The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

Often we think that we can buy wisdom. People have spent lots of money trying to do that, but they are unable to accomplish very much. It is very important to realize that wisdom cannot be bought or sold, but wisdom has to be practiced personally. Then we begin to realize the value of wisdom. It is priceless.

And what do I risk to tell you this, 
which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then,
love the world. 

Life is only available in the present moment.

Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.

Two petals fall
and the shape of the 
peony
is wholly changed

Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything that they do not make clear.

In every moment the Universe is whispering to you.

Buddha nature is not regarded as a peaceful state of mind or, for that matter, as a disturbed one either. It is a state of intelligence that questions our life and the meaning of life. It is the foundation of a search. A lot of things haven’t been answered in our life—and we are still searching for the questions. That questioning is buddha nature. It is a state of potential. The more dissatisfaction, the more questions and more doubts there are, the healthier it is, for we are no longer sucked into ego-oriented situations, but we are constantly woken up.

In the dim first light
I watch the waves
from a departing boat.

Complacency is countered by integrity, which is an unswerving love of the truth and a willingness to live it.

When you pursue awakening, it’s not going to lead to disappointment. Quite the contrary, it goes wildly beyond your expectations, wildly beyond your hopes.

To really understand the meaning of life, we have to go beyond thinking and experience the vast scale of life directly, with our own body and mind.

One’s appreciation of the world never diminishes. When you open your eyes early in the morning, you don’t say, “Oh, here’s another day, another pain.” The delight begins to happen from the first moment when you wake. You feel that you are a complete human being. You don’t feel that you are still dragging your umbilical cord with you throughout your life. Instead, you are a wholesome, complete, and independent human being.

Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us. Not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are.

Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity; but if we dare to examine it, we  find that this identity depends on an endless collection of things to prop it up…without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn’t that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?

The truth is, bad things don’t affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That’s true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either. 

Buddhism is optimistic, joyful with the possibility of our liberation. We can find harmful tendencies in ourselves, begin to free ourselves from our conditioned responses, guilt, and grief. Individuals do this; communities do this; religions and nations can do this.

There is no greater mystery than this: being Reality ourselves, we seek to gain Reality.

Don’t feel disturbed by the thinking mind. You are not practicing to prevent thinking, but rather to recognize and acknowledge thinking whenever it arises.