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NO MATTER HOW GREAT
the faults of others,
they can't make us
fall into hell.
While our own faults can take us
to the severest hell
straightaway,
even if they aren't very defiling at all.
So keep watch on your faults
until it comes naturally.
-- Phra Ajaan Munbhuridatha Mahathera
from "The Ballad of Liberation from the Khandhas"
-- Bhante Yogacavara Rahula
from a personal phone call.
REMEMBERING NOT TO IDENTIFY
with the story has been crucial---
and very hard to do, because,
in anger the story carries such
obsessive power. But this for me
really is, most fundamentally,
what it means to be "religious."
It means remembering, again and again,
that the stories we tell ourselves
---all those stories about loss, failure,
shattered hope, betrayal, blame---
are not what is most true about who we are.
This is for me the true meaning of "taking refuge,"
this residing in the vast only don't know
of practice.
-- Noelle Oxenhandler
from the article "A Streetcar in Your Stomach"
Tricycle, Summer 1998
ANXIETY IS A THIN STREAM OF FEAR
trickling through the mind. If encouraged,
it cuts a channel into which
all other thoughts are drained.
WHAT YOU DENY TO OTHERS
will be denied to you, for the plain reason
that you are always legislating for yourself;
all your words and actions define
the world you want to live in.
WHEN MY MASTER AND I
were walking in the rain,
he would say,
"Do not walk so fast,
the rain is everywhere."
-- Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
from "Crooked Cucumber:
The Life and Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki,"
by David Chadwick (Broadway Books)
IF WE DON'T PRACTICE
deliberate speech, it will come out
instinctively and impulsively,
especially when there's
the tiniest bit of stress.
-- Sister Ayya Khema
from "Be an Island Unto Yourself"
(Sri Lanka, 1986)
WHEN YOU HAVE NOTHING TO SAY
just drive
for a day all around the peninsula...
-- Seamus Heaney
from his poem "The Peninsula"
in the collection "Door Into the Dark" (1969)
THE MAIN DOOR INTO ALL BUDDHIST WORK
is this one of impermanence or emptiness.
That doesn't mean---as we sometimes think---
that things aren't here, but that they aren't here
in the way we imagine they are.
We ourselves are not solid in that way;
we create notions of who we are out of
memory and various ideals, then exhaust
ourselves trying to maintain that image.
When the time finally comes that we can
let go of that, it is a tremendous relief.
And we have abundant energy for other things.
-- Larry Rosenberg
from "Breath by Breath: The Liberating Practice
of Insight Meditation" (Shambhala, 1993)
IF YOU DO NOT
get it from yourself,
where will you go for it?
THERE IS NO REALITY
except the one contained within us.
That is why so many people live
such an unreal life.
They take the images outside of them
for reality and never allow the world within
to assert itself.
GREAT FAITH.
Great Doubt.
Great Effort.
-- The Three Qualities
Necessary for Training
ACCORDING TO THE
Franciscan priest Richard Rohr,
spirituality is not for people
who are trying to avoid hell;
it is for people who have been
through hell. In many ways,
spirituality is about what we do
with our pain.
And the truth is, if we don't
transform it,
we will transmit it.
-- Al Gustafson
from "The Outbox," a column
in The Works magazine, Winter 2000
THINGS "TURN OUT BEST"
for the people
who make the best of
the way things
"turn out."
THE FOOL IS CARELESS.
But the master guards his watching.
It is his most
precious treasure.
--The Buddha
from "The Dhammapada,"
No. 2, Wakefulness"
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QUOTATIONS, 9/99: Sir Edwin Arnold, Herakleitos, Robert Aitken Roshi, E.B. White, Pablo Neruda and more.
QUOTATIONS, 5/99: Rumi, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Yogi Berra, Thinley Norbu Rinpoche and more.
QUOTATIONS, 2/99:
Jack Kornfield, Ajahn Jumnien, Kabir, Toni Packer and more.
QUOTATIONS, 11/98:
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