Legitimate Buddha Quotes

Without discursive thought it is just dharma practice. Hope together with aim obscures. One does not cut through pride by meditatively cultivating the desire for happiness. If there is hope, even the hope for buddhas, it is a negative force. If there is apprehension, even apprehension about hells, it is a negative force.

Above all, he alerted his students to topics rarely discussed in university, such as the simple fact that all the ancients, from Buddha to the biblical authors, knew what every slightly worn-out adult knows, that life is suffering. If you are suffering, or someone close to you is, that’s sad. But alas, it’s not particularly special. We don’t suffer only because “politicians are dimwitted,” or “the system is corrupt,” or because you and I, like almost everyone else, can legitimately describe ourselves, in some way, as a victim of something or someone. It is because we are born human that we are guaranteed a good dose of suffering. And chances are, if you or someone you love is not suffering now, they will be within five years, unless you are freakishly lucky. Rearing kids is hard, work is hard, aging, sickness and death are hard, and Jordan emphasized that doing all that totally on your own, without the benefit of a loving relationship, or wisdom, or the psychological insights of the greatest psychologists, only makes it harder.

The job of a Zen master is to transmit the dharma. The word dharma is a cognate of the Pali word for carrying. The dharma that is passed from teacher to student involves the essential teachings of the Buddha and the spirit of living those truths. Transmission is applied both to the ritual identification and acknowledgment of a particular student as the legitimate successor, or dharma heir, of a Zen master, and to the ordinary, daily interactions between the teacher and all students. Transmit is an oddly technical verb, and the analogies it occasions are oddly useful. If you imagine the dharma as an electrical current arcing across a distance from one conductive wire to another, you get the basic idea. However, if you have even a rudimentary grasp of physics, you know that the power of an electrical charge decreases as it travels this way This is precisely what is not supposed to happen to the dharma as it passes from master to disciple. A dharma heir is meant to be someone whose enlightenment or understanding equals or, preferably, surpasses that of the master.

focus on speaking your truth rather than changing other people; stay in touch with your experience, especially the deeper layers; establish the facts; take maximum reasonable responsibility for the other person’s issues with you and keep addressing his or her legitimate complaints; do what you can to have the relationship match its true foundation; keep in mind the big picture; and maintain compassion and kindness.