The person craving blessedness gives food to the poor to save his own soul.
If you look closely, you will not find a thing. Existence is an illusion; emptiness is real. Yet existence and emptiness are identical.
Grappling with fate is like meeting an expert wrestler: to escape, you have to accept the fall when you are thrown. The only thing that counts is whether you get back up.
Those with faith have power, but they never use it.
Only the weak utilize power.
The meek are blessed, for they live in harmony.
On his death bed, his family mourning, he is serene, for he knows Death, like Life, is an illusion: there is no beginning and no end. (TAO)
When facing a single tree, if you look at a single one of its red leaves, you will not see all the others. When the eye is not set on one leaf, and you face the tree with nothing at all in mind, any number of leaves are visible to the eye without limit. But if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.
The things we touch have no permanence.
There is nothing we can hold onto in this world. Only by letting go can we truly possess what is real.
One cannot listen to different pieces of music at the same time, a real comprehension of the beautiful being possible only through concentration upon some central motive.
As a bee gathering nectar does not harm or disturb the colour and fragrance of the flower; so do the wise move through the world.
Dwell not on the faults and shortcomings of others; instead, seek clarity about your own.
Take the relationship of love. I may be in love and my girlfriend may be a flawlessly beautiful and wonderful person, but if I can control her completely and become immersed in her perfection, I might as well fall in love with a mannequin. However, if she has a little mole on her cheek, or some kind of unpredictability of character, then the accidental has been introduced into the domain of the orderly, and I can enjoy her humanity more easily. (Alan Watts)
The root of ignorance itself is our mind’s habitual tendency to distraction.
True beauty could only be discovered by one who mentally completed the incomplete. The virility of life and art lay in its possibilities for growth.
Experience pain to the full.
Do not try to run away from it,
do not resist it by thinking of something else or by cursing fate.
Open your arms to it, embrace it, ask it to do its worst to you.
To go with it requires a moment's plucking up of courage;
it seems to invite disaster,
yet oddly enough it is the only salvation.
The sagely person is like water. Water benefits all things and does not compete with them.
If you work on your mind with your mind, How can you avoid an immense confusion?
Does the possession of knowledge imply wisdom? No. The human race has stored vast sums of knowledge over millennia, yet there are still wars, there is still hunger, there is still selfishness and greed.
When the way comes to an end,
then change -
having changed, you pass through.
Can another help bring about a transformation in you? If he can, you are not transformed; you are merely dominated, influenced.
You have been overcome; and whether you are overcome by envy or by a so-called noble influence, you are still a slave, you are not free.
The word seriousness is elaborated on by the saying "One aim with no distractions".
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
The whole is simpler than the sum of its parts.
To take all you want is never as good as to stop when you should.
You often say, "I would give, but only to the deserving."
And who are you that men should rend their bosom and unveil their pride, that you should see their worth naked and their pride unabashed? (Kahlil Gibran)
Why, then, should we seek for something that does not need to be added to us? (Eka)
The body is like a floating cloud.
In push-hands, the hands are not needed.
The whole body is a hand,
and the hand is not a hand.
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Power that comes from purpose and wilfulness is apparent, and provokes opposition.