Compassion in Mahayana Buddhism

Quotes on Compassion 

By Zen Master Rama 

 

Help the world in any way that you want to. I have found that the more light you give and spread, the more you will evolve.

Compassion allows us to accept everything. That's why there's always a tear in the eye of the Buddha that no one sees, for the pain and suffering of others.

 

The secret teaching was the bodhisattva ideal, to live for others, for the welfare of all beings. That's enlightenment, not some flashy state of luminosity.

You get to the point where you have to wash the dishes. That's the fun in life, being behind the scenes and doing things for others, being an instrument of that cause.

 

You have to refine your being. You have to go through all of the stages and steps of erasing yourself through service to others with purity, humility, integrity.

 

You only become funny when you have a complete reverence for life.

 

Compassion and empathy are not the same as feeling sorry for oneself. They are emotions that extend our perceptual ranges.

 

If you'd like to have a better incarnation, then have one now. If that's your attitude, just let go and meditate and try to be as wise and compassionate, as understanding as you can.

 

Energy is gained by giving energy. When we give energy, we gain energy. This is different than having someone manipulate you and take your energy.

 

The essence of the teachings is to lose self importance and to care more for the welfare of others and the magical world around us, than we do for ourselves and our own self images.

 

Selfless giving is love in action.  Initially you will feel that you should help in a certain way, with a certain result.  Do your best, but don't be concerned with results; do it for the infinite.

 

The action of giving is in a certain vibratory level, meaning giving exists in a certain plane of consciousness.

 

One of the traditional Tantric methods of mediation is to imagine that you are taking on the suffering of all beings.

 

Advance yourself by advancing others. Do not judge others. Be of service to them, but realize that you are not necessarily the instrument of perfecting and immortalizing others.

 

As we hate ourselves less, we tend to hate other people less too.

 

In self-giving you must be so careful of egotism. You must be so careful when you are aiding others in their liberation not to have a sense of self.

 

In my estimation it's silly to go out and spend your time aiding people if you don't have your own act together yet. So I'd rather you spend the time, get it right, and it'll all work out a lot better.

 

In future years a number of you will become spiritual teachers. After many years of study and doing a good job, go out into the world and teach people.You'll reach points of advancement where you'll be able to be of great help to many, many people.

 

It's suggested that enlightenment has some tremendous compassion, some driving necessity to help humanity. I don't think that's the case at all. I think humanity wishes it were the case since it's humanity that writes the various scriptures.

 

I realize that there's a thing called the bodhisattva ideal, and it's a very nice pinnacle of attention. It's a very egotistical thought, ultimately.

 

To have to liberate everybody doesn't sound very free to me. You're gong to go liberate people who maybe don't want to be liberated.

 

To think that God is compassionate is a terrible mistake. To think that God is wrathful is equally stupid. God isn't emotional. You are. To superimpose your emotions on infinity is typically human.

 

To feel that you are the Buddha of all times and places and that in some way the salvation of anyone, including  yourself, depends upon you, I think there's a lot of ego involved in such a view, not much self-transcendence.

 

 I respect self-giving and I've tried to lead my life with that as the ideal. But real self-giving is when we take our being, that which is most precious to us, and we throw it into eternity with a total sense of offering.

 

Determine where you are and where you wish to be. Then use all of your self-effort to make that happen, following the guiding principles of all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and seekers of the dharma or enlightenment.

 

Selfless-giving burns away the layers of the onion. Purity and humility keep meditation and selfless-giving clear. Love radiates through the entire practice because we do all of it only for love.

 

There is no time when we really love each other. That's the magic of love. When we really love each other, there is no time.  Love is self-realization. Love is liberation.  The only way beyond time, to unravel the knot of existence, is to love.

 

Love the fading flowers as much as you love the undifferentiated which lasts forever.

 

By perfecting the practices of zazen and mindfulness, by learning patience and love and by realizing the essential emptiness of all phenomena, you will discover nirvana.

 

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Emptiness In Mahayana Buddhism

Mahayana Buddhism - Emptiness

Quotations by Dr. Frederick Lenz, Zen Master Rama

"None of this is real. All of this is an illusion and your acceptance of that fact is the beginning of the pathway to self-knowledge.

None of this exists. All important decisions in the universe occur someplace else.

Everything that you are or conceive of yourself as being is just an idea. It's an illusion. It's a hallucination.

None of this has ever been or will ever be; all is an appearance, all is an illusion. Illusions are truth. All illusions are real. We say illusion, meaning that they're shadows.

We've decided what we are. That's the dream. When the dream fades, it's not that we don't exist. How could we not exist since we never existed?

We were never there to begin with. What we are, or conceive of ourselves as, is a perception.

We are everything and we are nothing. We are a forgotten moment. We don't even exist, which is the freeing part. We just think we do. That's the illusion.

There is no self, yet we all exist. All phenomena are "empty," yet they have Buddha nature.

The way you become happy is by realizing that there is no self. No self at all, not a silly millimeter of self. You don't exist. When you know this, you will be happy.

Some types of nothing are better than other types of nothing.

Nothing is or is not unless you happen to think it so. That's what Shakespeare said, and he knew.

You are fighting against nothingness all the time by creating a series of shields that you call personality, life history, feelings, ideas, and ways of seeing.

When you visit Nirvana, there is neither existence nor nonexistence. Your baggage never arrives because there is no one there to claim it.

Qualityless simply means there is no way to discuss it. There is no way to pin it down. It could be anything at any given moment since infinity is not bound even by itself, nor the words that human beings choose to try and talk around it.

There is no evil, there's no bad; there's no good. These are human ideas. There's no creator, there's no creation; there's no God, there's no nirvana, there's no perfection. These are ideas.

The world is always ending and always beginning at every moment.

How do you know you're even here right now? Perhaps you're not. Perhaps you're far, far away and this is just a dream.

Life is a series of dreams, a series of interlocking awarenesses. I don't necessarily believe in linear time. Everything happens all at once forever.

All incarnations are lived at once, and yet there does seem to be a linear sense of time when you're in the vortex of time and space when your consciousness is fixated in a body.

There is no deterioration and there is no creation. There are projections, moments of existence. Each moment is perfect.

The world is empty -- all of the people and places, the earth, the seas, mountains, deserts, forests and cities, and the beings that inhabit them, are unchangeable.

We can only conceive of changing the self-reflection in response to our concept of self-reflection, which is predicated on our concept of self, which is a self-reflection.

We aren't anything in particular. There is no self. There are only ideas and states of mind.

The continuity of awareness is your perceptual field. Existence only occurs through the act of perception.

Step beyond your role as a perceiver, merge everything into the flux. You're going to go to stillness. When that happens, the world collapses. There is no time, no space, no viewer, no viewing…no object in view.

We are made up of nothing. There is no self. We are whatever we decide we are.

When you stop all thought, the battle is won. Everything is still and peaceful. You will come to see the eternal voidness of all things. You will see that nothing is, really.

The world wasn't created. It is created anew at every moment by mind.

Mind only comes into apparent existence through the action of perception. Mind appears to exist because it perceives.

What is incarnation? Incarnation is self-reflection. The universe that we are in is constructed, is a reflection of ourselves. We picked the dimension according to our self-reflection.

To go beyond karma you have to end the structure of self.

There is no self. There is nobody home. No forwarding address, no zip code. Address unknown.

There is no such thing as reality. Reality is what you make it.

Nirvana is something that cannot be known here. I know it seems incongruous, but it is only incongruous from the perspective of the dialectical consciousness of division, of time and space

So in the world of Enlightenment, things are just things, except they're not things. We're in nirvana. There is no debating team.

We label things through value systems that we have developed. But nothing is or is not unless we feel it is that way. We give ground to reality by creating it."

- Zen Master Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz
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