relaxing, using imagery, connecting with others, being mindful of fear itself, evoking inner protectors, being realistic, and increasing your sense of secure attachment. Find refuge in whatever is a sanctuary and refueling station for you. Potential refuges include people, activities, places, and intangible things like reason, a sense of your innermost being, or truth.

If we fail to look after others when they need help, who will look after us?

Be like a tree standing planted by a dead river bed, until you transform into the confidence of your own stream of consciousness flowing from the sea of your own inner depths.

In Zen there are fortunately none of those marvellously incomprehensible words as in Indian cults. Neither does Zen play about with complicated Hatha-yoha techniques which delude the physiologically thinking European with the false hope that the spirit can e obtained by sitting and by breathing. On the contrary, Zen demands intelligence and will power, as do all the greater things which desire to become real. Personal experience is everything in Zen. To get the clearest and most efficient understanding of a thing, it must be experienced personally. In the working of the Eastern mind there is something calm, quiet, silent, undisturbable, which appears as if always looking into eternity. The spirit of Buddhism has left its highly metaphysical superstructure in order to become a practical discipline of life. The result is Zen. In Zen are found systematized, or rather crystallized, all the philosophy, religion and life itself of the Far-Eastern people, especially of the Japanese. If I am asked, then, what Zen teaches, I would answer, Zen teaches nothing. Whatever teachings there are in Zen, they come out of one's own mind. We teach ourselves; Zen merely points the way. This getting into the real nature of one's own mind or soul is the fundamental object of Zen Buddhism. The truth is, Zen is extremely elusive as far as its outward aspects are concerned. Unless you devote some years of earnest study to the understanding of its primary principles, it is not to be expected that you will begin to have a fair grasp of Zen. Anything that has the semblance of an external authority is rejected by Zen. Absolute faith is placed in a man's own inner being. For whatever authority there is in Zen, all comes from within. When Zen is thoroughly understood, absolute peace of mind is attained and a man lives as he ought to live. What more may we hope? What makes Zen unique as it is practiced in Japan is its systematic training of the mind. The great truth of Zen is possessed by everybody. Look into your own being and seek it not through others. The question: How can one always be with Buddha? called forth the following answer from a master: Have no stirrings in your mind, be perfectly serene toward the objective world. To remain thus all the time in absolute emptiness and calmness is the way to be with the Buddha. Zen thinks we are too much of slaves to words and logic. A quiet, self-confident and trustful existence of your own - this is the truth of Zen. The desire to possess is considered by Buddhism to be one of the worst passions with which mortals are apt to be obsessed. What in fact causes so much misery in the world is the universal impulse of acquisition.