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Quotes by Vietnamese Authors
"Whatever the tasks, do them slowly and with ease, in mindfulness. Don't do any task in order to get it over with. Resolve to do each job in a relaxed way, with all your attention."
"In order to rally people, governments need enemies... if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us."
"There is no need to put anything in front of us and run after it. We already have everything we are looking for, everything we want to become. Be yourself. Life is precious as it is. All the elements for your happiness are already here. There is no need to run, strive, search, or struggle. Just be. Just being in the moment in this place is the deepest practice of meditation. Most people cannot believe that just walking as though you have nowhere to go is enough. They think that striving and competing are normal and necessary. Try practicing aimlessness for just five minutes,and you will see how happy you are during those five minutes."
"Your body belongs to the earth. In modern life, people tend to think their bodies belong to them, that they can do anything they want to themselves. But your body is not only yours. Your body belongs to your ancestors, your parents, and future generations. It also belongs to society and to all the other living beings. The trees, the clouds, the soil, and every living thing brought about the presence of your body. We can eat with care, knowing we are caretakers of our bodies, rather than their owners."
"It is my conviction that there is no way to peace - peace is the way."
"Those who are without compassion cannot see what is seen with the eyes of compassion."
"The meditation on interdependence is to help one penetrate reality in order to be one with it, not to become caught up in philosophical opinion or meditation methods. The raft is used to cross the river. It isn't to be carried around on your shoulders. The finger which points at the moon isn't the moon itself."
"When a feeling or thought arises, your intention should not be to chase it away, even if by continuing to concentrate on the breath the feeling or thought passes naturally from the mind. The intention isn't to chase it away, hate it, worry about it, or be frightened by it. So what exactly should you be doing concerning such thoughts and feelings? Simply acknowledge their presence."
"Concentration is not wholesome in itself. A thief needs concentration to break into a house.The object of our concentration is what makes it beneficial or not. If you use meditative concentration to run away from reality, that is not beneficial."
"Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future. If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now we are okay. Right now, today, we are still alive, and our bodies are working marvelously. Our eyes can still see the beautiful sky. Our ears can still hear the voices of our loved ones."
"We have to learn the art of stopping - stopping our thinking, our habit energies, our forgetfulness, the strong emotions that rule us. When an emotion rushes through us like a storm, we have no peace. We turn on the TV and then we turn it off. We pick up a book and then we put it down. How can we stop this state of agitation? How How can we stop our fear, despair, anger, and craving? We can stop by practicing mindful breathing, mindful walking, mindful smiling, and deep looking in order to understand. When we are mindful, touching deeply the present moment, the fruits are always understanding, acceptance, love, and the desire to relieve suffering and bring joy."
"The present moment is the substance with which the future is made. Therefore, the best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment. What else can you do?"
"Breathe in deeply to bring your mind home to your body. Then look at, or think of, the person triggering this emotion: With mindfulness, you can see that she is unhappy, that she is suffering. You can see her wrong perceptions. You can see that she is not beautiful when she says things that are unkind."
"If you can be aware that you have a living body, and notice when there's tension in your body, that's already an important insight."
"We can only accept teachings that we have put into practice with our own awakened understanding and that we can see with our own experience to be true."
"Your true home is in the here and the now."
"When you learn about the teaching and the practice of another tradition, you always have a chance to understand your own teaching and practice."
"We fall back into the past, we jump ahead into the future, and in this we lose our entire lives."
"In us, there is a river of feelings, in which every drop of water is a different feeling, and each feeling relies on all the others for its existence. To observe it, we just sit on the bank of the river and identify each feeling as it surfaces, flows by, and disappears."
"When we recognise the virtues, the talent, the beauty of Mother Earth, something is born in us, some kind of connection, love is born."
"You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer."
"When you touch someone who authentically represents a tradition, you not only touch his or her tradition, you also touch your own."
"There is nowhere to arrive except the present moment."
"If you miss the present moment, you miss your appointment with life. It's so clear. Mindfulness is the energy and practice that helps you go back to the here and now so that you encounter life."
"If we are aware of our lifestyle, our way of consuming, of looking at things, we will know how to make peace right in the moment we are alive."
"Just by breathing deeply on your anger, you will calm it. You are being mindful of your anger, not suppressing it...touching it with the energy of mindfulness. You are not denying it at all. When I speak about this to psychotherapists, I have some difficulty. When I say that anger makes us suffer, they take it to mean that anger is something negative to be removed. But I always say that anger is an organic thing, like love. Anger can become love. Our compost can become a rose. If we know how to take care of our compost...Anger is the same. It can be negative when we do not know how to handle it, but if we know how to handle our anger, it can be very positive. We do not need to throw anything away," (50)."
"Practicing mindfulness enables us to become a real person. When we are a real person, we see real people around us, and life is present in all its richness."
"Our feelings are formations, impermanent and without substance. We learn not to identify with ourselves with our feelings, not to consider them as a self, not to seek refuge in them, not to die because of them."
"We tend to think of nourishment only as what we take in through our mouths, but what we consume with our eyes, our ears, our noses, our tongues, and our bodies is also food. The conversations going on around us, and those we participate in, are also food. Are we consuming and creating the kind of food that is healthy for us and helps us grow?"
"Meditation can help us embrace our worries, our fear, our anger; and that is very healing. We let our own natural capacity of healing do the work."
"There is no way to happiness - happiness is the way."
"Equanimity means to let go, not to abandon."
"May we eat only foods that nourish us and prevent illnes.. May we accept this food for the realization of the way of understanding and love."
"I vow to ingest only items that preserve well-being, peace, and joy in my body and my consciousness... Practicing a diet is the essence of this precept. Wars and bombs are the products of our consciousness individually and collectively. Our collective consciousness has so much violence, fear, craving, and hatred in it, it can manifest in wars and bombs. The bombs are the product of our fear... Removing the bombs is not enough. Even if we could transport all the bombs to a distant planet, we would still not be safe, because the roots of the wars and the bombs are still intact in our collective consciousness. Transforming the toxins in our collective consciousness is the true way to uproot war (72-73)."
"Just because we do not perceive something, it is not correct to say it does not exist."
"If I don't understand you, I may be angry at you, all the time. We are not capable of understanding each other, and that is the main source of human suffering."
"Impermanence and selflessness are not negative aspect of life, but the very foundation on which life is built. Impermanence is the constant transformation of things. Without impermanence, there can be no life. Selflessness is the interdependent nature of all things. Without interdependence, nothing could exist."
"Understanding and love aren't two separate things, they're just one."
"This is Buddhist meditation-to penetrate, to be one with, in order to really understand."
"Worrying does not accomplish anything. Even if you worry twenty times more, it will not change the situation of the world. In fact, your anxiety will only make things worse. Even though things are not as we would like, we can still be content, knowing we are trying our best and will continue to do so. If we don't know how to breathe, smile,and live every moment of our life deeply, we will never be able to help anyone. I am happy in the present moment. I do not ask for anything else. I do not expect any additional happiness or conditions that will bring about more happiness. The most important practice is aimlessness, not running after things, not grasping."
"If we practice walking meditation, we walk just for walking, not to arrive."
"If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. This is the most basic kind of peace work."
"Mindfulness is like that-it is the miracle which can call back in a flash our dispersed mind and restore it to wholeness so that we can live each minute of life."
"Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves - slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future."
"Once you can communicate with yourself, you'll be able to communicate outwardly with more clarity. The way in is the way out."
"Do not lose yourself in the past. Do not lose yourself in the future. Do not get caught in your anger, worries, or fears. Come back to the present moment, and touch life deeply. This is mindfulness."
"Love has no meaning without understanding."
"So if we love someone, we should train in being able to listen. By listening with calm and understanding, we can ease the suffering of another person."
"The most basic precept of all is to be aware of what we do, what we are, each minute . Every other precept will follow from that."
"But work is life only when done in mindfulness. otherwise, one becomes life the person "who lives as though dead." We need to light our own torch in order to carry on. But the life of each one of us is connected with the life of those around us. If we know how to live in mindfulness, if we know how to preserve and care for our own mind and heart then thanks to that our brothers and sisters will also know how to live in mindfulness."
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