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Mahayana Quotes

Browse 8 quotes about Mahayana.

Mahayana Quotes

“The world-view of the poets centred in their experience of human destiny itself and of the way in which it could be overcome through that spirit of heroism in the midst of tragedy which had grown to maturity in the hard struggles of a century filled with inward upheaval and threatened with constant danger from without.”

“The way to develop the altruistic intention a. Seven points of cause and effect 1. Equanimity between fnend, enemy and stranger is the preliminary. 2. Seven points: recognizing sentient beings as your mother, remembening their kindness, wishing to repay it, heart-warming love, compassion, great determination, altruistic intention b. Equalizing and exchanging self and others: equalizing self and others, disadvantages of selfishness, advantages of cherishing others, exchanging self and others, taking others’ suffering and giving them your happiness and its causes c. Combining the above two methods into one”

“There are two kinds of aspiration in the realization of bodhicitta: the aspiration concerned for the welfare of all sentient beings and the aspiration to attain buddhahood for their sake. The spontaneous intention to attain buddhahood for the benefit of all sentient beings occurs when these two aspirations are complete. This is the realization of bodhicitta, the mind of enlightenment. At this point, the student has become a practitioner of the highest capacity and all activities and practices motivated by bodhicitta are those of the Greater Vehicle, the Mahayana.”

“The moment you have realized bodhicitta, you have become a Mahayana practitioner and are on the path to complete enlightenment but the moment your bodhicitta degenerates, you fall outside the fold of the bodhisattvas. Without bodhicitta, no matter how advanced you are in other practices—even if you have a direct realization of emptiness or have attained nirvana—nothing you do becomes the conduct of a bodhisattva or the cause of enlightenment.”

“...if we seek the permanence of an object as something existing from its own side, we discover something inexpressible. If we take three sticks and place them together in a certain way, they will all stand up. If each of the sticks could stand under its own power, it would remain standing even if the others were removed, but they cannot. In this way we must understand dependent arising precisely. Another way of thinking about it is to consider clothing. Only when cloth is of the correct color, shape, and so forth is it labeled "clothing." Or think of a clock. Whenever we see a clock, we label it a clock, but if we were to separate the component pieces, then the "clock" would cease to exist, because no basis of imputation would remain. In actuality there was no truly existent clock in the first place—only the causes and conditions fit to be labeled a "clock.”