Author: DhammaSeeker

Fuck that

I was watching the NBC Nightly News last evening, and they showed footage of a U.S. army helicopter being mobbed on a hilltop in Pakistan while delivering much-needed relief supplies to the earthquake victims there, and this is what popped into my head: So the U.S. army can land a helicopter in the middle of Pakistan (where it’s guaranteed that many of the men are armed) to deliver food, but it was logistically impossible to airlift in a flat or five of drinking water to the hundreds of American citizens stranded at the New Orleans convention center in the days after Katrina? Fuck that.

independent self-existence?

When the Dalai Lama was asked: “How do things exist if they are empty of inherent existence?”, His Holiness replied: “The doctrines of emptiness and selflessness do not imply the non-existence of things. Things do exist. When we say that all phenomena are void of self-existence, it does not mean that we are advocating non-existence, that we are repudiating that things exist. Then what is it we are negating? We are negating, or denying, that anything exists from its own side without depending on other things. Hence, it is because things depend for their existence upon other causes and conditions that they are said to lack independent self-existence.”
~ From Answers: Discussions with Western Buddhists

treasure of the heart

And as to me, I know nothing else but miracles.
~ Walt Whitman

To be enlightened is to be intimate with all things.
~ Dōgen

There is no such person as a Buddha. The Absolute is imminent in every man’s heart and this treasure of the heart is the only Buddha that exists. Those who seek the Buddha do not find him. This may be qualified into the statement that those who seek the Truth will find the Buddha and finding, comprehend not the Buddha, but the cause which underlies the phenomena of his life and teaching.

~ Elizabeth Barrington