Repeatedly
undergoing birth and death
is just due to grasping at objects.
When we reflect back on the mind that
grasps at objects, we see that the real identity
of mind is originally pure. Within this purity, grasping
mind does not exist. Within nirvana, fundamentally
there are no thoughts moving; the movement
is ever still. Being still, there is
no seeking.
Records of the Teachers and Students of the Lanka
If once you can
go through the Cloud-pass,
Then South, North, East, West,
you can go freely in any direction.
Resting at night, travelling by day,
all subject or object forgotten.
Wherever you plant your foot,
there is purity and coolness.
Go through the Cloud pass and
there is no more the old road.
The sky is blue and the sun bright,
the mountains are your home.
The wheel of the world turning and changing,
hard for men to attain truth!
But he who moves through it with folded hands,
is noble ~ a golden dragon indeed.
jacob wrestling with the enemy
One learns to understand
that there is a world in one’s self,
that in one’s mind there is a source of happiness
and unhappiness, the source of health and illness, the source of light
and darkness, and that it can be awakened, either mechanically or at will,
if only one knew how to do it. Then one does not blame his ill fortune
nor complain of his fellow man. He becomes more tolerant,
more joyful, and more loving toward his neighbor,
because he knows the cause of every thought
and action, and he sees it all as the
effect of a certain cause.
A physician would not
revenge himself on a patient in an asylum,
even if the patient hit him, for he knows the cause.
Psychology is the higher alchemy, and one must not study
it only without practicing it. Practice and study must
go together, which opens the door to
happiness for every soul.
You still imagine that truth
needs pointing at and telling you: ‘Look, here is truth’.
It is not so. Truth is not the result of an effort, the end of a road.
It is here and now, in the very longing and the search for it. It is nearer than
the mind and the body, nearer than the sense ‘I am’. You do not see it
because you look too far away from yourself, outside your
innermost being. You have objectified truth and
insist on your standard proofs and tests,
which apply only to things
and thoughts…
Truth is not a reward for good behaviour,
nor a prize for passing some tests. It cannot be brought about.
It is the primary, the unborn, the ancient source of all that is. You are
eligible because you are. You need not merit truth. It is your
own. Just stop running away by running after.
Stand still, be quiet.
One has to spend
so many years in learning how
to be happy. I am just beginning to make
some progress in the science, and I hope to disprove
Young’s theory that “as soon as we have found the key of life
it opens the gates of death.” Every year strips us of at least one vain
expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its
stead. I never will believe that our youngest days are
our happiest. What a miserable augury for the
progress of the race and the destination
of the individual if the more matured
and enlightened state is the
less happy one!
Childhood is only
the beautiful and happy time
in contemplation and retrospect:
to the child it is full of deep sorrows,
the meaning of which is unknown. Witness
colic and whooping-cough and dread of ghosts,
to say nothing of hell and Satan, and an offended Deity
in the sky, who was angry when I wanted too much plumcake.
Then the sorrows of older persons, which children see but
cannot understand, are worse than all. All this to prove
that we are happier than when we were seven years
old, and that we shall be happier when we are
forty than we are now, which I call a
comfortable doctrine, and one
worth trying to
believe!