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I read all morning". The simple words spoke of the purest and most rewarding kind of leisure.
The Buddha had placed no value on prayer or belief in a deity, he had not spoken of creation, original sin or the last judgement.
The quality of all human experience depends on the mind and so the Buddha had been concerned with analyzing and transforming the individual mind.
India's intellectual backwardness, her inability to deal rationally with her past, which seemed no less damaging than her economic and political underdevelopment.
With its literary and philosophical traditions, China was well equipped to absorb and disseminate Buddhism. The Chinese eagerness to distribute Buddhist texts was what gave birth to both paper and printing.
There are places on which history has worked for too long and neither the future nor the past can be seen clearly in their ruins or emptiness.
In the agrarian society of the past, the Brahminic inspired human hierarchy had proposed itself as a complete explanation not only for what human beings did but also what they were. So, for instance, a Brahmin was not just a priest because he performed rituals; he was innately blessed with virtue, learning and wisdom. A servant wasn't just someone who performed menial tasks, his very essence was poverty and weakness.
Meditation was one of the methods used to gain control over one's emotions and passions. Sitting still in a secluded place, the yogi attempted to disengage his perennially distracted mind and force it to dwell upon itself.
The discipline of meditation steadily equips the individual with a new sensibility. It shows him how the craving for things that are transient, essence-less and flawed leads to suffering. Regular meditation turns this new way of looking into a habit. it detaches the individual from the temptations of the world and fixes him in a state of profound calm.
Mere faith in what the guru says isn't enough and you have to realize and verify it through your own experience.
The mind determines the way we experience the world, the way in which we make it our world.
The ego seeks to gratify and protect itself through desires. But the desires create friction when they collide with the ever-changing larger environment. They lead only to more desires and more dissatisfaction.
How human beings desiring happiness and stability were undermined slowly, over the course of their lives, by the inconstancy of their hearts and the intermittence of their emotions.
Buddhism in America could be seen to meet every local need. It had begun as a rational religion which found few takers in America before being transformed again, during the heady days of the 1960s, through the mysticism of Zen, into a popular substitute for, or accessory to, psychotherapy and drugs.
It was probably true that greed, hatred and delusion, the source of all suffering, are also the source of life and its pleasures, however temporary and that to vanquish them may be to face a nothingness that is more terrifying than liberating. Nevertheless, the effort to control them seemed to me worth making.
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