Quotes from Thai Forest Tradition
Whatever you experience will become an object for contemplation.
This is where the practice really begins.
It is the fruit which arises as samadhi matures.
One will never come to see Dhamma by means of rational thinking.
We can just allow things to be the way they are.
Even if you are stressed out,
you can allow it,
you can let it be the way it is.
Let things be
just as they are.
Each human being is quite capable of realizing
ultimate reality,
immortal truth,
and yet not one of us is capable
of proving it to anyone else.
Loving-kindness [metta]
is a skillful way of enduring
what we would not normally endure.
The significance of the Buddhist teaching lies in the fact that
it’s not an attempt to tell us how things should be,
it’s more a way of bringing our attention to the way things are.
The real challenge lies in just being able to integrate this awareness into the most ordinary things.
‘Mystical experience’, the ‘insight’ …
all the ways of talking about
that realisation of the deathless reality …
is indescribable.
Stuff we create in our own mind — that’s what dukkha is.
The Buddha taught that
greed, anger, and misunderstanding are the causes that give rise to suffering.
If we ourselves are not yet acquainted with
greed, anger, and misunderstanding, then there is no way we can believe this.
When we know ourselves what
greed, anger and delusion are like,
and that whenever they arise in the mind,
they produce suffering like a fire burning us,
then we can believe it on the basis of our own experience.
Today is a new day.
Yesterday is a memory.
Tomorrow is the unknown.
Now is the knowing.
That which is threatening to the ego is liberating to the heart.
Whenever the mind wants to grab on to something as a sure thing,
just say, ‘It’s not sure, it’s transient’.
Detach, let go.
Whenever there is any feeling of clinging,
we detach from it
because we know that feeling is just as it is.
Instead of becoming the world’s expert on Buddhism,
just let go, let go, let go.
When there is mindfulness and right understanding,
then I can’t find any suffering at all in this moment, now.
There is no way that we can guarantee that anything is definitely like this or like that, so the Buddha said to just leave it be. Leave it be as uncertain. However much you like it or dislike it, you should understand it as uncertain.
We practise Buddhism until we have a feeling for it.
After a time, a new kind of understanding arises.
The Buddha’s teachings are like the instructions posted on a hotel room door,
telling you what to do when the hotel’s on fire.
I dedicate my body and mind, my whole life, to the pracice of the Lord Buddha’s teachings in their entirety. I will realize the truth in this lifetime … I will let go of everything and follow the teachings. No matter how much suffering and difficulty I have to endure I will perservere, otherwise there will be no end to my doubts.
I will make this life as even and continuous as a single day and night. I will abandon attachments to mind and body and follow the Buddha’s teachings until I know their truth for myself.
“Right effort” is not the effort to make something particular happen.
It is the effort to be aware and awake each moment.
Freedom from craving brings many incidental benefits.
Love is not liking somebody.
Anyone can do that.
Love is loving things
that sometimes you don’t like.
If you have time to breathe, you have time to meditate. You breathe when you walk. You breathe when you stand. You breathe when you lie down.
When operating on a personal level — from how things should be — it seems that life is always a struggle.
The spiritual journey is, in essence, from distraction to awakening, and also from the personal to the universal. … In this ‘going forth’ the heart opens and self-concern is realized as the shadow of concern for the welfare of all – “What can I gain from my practice, my efforts?” is replaced by, “What can I offer?”
[Any] scene becomes only a sign for awakening,
a signal to free the mind.
[When we are upset, sad, etc … we can remember]
we are the observers of the conditions —
we are not the conditions themselves.
But after that I contemplated my attitude; I contemplated my greed for peace. And I did not seek tranquillity any more.
Proper effort is not the effort to make something particular happen.
It is the effort to be aware and awake each moment.
If my mind doesn’t go out to disturb the noise,
the noise won’t disturb me.
When you sit, let it be.
Grasp at nothing.
Resist nothing.
The nibbana-dhamma lies in the minds of each one of you
at the moment that you are to some degree
empty of the feeling of “I” and “mine”.
Remember that the world happens to be as it is, and right now
that’s the only way it can be. The only thing we can do is be
patient with it.