Breakfast with Buddha

If Christ's message could be distilled down to one line, that line would have to do with kindness and inclusiveness, not rules and divisiveness.

You ask a certain question again and again, in a sincere fashion, and the answer appears. But, in my experience, at least, that answer arrives according to it's own mysterious celestial timing, and often in disguise. And it comes in a way you're not prepared for, or don't want, or can't at first, accept.

Isn't mockery the province of the insecure?

I have a tremendous fascination with the United States of America, the grand, swirling variousness of it, the way it siphons off the ambitious, the poor, and the abused from so many other nations, the ability we seem to have to be noble and heroic at the same time as we are being arrogant and stupid.

His eyes were more intense, the gaze more intimate. He put just the last inch or so of the fingers of both hands on the table to either side of his plate and said, “Love makes them run. That is not my lineage, my idea. That is a fact just like when water gets cold it ices. Like that. Some people cannot see this is a fact, but this is. They are blind in different ways but this is a fact: Love makes the atoms go where they go and stick where they stick. Everybody when they see a baby, a small boy or girl, they smile? Why? Because inside themself they know this fact. They know love made this baby, this boy, this girl. They feel this natural rising up of love in themself. Okay, yes? Before, I said to you about God’s music that is playing all the time, for everyone. God’s music is this love. And this love that runs our world, sometimes it means that there is help coming from that love, from that . . . source you would

if Christ’s message could be distilled down to one line, that line would have to do with kindness and inclusiveness, not rules and divisiveness.

Inside the big world that you cannot control, you have the small world of you that you can control. In that small world, if you look, you can see whether to go this way toward good, or the other way toward bad.

Anger is like hands over your eyes when another person is trying to show you.

There was a small glass vase between us, three gladioli in a few ounces of water. One of the gladioli had dropped a petal- brushstroke of purple on fine white cloth. Rinpoche drank the last sip of his tea, then set the cup aside, took the petal with his thumb and second finger, placed it on the middle of the saucer in front of him, and turned the cup upside down to cover it. "I feel a lesson coming on," I said... "The flower is the good inside every person," he said. "The cup is like a wall, to protect. Many people have that wall." "Armor" I said. He nodded. "Why?" "Because to live without the cup means you must feel the world as the world really is.

our national obsession with sex (and if you don’t think there is a national obsession with sex, just browse the magazine racks in the local chain bookstore) is really nothing more than a profound spiritual longing in disguise: the desire to exhaust all other desires and feel loved and sated, at peace with our fragmented modern selves, linked to those around us. At peace, at rest. I wonder, sometimes, if the same deep desire lies at the heart of addiction to drugs, to drink, to eating, to work: are we all just desperately looking for some strategy that will get us past the shoals of modern existence and safely into that imagined, calm port?

When you are a crank, you put yourself on the top of the list of people you make miserable.

I thought I heard a cow mooing in Seese's back yard. Later on, later down the road, as they say, I would learn that this was the sound of the Rinpoche chanting some ancient prayer. But, at that moment, it sounded to me very much like a mooing cow.

The frown again. So much contained there in the flex of a few muscles. All of history, it sometimes seemed to me. All of ours, at least.

What difference makes what you believe? What happens will happen anyway, exactly the same, no matter what you believe. What you do makes the important part. What you do

A fair portion of my anger had returned, but alongside it ran the memory of those few seconds on the yoga mat in the death pose. I felt as if I had been shown a kind of essential secret, something so subtle and quiet and small(and yet so important)that I could gone my entire adult life and never even imagined such a thing existed.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought: It is built on our thoughts, it is made from our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with evil thought, pain follows him, just like the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the cart. If a person speaks or acts with pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves...

When you have known someone your whole life you don’t need a lot of warm-up time to get into a big argument. All the fore-play has been done years ago, and so the battle sits in your memory like stove gas awaiting the match. A wrong word, a careless allusion, and the old fire is suddenly raging.

it occurred to me that the modern spiritual leaders of my tradition were always somber, self-important men, thickly coated in others’ idea of who they were supposed to be.

But what runs the world is that source. Sometimes when a country, when a place on the earth, needs help, or when the whole of the earth needs help, then this love becomes into a human body like a Buddha, a Krishna, a Muhammad, a Mary, a Jesus, a Moses, and so like that. Why at that time, why in that place, that culture, even my father says, ‘Don’t know.’ Why only some of the peoples there see that these saints are pieces of God and others do not see, don’t know. But if you look with a clear mind, you know that the world works

Because to live without the cup means you must feel the world as the world really is. People make the armor from their smartness, or their anger, or their quiet, or their fear, or their being busy, or their being nice. Some people make it from a big show, always talking. Some make it by being very important. Many people do not make it, though, and those people can begin to see the world as it is.

Svakoga dana”, reče, “nudi vam se izbor hoćete li ići ovim ili onim putem. Možete se ljutiti ili ne morate. Možete biti pohlepni i ne morate. Možete nekoga mrziti i ne morate. Možete birati hoćete li previše jesti ili nećete, hoćete li pretjerati u vođenju ljubavi ili nećete. Uvijek postoji izbor.

Without really intending to, without really thinking about where it might lead, I said, "How does one get one's mind clean?" That is the very best question, my friend. The answer is a simple answer, but very hard also: Live a good life. Help people. Meditate. Live another good life. Meditate some more. Don't hurt. Don't hurt. Don't hurt.

some point you had to risk the ridicule of the mob, of your own internalized voices, and try to see clearly what had been set in front of you in this life, and try to act on that as bravely and honestly as you could, no matter what kind of rules you’d previously been living by.

What really bothers me is when religion, instead of being something that a person uses to become more loving and considerate, turns into something people use to justify their own hatred or close-mindedness.

but I could see that she blamed me for the fact that her teacher was twenty-one minutes late. I

If you want to know why this life is like it is, you should know that it is because of your last life. If you want to know what your future life will be, you should look at the way you are living in this life.

He laughed. I had made a joke, apparently. "What difference makes what you believe? What happens will happen anyway, exactly the same, no matter what you believe. What you do makes the important part. What you do.