“This one life has no form and is empty by nature. If you become attached by any form, you should reject it. If you see an ego, a soul, a birth, or a death, reject them all.”

Whoever realizes that the six senses aren’t real, that the five aggregates are fictions, that no such things can be located anywhere in the body, understands the language of Buddhas.

The Buddha is your real body, your original mind.

The true Way is sublime. It can’t be expressed in language. Of what use are scriptures? But someone who sees his own nature finds the Way, even if he can’t read a word.

But when you first embark on the Path, your awareness won’t be focused. You’re likely to see all sorts of strange, dreamlike scenes. But you shouldn’t doubt that all such scenes come from your own mind and nowhere else.

The ultimate Truth is beyond words. Doctrines are words. They’re not the Way.

Our nature is the mind. And the mind is our nature.

To have a body is to suffer. Does anyone with a body know peace? Those who understand this detach themselves from all that exists and stop imagining or seeking anything. The sutras say, “To seek is to suffer. To seek nothing is bliss.” When you seek nothing, you’re on the Path.

But this mind isn’t somewhere outside the material body of the four elements. Without this mind we can’t move. The body has no awareness. Like a plant or a stone, the body has no nature. So how does it move? It’s the mind that moves.

Delusion means mortality. And awareness means Buddhahood.

When mortals are alive, they worry about death. When they’re full, they worry about hunger. Theirs is the Great Uncertainty. But sages don’t consider the past. And they don’t worry about the future. Nor do they cling to the present. And from moment to moment they follow the Way.

People of this world are deluded. They’re always longing for something – always, in a word, seeking.

All the suffering and joy we experience depend on conditions.

Buddha means awareness, the awareness of body and mind that prevents evil from arising in either.

As long as you’re enthralled by a lifeless form, you’re not free.

Worship means reverence and humility. It means revering your real self and humbling delusions. If you can wipe out evil desires and harbor good thoughts, even if nothing shows, it’s worship. Such form is its real form.

Freeing oneself from words is liberation.

In my introductory course, Anthropology 160, the Forms of Folklore,

We’re getting rid of bureaucracy, so that we’re releasing time for police officers to be crime fighters and not form writers.

The internet is changing all forms of communication, and this definitely includes political communication.

Evil is a form of incompetence.

Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.

A sweaty Macbeth with blood on his arms coming in fresh from the battle doesn’t interest me.

Range is of the ego, form is of the soul.

I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.