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Path Of The Bodhisattva Quotes

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Path Of The Bodhisattva Quotes

“The essence of the Buddha’s teachings was that while formal practice can help us to develop direct experience of emptiness, wisdom, and compassion, such experiences are meaningless unless we can bring them to bear on every aspect of our daily lives. For it’s in facing the challenges of daily life that we can really measure our development of calmness, insight, and compassion.”

CompassionBuddhismEnlightenmentAwakeningPath Of The Bodhisattva
Book:The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness
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“Suffering, in fact, can be helpful in many ways. It spurs your motivation and as many teachings point out, without suffering there would be no determination to be free from samsara. Sadness is an effective antidote to arrogance.”

SufferingBuddhismEnlightenmentAwakeningSpiritual TransformationMindtrainingPath Of The Bodhisattva
Book:The Heart of Compassion: The Thirty-seven Verses on the Practice of a Bodhisattva
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“The Indian mystic Sri Ramakrishna likened this to going out in a rowing boat. At first one has to make a lot of effort; it’s quite a strain, especially if one is rowing against the stream. But when one finally manages to reach the middle of the river, one can hoist one’s sail and the breeze will carry the boat along. In the same way, a great deal of effort is necessary in the early stages of the spiritual life, but a time comes when one makes contact with forces that in a sense are beyond oneself – though in another sense they are part of one’s greater self – and these begin to carry one along.”

EffortBuddhismSpiritual LifeDivine GracePath Of The BodhisattvaSri Ramakrishna
Book:The Bodhisattva Ideal : Wisdom and Compassion in Buddhism
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“Our manifesting mission is a White Op, a term based on the military black op, or black operation, a clandestine plot usually involving highly trained government spies or mercenaries who infiltrate an adversary‘s position, behind enemy lines and unbeknownst to them. White Op, coined by my best friend Bunny, stands for what I see needing to happen on the planet: a group of well-intentioned, highly trained Bodhisattva warriors (appearing like ordinary folk), armed with the six paramitas and restrained by ethical vows, begin to infiltrate their relationships, social institutions, and industries across all sectors of society and culture. Ordinary Bodhisattvas infusing the world with sacred view and transforming one mind at a time from the inside out until a new paradigm based on wisdom and compassion has totally replaced materialism and nihilism. The White Op is in large part how I envision the work and intention of my colleagues and me at the Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science; we aspire to fulfill it by offering a Buddhist-inspired contemplative psychotherapy training program, infused with the latest neuroscience, to therapists, health-care workers, educators, and savvy business leaders. (p. 225)”

BuddhismEnlightenmentAwakeningBlack OpsPath Of The BodhisattvaWhite Op
Book:Gradual Awakening: The Tibetan Buddhist Path of Becoming Fully Human
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“We believe in ourselves in this narrow, limited, egoistic sense, as identified with the body and the lower mind. We are blind to any higher vision, any more ultimate selfhood, any more universal mind or consciousness. This belief in self in this sense is a fetter that has to be broken before we can enter the Stream and break through into a higher, wider dimension of being and consciousness.”

BuddhismHigher ConsciousnessUniversal ConsciousnessPath Of The BodhisattvaUltimate Selfhood
Book:The Bodhisattva Ideal : Wisdom and Compassion in Buddhism
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“Everything depends on your intention. All the time, therefore, check your attitude and motivation. As Patrul Rinpoche said, everyone wants happiness, but the true way to reach perfect happiness is to bring happiness to others.”

HappinessBuddhismEnlightenmentIntentionAwakeningMindtrainingPath Of The Bodhisattva
Book:The Heart of Compassion: The Thirty-seven Verses on the Practice of a Bodhisattva
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“The final disappearing act of the great magician, the great medicine itself, is that a correct view of emptiness prevents even emptiness from being the final source of clinging. The point is that we have nothing to hold on to – not the world of forms and differentiation, not the formless realm of oneness, and not even the dissolving method of emptiness. „Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone utterly beyond, hail awakening“ as the Heart Sutra pronounces. (p. 204)”

BuddhismEnlightenmentAwakeningEmptinessPath Of The BodhisattvaHeart SutraPath Of The Magician
Book:Gradual Awakening: The Tibetan Buddhist Path of Becoming Fully Human
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“The practice of extending love towards all living creatures brings on ecstatic states of cosmic joy. In this intently concentrated state he (the meditator) has the power to send beneficent thoughts over land or sea to a distant person and let them penetrate his mind.”

MeditationContemplationPaul BruntonPhilosophia PerennisPath Of The BodhisattvaCosmic Joy
Book:Advanced contemplation: The peace within you
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“The root of virtue is a mind free from the three poisons of aversion, attachment, and ignorance. The root of merit is the practice of the six perfections (in Sanskrit they are known as the paramitas). They constitute engaged bodhichitta. The first five—generosity, discipline, patience, diligence, and meditation—are the source of merit. When they are embraced by the sixth—transcendent wisdom (prajnaparamita)—they become true paramitas, or perfections. A virtuous mind that practices the paramitas is suffused with supreme joy; and this is the mind of a bodhisattva.”

VirtueBuddhismPath Of The BodhisattvaParamitasMind Of The Bodhisattva
Book:In the Footsteps of Bodhisattvas: Buddhist Teachings on the Essence of Meditation
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“Between the unenlightened human being and the Enlightened one, the Buddha, there are a number of intermediate degrees, embodied in different people at different stages of spiritual development. Most people are still short of Enlightenment, to a greater or lesser extent, but at the same time they are not wholly unenlightened. They stand somewhere between the unenlightened state and the state of full Enlightenment, and thus make up the spiritual hierarchy, the higher reaches of which can be referred to as the Bodhisattva hierarchy. By now we know enough about Bodhisattvas to have an appreciation of the intensity of their aspiration and commitment to the spiritual life. But even among Bodhisattvas there are degrees of spiritual attainment. The principle of spiritual hierarchy is very important.”

BuddhismPath Of The BodhisattvaSpiritual Hierarchy
Book:The Bodhisattva Ideal : Wisdom and Compassion in Buddhism
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“We can sacrifice ourselves in order to save lives, to spread messages of freedom, hope, and dignity. That is our Buddha Nature, our Christ Nature – people who have embodied the principles of love and compassion and have taken extraordinary measures to change the world for the better. We call them heroes and heroines - for example, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Malala Yousafzai, along with the nameless aid workers, neonatal surgeons, and ordinary parents who make extraordinary choices in life-threatening circumstances. And we admire them. Those are the people who we want to occupy our Jewel Tree, letting their nectar rain down upon us in a shower of blessing and inspiration. They are the people who have discovered interdependence, wisdom, and compassion, have seen through the illusion of separation and come out the other side with the hero‘s elixir for the welfare of others. If we don‘t believe we can do it, if we don‘t have the confidence, that‘s the last hurdle. We believe there is something special about the hero and something deficient about us, but the only difference is that the Bodhisattva has training, has walked the Lam Rim, has reached the various milestones that each contemplation is designed to evoke, and collectively those experiences have brought confidence. Our natures are the same. It‘s in your DNA to become a hero. As heretical as it may sound to some, there is no inherent specialness to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He is not inherently different from you. If you had his modeling, training, support, and devotional refuge, you too could be a paragon of hope and goodwill. Now, hopefully you will recognize cow critical it is for you to embrace your training (the Bodhisattva Path), so that we can shape-shift civilization through the neural circuitry of living beings. (pp. 139 - 140)”

BuddhismHeroEnlightenmentAwakeningSpiritual TransformationBuddha NaturePath Of The BodhisattvaWisdom And CompassionChrist Nature
Author:Miles Neale
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“There is a real correspondence between biological and psychological masculinity and femininity on the one hand, and spiritual masculinity and femininity on the other. What one must bear in mind is that the Bodhisattva combines both. This may seem strange, but the Bodhisattva can be described as being psychologically and spiritually bisexual, integrating the masculine and the feminine at every level of his or her psychological and spiritual experience. This is reflected in Buddhist iconography. With some representations of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas it is hard to discern whether the figure is masculine or feminine. This iconographical convention reflects the psychological and spiritual bisexuality of the Bodhisattva, and indeed of any spiritually developed person. The idea, or even ideal, of psychological and spiritual bisexuality is unfamiliar to us in the West today, but it was known to the ancient Gnostics, one of the heretical sects of early Christianity. The teaching was quickly stamped out by the Church, but an interesting passage has been preserved in a work known as the Gospel of Thomas, which was discovered in Egypt as recently as 1945. It isn’t an orthodox Christian work, but it consists of 112 sayings attributed to Jesus after his resurrection. In the twenty-third of these sayings, Jesus is represented as saying: 'When you make the two one, and make the inside like the outside, and the outside like the inside, and the upperside like the underside, and (in such a way) that you make the man (with) the woman a single one, in order that the man is not the man and the woman is not the woman; when you make eyes in place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image; then you will go into the Kingdom.' This is not the sort of teaching one normally encounters in church, but it is obviously of profound significance. In the context of Buddhism the idea or concept, and even the practice, of spiritual bisexuality features most graphically in the Tantra, where it is represented not just by the androgynous appearance of the Bodhisattva, but by the symbol of sexual union. Here, ksanti, the feminine aspect of the spiritual life, becomes transcendental wisdom, while energy, the masculine aspect, becomes fully realized as compassion. Thus in Tantric Buddhist art one encounters representations of a mythical form of the Buddha in sexual union with a figure who is sometimes described as the female counterpart to his own masculine form. These images are called yab-yum, yab meaning ‘father’ and yum meaning ‘mother’. They are sometimes regarded in the West as being obscene or even blasphemous, but in Tibet such symbolism is regarded as extremely sacred. It has nothing to do with sexuality in the ordinary sense; it is a representation of the highest consummation, the perfect balance, of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’, wisdom and compassion. Although there are two figures, there are not two persons. There is only one person, one Enlightened person, within whom are united reason and emotion, wisdom and compassion.”

BuddhismOnenessNondualityPath Of The BodhisattvaWisdom And CompassionYab Yum
Book:The Bodhisattva Ideal : Wisdom and Compassion in Buddhism
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