Enjoying the Ultimate: Commentary on the Nirvana Chapter of the Chinese Dharmapada
Thich Nhat Hanh
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Nirvana isn’t merchandise for sale. Any religion can sell a paradise, a pure land, or nirvāṇa. But is nirvāṇa a product that the Buddha and ancestral teachers want to sell us? Is it a promised land or paradise up in the sky, which people try to sell us saying: “If you follow our religion, if you become a member of our congregation, then after you die you will have nirvāṇa or the Kingdom of Heaven”? We can see clearly that it is not.”
“As a practitioner, you can create holiness. Holiness cannot be bestowed on us by someone else. ... We are a saint when we can produce holiness.”
“Wherever there is enough true happiness, there is heaven.”
“We just sit, smile, and breathe, because we know that arguing about the existence of God or nirvāṇa is a waste of time.”
“We are in nirvāṇa. The only problem is that we are not able to return to it.”
“This is the path that goes to the shore of no-birth and no-death, leading to the end of suffering and calamity. On the spiritual path, there is no longer the discrimination between friend and enemy. You do not need to know who has worldly power or who has not.”
“The second way of practice is to remove the discrimination that comes from dualistic thinking, that separates inside from outside; ourselves from others; the subject from the object; the spiritual from the material. With no more dualistic discrimination, we have an immense freedom that is nirvāṇa.”
“The home of the deer is the countryside, the home of the birds is the sky, the home of all phenomena is the mind; the mind contains everything that is.”
“The absolute silence that is nirvāṇa is the release from a world of suffering.”
“The Sōtō school of meditation has the saying: “You cannot conceive the inconceivable. Not trying to conceive what is inconceivable is the essence of meditation.”
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Book Keywords:
holy, saints, zen, holiness, goodness, heaven, precepts, nirvana, kingdom-of-god, buddhism, righteousness, paradise
