"Equal to friend and enemy, equal to honour and insult, pleasure and pain, praise and w:Blame:blame, grief and happiness, heat and cold (to all that troubles with opposite affections the normal nature), silent, content and well-satisfied with anything and everything, not attached to person or thing, place or home, firm in mind (because it is constantly seated in the highest self and fixed for ever on the one divine object of his love and adoration), that man is dear to Me."

"Fill your mind with Me, be My devotee, sacrifice unto Me, bow down to Me; thus having made thy heart steadfast in Me, taking Me as the Supreme Goal, thou shalt come to Me."

"Bhakti Yoga became progressively more important for me. Its value can be described with a simple metaphor: knowledge (jnana) is the flame and the mind is the wick, but bhakti is the oil. Without bhakti spiritual knowledge burns out the mind, like a flame does a wick without oil. I discovered that the Vedas are primarily books on Bhakti Yoga, quite contrary to a modern scholarly belief that Bhakti Yoga originated from a later Islamic or Christian influence in medieval India."

"From meditation on difference, one proceeds to meditating on “He am I”. Meditation without a sense of difference is regarded as the most purifying...Once concentration develops, one begins with meditation on froms such as Shiva, Vishnu or the Goddess. This is the basis of Bhakti Yoga, the yoga of devotion."

"The bhakti poets use an elaborate, multi-vocal rhetoric, which requires the taking on, not only of personal voices to suit different emotions and genres, but also the voices of some of the dramatis personae of classical Tamil (Cankam) poetry, such as the lovelorn heroine or her solicitous girlfriend."

"... he [Chaitanya] described bhakti as that state of mind in which one abandons all duties through love of Krishna...one cannot reach the path of love without renouncing all thoughts of oneself."

"One achieves bhakti [love of God] by hearing and chanting about the Supreme Lord's special qualities, even while engaged in the ordinary activities of life in this world."

"The individual soul is forever a servant of the Supersoul and therefore, his reletionship with the Supersoul is to offer service. That is called Bhakti-Yoga or Bhakti-bhaava."

"Bharata Natyam is grounded in bhakti. In fact bhakti is at the center of all the arts of India. Our music and dance are two important offerings to God."

"Raja Yoga stands by itself and is the king science of them all; it is the summation of all the others... Bhakti Yoga is the yoga of the heart; it is the bringing into submission of all the feelings, desires and emotions, to the one beloved, seen and known in the heart. It is the sublimation of all the lower loves and the bringing captive of all longings and desire, to the one longing to know the God of love and the love of God. It was the "kingly" or crowning science of the last rootrace, the Atlantean, just as the science of Raja Yoga is the great science of our Aryan civilization. Bhakti Yoga made its exponent an arhat or led him to the fourth initiation. Raja Yoga makes him an adept and leads him to the portal of the fifth initiation. Both lead to liberation, for the arhat is released from the cycle of rebirth but Raja Yoga liberates him to complete service and freedom to work as a White Magician. Bhakti Yoga is the yoga of the heart, of the astral body."

"It might be of value here if we dealt with the various "yogas" so as to give to the student a clear concept as to their distinctions and thus cultivate his discrimination. The principal yogas are three in number, the various other so-called "yogas" finding their place in one of these three groups: 1. Raja Yoga...the yoga of the mind or will, 2. Bhakti Yoga... the yoga of the heart or the devotee, 3. Karma Yoga.... the yoga of action."

"Bhakti: Others boast of their love for God. My boast is that I did not love God; it was He who loved me and forced me to belong to him."

"The Alvars being devotees of Vishnu had access to the many temples dedicated to the god. During their visits they composed devotional hymns in praise of Vishnu. These hymns promoted devotion and surrender by glorifying the greatness of Vishnu. Although their hymns are replete with the ideas of the Vedas, their uniqueness lie in the great emphasis on devotion and surrender which are rarely found in the Vedic Mantras or in the highly metaphysical pronouncements within the Upanishads."

"Emphatically did the Buddha proclaim again and again that man is in full possession of all the resources needed for self-help. The most simple and most comprehensive way in which he spoke about these resources is this method of Satipaṭṭhāna. Its essence may be compressed into two words: “Be mindful!” That means: Be mindful of your own mind! And why? Mind harbours all: the world of suffering and its origin, but also ill’s final cessation and the path to it. Whether one or the other will be predominant depends again on our own mind, on the direction that the flux of mind receives through this very moment of mind-activity that faces us just now. Satipaṭṭhāna, always dealing with this crucial present moment of mind activity, must necessarily be a teaching of self-reliance. But self-reliance must be gradually developed, because men, knowing not how to handle the tool of the mind, have become used to leaning on others and on habit; and, owing to that, this splendid tool, the human mind, has in fact become unreliable through neglect."

"From the invocation to the conclusion, the poet Tulsidas seeks the grace of Rama and announces over and over again that the final object of his poetic performance is the attainment of bhakti – complete dedication to Rama. The narrative ends with an elaborate discourse on the supremacy of the devotional sentiment."

"...there were three different ways of approaching God, viz., the ways of action (karma), knowledge (jnana), and devotion (bhakti). Of these, bhakti is the best among them, since it is the only means of salvation and the state of love (prema) and service (seva) which bhakti implies is better than even release."

"The path of spiritual progress that the teachers of the Bengal school recommend is neither yoga nor jnana but bhakti. While the followers of the way of yoga emphasise the subjective aspect and those of the path of jnana both the subjective and objective aspect, the followers of the path of bhakti emphasize the objective aspect of consciousness."

"The one great advantage of Bhakti is that it is the easiest and most natural way to reach the great divine end in view; it's great disadvantage is that in its lower forms it oftentimes degenerates into hideous fanaticism. The fanatical crew in Hinduism, Mohammedanism, or Christianity, have always been almost exclusively recruited from these worshippers [sic] on the lower planes of Bhakti. That singleness of attachment (Nishthâ) to a loved object, without which no genuine love can grow, is very often also the cause of the denunciation of everything else. All the weak and undeveloped minds in every religion or country have only one way of loving their own ideal, i.e., by hating every other ideal. Herein is the explanation of why the same man who is so lovingly attached to his own ideal of God, so devoted to his own ideal of religion, becomes a howling fanatic as soon as he sees or hears anything of any other ideal."

"Never say, "O Lord, I am a miserable sinner." Who will help you? You are the help of the universe. What in this universe can help you? What can prevail over you? You are the God of the universe; where can you seek for help? Never help came from anywhere but from yourself. In your ignorance, every prayer that you made and that was answered, you thought was answered by some Being, but you answered the prayer yourself unknowingly. The help came from yourself, and you fondly imagined that someone was sending help to you. There is no help for you outside of yourself; you are the creator of the universe. Like the silkworm, you have built a cocoon around yourself. Who will save you? Burst your own cocoon and come out as a beautiful butterfly, as the free soul. Then alone you will see Truth."

"Bhakti Yoga is described by Swami Vivekananda as the path of systematized devotion for the attainment of union with the Absolute."

"Bhakti is a series of succession of mental efforts at religious Realization|realization beginning with ordinary worship ending in a supreme intensity of love for Ishvara."

"The renunciation necessary for the attainment of bhakti is not obtained by killing anything, but comes naturally as in the presence of an increasingly stronger light, the less intense ones become dimmer and dimmer until they vanish away completely. So this love of pleasures of the senses and of the intellect is all made dim and thrown aside and cast into the shade by the love of God Himself."

"Meera Bai belonged to a strong tradition of bhakti (devotional) poets in medieval India who expressed their love of God through the analogy of human relations—a mother's love for her child, a friend for a friend, or a woman for her beloved. The immense popularity and charm of her lyrics lies in their use of everyday images and in the sweetness of emotions easily understood by the people of India."

"The name of the Lord is the mighty force He who takes refuge in Him is never abandoned. The castle of His grace becomes his shelter: They all resort to Him, great and small As with the touch of the mystical store Iron becomes gold."

"Tulsidas is a devotee of Rama, who is an emblem of moral values and decorum. Quite naturally, a tone of high seriousness marks his devotional poetry. His bhakti has a sound socio-moral base with a rational background."

"Jnana marga is like Ramphal. Bhakthi marga is like Sitaphal (custard apple), easy to deal with and very sweet. The pulp of Ramphal is inside and difficult to get at. Ramphal should ripen on the tree and plucked ripe, If it falls down it is spoilt. So if a Jnani falls, he is ruined. Even for a Jnani there is the danger of a fall, i.e., by a little negligence or carelessness."

"Guru Brahma, Guru Vishnu, Guru Deva Maheshwara. Guru Sakshath Parambrahma, Tasmai Shri Gurave Namaha. Guru is the creator Brahma, Guru is the preserver Vishnu, Guru is the destroyer Shiva. Guru is directly the supreme spirit — I offer my salutations to this Guru."

"He who renouncing all activities, who is free of all the limitations of time, space and direction, worships his own Atman which is present everywhere, which is the destroyer of heat and cold, which is Bliss-Eternal and stainless, becomes All-knowing and All-pervading and attains thereafter Immortality."

"Schumacher ... rightly saw that in the world today Buddhism is a more potent basis for resisting the economism that rules the West and through it most of the East."

"The Buddhist doctrine of impermanence includes the notion that there is no self... It holds that the idea of a separate, individual self is an illusion, just another form of maya, an intellectual concept that has no reality. To cling to this idea of a separate self leads to the same pain and suffering (duhkha) as the adherence to any other fixed category of thought."

"If beings knew, as I know, the results of sharing gifts, they would not enjoy their gifts without sharing them with others, nor would the taint of stinginess obsess the heart and stay there. Even if it were their last and final bit of food, they would not enjoy its use without sharing it, if there were anyone to receive it."

"If only I could throw away the urge to trace my patterns in your heart, I could really see you."

"To go from mortal to Buddha, you have to put an end to karma, nurture your awareness, and accept what life brings."

"Buddhism is now split into two distinct Churches: the Southern and the Northern Church. The former is said to be the purer form, as having preserved more religiously the original teachings of the Lord Buddha. It is the religion of Ceylon, Siam, Burmah and other places, while Northern Buddhism is confined to Tibet, China and Nepaul. Such a distinction, however, is incorrect. If the Southern Church is nearer, in that it has not departed, except perhaps in some trifling dogmas due to the many councils held after the death of the Master, from the public or exoteric teachings of Sâkyamuni—the Northern Church is the outcome of Siddhârta Buddha’s esoteric teachings which he confined to his elect Bhikshus and Arhats. In fact, Buddhism in the present age, cannot be justly judged either by one or the other of its exoteric popular forms. Real Buddhism can be appreciated only by blending the philosophy of the Southern Church and the metaphysics of the Northern Schools....Correspondentially they stand in their relation to each other as Protestantism to Roman Catholicism. Both err by an excess of zeal and erroneous interpretations, though neither the Southern nor the Northern Buddhist clergy have ever departed from truth consciously, still less have they acted under the dictates of priestocracy, ambition, or with an eye to personal gain and power, as the two Christian Churches have."

"A detailed account of this adventure, attested with the signature of this eye-witness, was forwarded to Paris, but the members of the Institute, instead of accepting the testimony of a scientific observer of acknowledged credibility, concluded that the Florentine was either suffering under an attack of sunstroke, or had been deceived by a clever trick of acoustics... there is a verse in the Lotus* which says that "A Buddha is as difficult to be found as the flowers of Udumbara and Palaca," if we are to believe several eye-witnesses, such a phenomenon does happen. Of course its occurrence is rare, for it happens but on the death of every great Dalai-Lama; and these venerable old gentlemen live proverbially long lives."

"Early in the present century a Florentine scientist, a skeptic and a correspondent of the French Institute, having been permitted to penetrate in disguise to the hallowed precincts of a Buddhist temple, where the most solemn of all ceremonies was taking place, relates the following as having been seen by himself. An altar is ready in the temple to receive the resuscitated Buddha, found by the initiated priesthood, and recognized by certain secret signs to have reincarnated himself in a new-born infant. The baby, but a few days old, is brought into the presence of the people and reverentially placed upon the altar. Suddenly rising into a sitting posture, the child begins to utter in a loud, manly voice the following sentences: "I am Buddha, I am his spirit; and I, Buddha, your Dalai-Lama, have left my old, decrepit body, at the temple of . . . and selected the body of this young babe as my next earthly dwelling." Our scientist, being finally permitted by the priests to take, with due reverence, the baby in his arms, and carry it away to such a distance from them as to satisfy him that no ventriloquial deception is being practiced, the infant looks at the grave academician with eyes that "make his flesh creep," as he expresses it, and repeats the words he had previously uttered."

"There is, in the Buddhist philosophy, a wonderful sentence of the Lord Gautama Buddha, where he is striving to indicate in human language something that would be intelligible about the condition of Nirvana. You find it in the Chinese translation of the Dhammapada, and the Chinese edition has been translated into English in Trübner’s Oriental Series. He puts it there that, unless there were Nirvana, there could be nothing; and he uses various phrases in order to indicate what he means, taking the uncreated and then connecting with it the created; taking the Real and then connecting with it the unreal. He sums it up by saying that Nirvana is; and that if it were not, naught else could be. That is an attempt (if one may call it so with all reverence) to say what cannot be said. It implies that unless there existed the Uncreate, the invisible and the Real, we could not have a universe at all. You have there, then, the indication that Nirvana is a plenum, not a void. That idea should be fundamentally fixed in your mind, in your study of every great system of Philosophy. So often the expressions used may seem to indicate a void. Hence the western idea of annihilation. If you think of it as fullness, you will realize that the consciousness expands more and more, without losing utterly the sense of identity; if you could think of a centre of a circle without a circumference, you would glimpse the truth."

"One now begins to see just what it was that came to an end with the death on the cross: a new and thoroughly original effort to found a Buddhistic peace movement, and so establish happiness on earth--real, not merely promised. For this remains--as I have already pointed out--the essential difference between the two religions of decadence: Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfills; Christianity promises everything, but fulfills nothing."

"This method of Bare Attention, so helpful to mind-knowledge and, through it, to world-knowledge, tallies with the procedure and attitude of the true scientist and scholar: clear definition of subject-matter and terms; unprejudiced receptivity for the instruction that comes out of the things themselves; exclusion, or at least reduction, of the subjective factor in judgment; deferring of judgment until a careful examination of facts has been made."

"The lives and writings of the mystics of all great religions bear witness to religious experiences of great intensity, in which considerable changes are effected in the quality of consciousness. Profound absorption in prayer or meditation can bring about a deepening and widening, a brightening and intensifying, of consciousness, accompanied by a transporting feeling of rapture and bliss. The contrast between these states and normal conscious awareness is so great that the mystic believes his experiences to be manifestations of the divine; and given the contrast, this assumption is quite understandable. Mystical experiences are also characterized by a marked reduction or temporary exclusion of the multiplicity of sense-perceptions and restless thoughts. This relative unification of mind is then interpreted as a union or communion with the One God. … The psychological facts underlying those religious experiences are accepted by the Buddhist and are well-known to him; but he carefully distinguishes the experiences themselves from the theological interpretations imposed upon them. … The meditator will not be overwhelmed by any uncontrolled emotions and thoughts evoked by his singular experience, and will thus be able to avoid interpretations of that experience not warranted by the facts. Hence a Buddhist meditator, while benefiting from the refinement of consciousness he has achieved, will be able to see these meditative experiences for what they are; and he will further know that they are without any abiding substance that could be attributed to a deity manifesting itself to his mind. Therefore, the Buddhist’s conclusion must be that the highest mystical states do not provide evidence for the existence of a personal God or an impersonal godhead."

"In the religiosity of Zen Buddhism, demythologization of the mythical and existentialization of the scientific belong to one and the same process."

"[Indra's Net is a metaphor for] the profound cosmology and outlook that permeates Hinduism. Indra's Net symbolizes the universe as a web of connections and interdependences [...] I seek to revive it as the foundation for Vedic cosmology and show how it went on to become the central principle of Buddhism, and from there spread into mainstream Western discourse across several disciplines."

"If one wanted to summarise the essence of Buddhism in one sentence, it could only be this: everything that is transient is painful. In fact, after all, suffering (“”dukkha“”) is nothing more than transience. (p. 27)"

"The religion of future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description... If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs, it would be Buddhism."

"The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness. In the distant past, this recognition already came to a few individuals. A man called Gautama Siddhartha, who lived 2,600 years ago in India, was perhaps the first who saw it with absolute clarity. Later the title Buddha was conferred upon him. Buddha means “the awakened one.” At abut the same time, another of humanity’s early awakened teachers emerged in China. His name was Lao Tzu. He left a record of his teaching in the form of one of the most profound spiritual books ever written, the Tao Te Ching. To recognize one’s own insanity, is of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence."

"The Arising New Consciousness. Most ancient religions and spiritual traditions share the common insight – that our “normal” state of mind is marred by a fundamental defect. However, out of this insight into the nature of the human condition – we may call it the bad news – arises a second insight: the good news of the possibility of a radical transformation of human consciousness. In Hindu teachings (and sometimes in Buddhism also), this transformation is called enlightenment. In the teachings of Jesus, it is salvation, and in Buddhism, it is the end of suffering. Liberation and awakening are other terms used to describe this transformation."

"When I occasionally quote the words of Jesus or the Buddha, from A Course in Miracles or from other teachings, I do so not in order to compare, but to draw your attention to the fact that in essence there is and always has been only one spiritual teaching, although it comes in many forms. Some of these forms, such as the ancient religions, have become so overlaid with extraneous matter that their spiritual essence has become almost completely obscured by it. To a large extent, therefore, their deeper meaning is no longer recognized and their transformative power lost... I love the Buddha's simple definition of enlightenment as "the end of suffering." There is nothing superhuman in that, is there? Of course, as a definition, it is incomplete. It only tells you what enlightenment is not: no suffering. But what's left when there is no more suffering? The Buddha is silent on that, and his silence implies that you'll have to find out for yourself. He uses a negative definition so that the mind cannot make it into something to believe in or into a superhuman accomplishment, a goal that is impossible for you to attain. Despite this precaution, the majority of Buddhists still believe that enlightenment is for the Buddha, not for them, at least not in this lifetime."

"Historically, Buddhist philosophers have failed to analyze out the degree to which ignorance and suffering are caused or encouraged by social factors. ... Institutional Buddhism has been conspicuously ready to accept or ignore the inequalities and tyrannies of whatever political system it found itself under. This can be death to Buddhism, because it is death to any meaningful function of compassion."

"One day I complained to Suzuki Roshi about the people I was working with. He listened intently. Finally he said, "If you want to see virtue, you have to have a calm mind.""