27 quotes found
“The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no "meaning," they are meaning; the mountains are. The ...”
“It is related that Sakyamuni [the historical Buddha] once dismissed as of small consequence a feat of levitation on the part of a disciple, and cried out in pity for a yogin by the river who had sp...”
“Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. Thi...”
“In his first summers, forsaking all his toys, my son would stand rapt for nearly an hour in his sandbox in the orchard, as doves and redwings came and went on the warm wind, the leaves dancing, the...”
“My foot slips on a narrow ledge; in that split second, as needles of fear pierce heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time. Thought and action are not different, and stone, air, ice,...”
“In the book of Job, the Lord demands, Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?I was there!-surely that is the answer to Gods question. For no matter how the universe came into bein...”
“I grow into these mountains like a moss. I am bewitched. The blinding snow peaks and the clarion air, the sound of earth and heaven in the silence, the requiem birds, the mythic beasts, the flags, ...”
“Left alone, I am overtaken by the northern void-no wind, no cloud, no track, no bird, only the crystal crescents between peaks, the ringing monuments of rock that, freed from the talons of ice and ...”
“The central feature of the practice of meditation and hard work known as Zen is that, as Matthiessen says, it has no patience with mysticism, far less the occult. Nor does it have any time with mor...”
“I sit in meditationand soon all sounds, and all one sees and feels, take on imminence, an immanence, as if the Universe were coming to attention, a Universe of which one is the center, a Universe t...”
“After midday, the rain eased, and the Land Rover rode into Pokhara on a shaft of storm light. Next day there was humid sun and shifting southern skies, but to the north a deep tumult of swirling gr...”
“The light irradiates white peaks of Annapurna marching down the sky, in the great rampart that spreads east and west for eighteen hundred miles, the Himalaya- the alaya (abode, or home) of hima (sn...”
“It is as if I have entered what the Tibetans call the Bardo-literally, between-two-existences- a dreamlike hallucination that precedes reincarnation, not necessarily in human formIn case I should n...”
“In what is now known as Bodh Gayaa Buddhist temple stands beside an ancient pipal, descended from that bodhi tree, or enlightenment tree, and I watched the rising of the morning star and came away ...”
“And it is a profound consolation, perhaps the only one, to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long and ghostly life wandering the future and the past on its hind legs, looking for meanings, ...”
“Transfixed by the bright gaze of a lizard, I become calm. This stone on which the lizard lies was under the sea when lizards first came into being, and now the flood is wearing it away, to return i...”
“The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each e...”
“The mystical perception (which is only mystical if reality is limited to what can be measured by the intellect and senses) is remarkably consistent in all ages and all places. All phenomena are pro...”
“Today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed, things merely change shape or formthe cosmic radiation that is thought to come from the explosion of c...”
“The sun is roaring, it fills to bursting each crystal of snow. I flush with feeling, moved beyond my comprehension, and once again, the warm tears freeze upon my face. These rocks and mountains, al...”
