Buddhist Nuns

"Look at adversity as a stepping stone, not a hindrance in life. (p. 108)"

"In handling matters, let your mind influence your heart. In dealing with people, let your heart influence your mind. (p. 44)"

"The hardest thing for people to see is themselves (p. 34)"

"A happy person creates a happy home, and from that is able to contribute to his country and finally the world. (p. 18)"

"The reason that people cannot be humble is because they cling to their past achievements (p. 24)"

"To study Buddhism under me is to adopt a new way of life. (p. 20)"

"Unconditional giving is not a privilege of the rich but an utmost sincere love. (p. 250)"

"It is never too late for a deep-rooted affinity to blossom. Do not worry over a distant journey as long as we find the way. (p. 194)"

"Affliction is like a poisonous snake that sleeps in the mind; the moment it is disturbed, it will bite you. (p. 176)"

"Love and Mercy transcends races, nationalities and geographical distance. (p. vi)"

"All lives deserve to be respected, and all beings need to be loved. It ought to be easy for us to feel the pain experienced by the bodies other than our own and grant happiness to those who are but strangers. (p. 3)"

"We are all human beings, the best of us a saint, but never a god. We can follow a saint's conduct and imitate his behavior, but it is unnecessary to worship him. (p. 7)"

"Life is a journey; we board an express train at birth and head for the unavoidable destination of death. The scenery drifts by, and the only meaningful thing we can do is to be good and kind to our fellow passengers. (p. 13)"

"Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it."

"Every day, at the moment when things get edgy, we can just ask ourselves, “Am I going to practice peace, or am I going to war?”"

"Generally speaking, we regard discomfort in any form as bad news. But for practitioners or spiritual warriors — people who have a certain hunger to know what is true — feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that... teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away."

"This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are."

"Meditation is an invitation to notice when we reach our limit and to not get carried away by hope and fear."

"Through meditation, we’re able to see clearly what’s going on with our thoughts and emotions, and we can also let them go."

"The natural quality of mind is clear, awake, alert, and knowing. Free from fixation. By training in being present, we come to know the nature of our mind. So the more you train in being present - being right here - the more you begin to feel like your mind is sharpening up. The mind that can come back to the present is clearer and more refreshed, and it can better weather all the ambiguities, pains, and paradoxes of life."

"The principle of nowness is very important to any effort to establish an enlightened society."

"Meditation is just gently coming back again and again to what's right here."

"But the Buddhist teachings are not only about removing the symptoms of suffering, they’re about actually removing the cause, or the root, of suffering."

"We can't control what's going to happen but we can grow in awareness of what is happening."

"But there is that feeling. And there’s always another challenge, and that keeps us humble. Life knocks you off your pedestal."

"The experience of a sad and tender heart is what gives birth to fearlessness."

"Meditation helps you to meet your edge; it’s where you actually come up against it and you start to lose it."

"This is a standard meditation instruction that you can embody in the entirety of your life: do not act out and do not repress. See what happens if you don’t do either of those things."

"When we multitask and split up our mind into a million directions, we are actually creating our own suffering, because these habits strengthen strong emotional reactivity and discursive thought."

"We all need to be reminded and encouraged to relax with whatever arises and bring whatever we encounter to the path."

"Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth."

"Impermanence becomes vivid in the present moment; so do compassion and wonder and courage. And so does fear."

"In fact, anyone who stands on the edge of the unknown, fully in the present without reference point, experiences groundlessness."

"The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought... Nothing is what we thought."

"Emptiness is not what we thought. Neither is mindfulness or fear. Compassion—not what we thought. Love. Buddha nature. Courage."

"When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test of each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize."

"The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell. In fact, that way of looking at things is what keeps us miserable."

"Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly."

"The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last — that they don’t disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security."

"From this point of view, the only time we ever know what’s really going on is when the rug’s been pulled out and we can’t find anywhere to land. We use these situations either to wake ourselves up or to put ourselves to sleep."

"When anyone asks me how I got involved in Buddhism, I always say it was because I was so angry with my husband... When that marriage fell apart, I tried hard—very, very hard—to go back to some kind of comfort, some kind of security, some kind of familiar resting place... I knew that annihilation of my old dependent, clinging self was the only way to go."

"My hunter of dragonflies, How far has he wandered today?"

"Tsuki mo mite ware wa kono yo o kashiku kana."

""Cuckoo!" "Cuckoo!" While I meditated on that theme day dawned."

"Things That Lose by Being Painted Pinks, cherry blossoms, yellow roses. Men or women who are praised in romances as being beautiful.Things That Gain by Being Painted Pines. Autumn fields. Mountain villages and paths. Cranes and deer. A very cold winter scene; an unspeakably hot summer scene. (p. 138)"

"Splendid Things Chinese brocade. A sword with a decorated scabbard. The grain of the wood in a Buddhist statue. Long flowering branches of beautifully coloured wistaria entwined about a pine tree. (p. 109)"

"A man who has nothing in particular to recommend him discusses all sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything. (p. 44)"

"One is telling a story about old times when someone breaks in with a little detail that he happens to know, implying that one's own version is inaccurate — disgusting behavior! (p. 46)"

"It is a loose book, impressionistic, hardly coherent as a continuous narrative. It is full of descriptions of court life, and the retelling of court gossip and descriptions of fashionable shrines and how to get there by the most elegant means. It is a piece of writing replete with those typical Japanese wistful and melancholic evocations of ephemerality. It was written a thousand years ago almost exactly to the year the film was made, and it was written by a woman. To be literate a thousand years ago in the West was pretty uncommon; to be literate and a woman, very unlikely; to be literate, female, and quite brilliant, a well-nigh Western impossibility."

"Sei Shonagon feels modern, almost a proto-feminist in such a paternalistic age that women at court stayed, for the most part, silent and still and available indoors all their lives. She said much, and she said two electrifying things from the still darkness of her domestic prisons. She said them of course very much in her own way, but she said there were two things in life that were absolutely essential, and life would be unbearable without them: the sensuous body and literature. My crude summation would be sex and text. Both have the X factor. She said them with longing and her longing stayed with me."