“All the suffering and joy we experience depend on conditions.”

As long as you look for a Buddha somewhere else, you’ll never see that your own mind is the Buddha

An Awakened person is someone who finds freedom in good fortune and bad.

When your mind doesn’t stir inside, the world doesn’t arise outside. When the world and the mind are both transparent, this is true vision. And such understanding is true understanding.

All Buddhas preach emptiness. Why? Because they wish to crush the concrete ideas of the students. If a student even clings to an idea of emptiness, he betrays all Buddhas.

Trying to find a buddha or enlightenment is like trying to grab space.

Someone who seeks the Way doesn’t look beyond himself.

Leaving behind the false, return to the true: make no discriminations between self and others. In contemplation, one’s mind should be stable and unmoving, like a wall.

Unless you see your nature, all this talk about cause & effect is nonsense. Buddhas don’t practice nonsense.

The mind’s capacity is limitless, and its manifestations are inexhaustible. Seeing forms with your eyes, hearing sounds with your ears, smelling odors with your nose, tasting flavors with your tongue, every movement or state is all your mind.

The essence of the Way is detachment.

To find a Buddha all you have to do is see your nature.

Once you see your nature, sex is basically immaterial.

Whoever knows that the mind is a fiction and devoid of anything real knows that his own mind neither exists nor doesn’t exist.

Not thinking about anything is Zen. Once you know this, walking, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is Zen.

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.

As much as I love the whole pirate kind of thing, the quality suffers.

I hope to get you to think differently about suffering and pain, to convince you that animals matter, and to argue that anyone serious about ending domination and hierarchy needs to think critically about bringing animals into consideration.

Those who sit at their work and are therefore called ‘chair workers,’ such as cobblers and tailors, suffer from their own particular diseases …

So then it comes back to whether the suffering and cruelty is justified by its place in a tradition that has deep roots in the culture. At present, the view in Catalonia apparently is that it does not.

The spirit I had caught gave me insight into the suffering of others, made me gravitate toward those whose feelings were like my own, made me sit for hours while others told me of their lives, made me strangely tender and cruel, violent and peaceful.

It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.

I once heard some idiot on the radio saying that all great art has suffering as its dominant theme, and that the greatest artists are only able to create because they suffer immensely in their own lives. What a bunch of bullshit.

Anything was better than nothing. Half-full was better than empty. Ignorance was the lowest form of humiliation and suffering.