Archive for the Quotes category
“No.”
by 10k films on February 4th, 2012
“A monk asked Zhaozhou: “Does a dog have buddha-nature or not?” Zhaozhou said: “No.” This word No is not the No of existence and non-existence. It is not the No of true nothingness. Ultimately, what is it?
When you arrive here, you must abandon all with your whole body, not doing anything, not doing not-doing-anything. Go straight to the empty and free and vast, with no pondering what to think. The previous thought is already extinct, the following thought does not arise, the present thought is itself empty. You do not hold to emptiness, and you forget you are not holding on. You do not reify this forgetting: you escape from not reifying and the escape too is not kept. When you reach such a time, there’s just a spiritual light that’s clearly aware and totally still, appearing as a lofty presence.
Do not wrongly give birth to interpretations: just bring up the meditation saying twenty-four hours a day, whatever you are doing. Do not be oblivious of it for a moment: diligently come to grips with it and study it in fine detail. If you keep studying like this, pulling it back and forth, when you reach the proper time, you better look back most carefully and see what Zhaozhou’s No means. When you are [unable to turn back] like a rat going into a [hollow] horn, then views are cut off.
When those of sharp faculties get here, they empty through and smash the lacquer bucket [of ignorance] and capture and defeat Zhaozhou. They have no more doubts about the sayings of the world’s [enlightened] people.
Even if you are awakened like this, do not speak of it in front of people without wisdom. You must go see a legitimate teacher of the school.”
[A Buddha from Korea: The Zen Teachings of T’aego, translated by J. C. Cleary. Teaching No. 15 is on pp. 106–107.] See also the 10k film: “Master T’aego Addresses the Great Assembly of Dragons and Elephants“
son of the moment
by 10k films on January 17th, 2012
“The saint hath no fear because fear is the expectation either of some future calamity or of the eventual loss of some object of desire, whereas the saint is the son of his time (ibn waqtihi); he has no future that he should fear anything; and as he hath no fear so he hath no hope, since hope is the expectation either of gaining an object of desire or of being relieved from a misfortune, and this belongs to the future; nor does he grieve because grief arises from the rigour of time and how should he feel grief who is in the radiance of satisfaction (rida) and the garden of concord (muwafaqat)?”
Al-Junayd of Baghdad (830 -910)
Buddhist Economics by E.F. Schumacher
by 10k films on December 26th, 2011
“There is universal agreement that the fundamental source of wealth is human labour. Now, the modern economist has been brought up to consider ‘labour’ or work as little more than a necessary evil. From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a ‘disutility’; to work is to make a sacrifice of one’s leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice. Hence, the ideal from the point of view of the employer is to have output without employees, and the ideal from the point of view of the employee is to have income without employment…
The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give a man a chance to utilize and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centeredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve- racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure…
It is clear, therefore, that Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilization not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character. Character, at the same time, is formed primarily by a man’s work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally their products…
For the modern economist this is very difficult to understand. He is used to measuring the ’standard of living’ by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is ‘better off’ than a man who consumes less.”
from ‘Buddhist Economics‘ in ‘Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered‘ by E.F. Schumacher Read Full Article
Luke 17:20-21
by 10k films on November 30th, 2011
Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, “The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you.” Luke 17:20-21
The self is the source of thoughts
by 10k films on November 21st, 2011
“Why do you think of yourself as a householder? If you become a wandering monk, a similar thought – that you are a renunciate – will haunt you. Whether you continue as a husband or father, or renounce your family and go to the forest, your small self will still accompany you.
The self is the source of thoughts. It creates the body and the world and makes you think that you are really a householder. If you renounce the world, it will only substitute the thought ”renunciate” for ”householder” and the environment of the forest for that of the household. But the mental obstacles are always there. They even increase in new surroundings. There is no help in the change of environment.
The obstacle is the mind. It must be overcome, whether at home or in the forest. If you can do it in the forest, why not in the home? Therefore, why change the environment? Your efforts can be made even now, whatever your environment may be.” — Ramana Maharshi
It leads to Me
by 10k films on November 21st, 2011
”Whatever path men travel
Is My path
No matter where they walk
It leads to Me.”
Bhagavad Gita
The present
by 10k films on October 12th, 2011
The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered:
“Man…. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”
World Wide Credulity Crunch
by 10k films on September 25th, 2011
By Golem IV, September 22, 2011
Does anyone anywhere believe anything they are told, on any subject, by any government official, financial expert or banker? Beneath all the outright lies, hopeless spin and half truths there is a more fundamental and corrosive problem. WE DON’T BELIEVE YOU!
The global reserves of credulity have been pillaged and squandered. We have been told too many times that this or that economy was fundamentally sound, that problems were contained, or would definitely be over by Christmas, that Spain was not Greece, Italy was not Spain, that Ireland’s banks were fixed, that we were all in it together and that all the banks are superbly well capitalized.
Even the banks don’t believe. Each protests that they are fine and yet none of them trust each other and won’t lend a dime.
We have found ourselves living in an entire economy of lies. Borrowers lied. Lenders lied. Insurers insured the lies but were lying themselves. The regulators who oversaw the lies lied about how sound the lies were and the people who rated the lies were the most AAA of liars themselves.
Lies like debts can be printed up at will. In fact most of what is being printed in banks and newspapers are all lies related to each other. But what none of the liars remembered is that lies can only be redeemed if there is an equally endless supply of credulity. And although we frequently lament the stupidity, cupidity and cowardice of ‘people’ even they have a finite supply of credulity. And it has been exhausted.
Credulity cannot be printed up, borrowed or electronically magic-ed into existence. There is no EU stockpile or emergency supply. Once its gone its gone. And some time ago I think we reached Peak Credulity and it has been in steep decline ever since.
I certainly have none left at all. And that is a problem for those bankers and politicians whose wealth and power is based entirely on the economy of lies. The market for their lies is wreaked and soon to shut entirely. The entire economy of lies is bankrupt.
I want no more lies I want no part in the economy that trades in them.
Give me the truth or go to hell.
http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2011/09/world-wide-credulity-crunch/
C.W. Comment:
IMF Article 1: http://goo.gl/ib2cH
IMF Article 2: http://goo.gl/8NZT3
The second article (Jarhan/McDonald) tells us that ‘more finance equals more equality’ as we all get a larger share of a bigger pie – i.e. that societies are becoming more equal with the growth of financial innovation. The first article (Milanovic) tells us that, contrary to expectations, “Income inequality has been on the rise—or stagnant at best—in most countries since the early 1980s (OECD, 2008)”, despite the growth of the finance sector.
‘The Painted Word’ – Tom Wolfe
by 10k films on September 19th, 2011
Wolfe’s thesis in The Painted Word was that by the 1970s modern art had moved away from being a visual experience, and more often was an illustration of art critics’ theories. Wolfe criticized avant-garde art, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. The main target of Wolfe’s book, however, was not so much the artists as the critics. In particular, Wolfe criticized three prominent art critics whom he dubbed the kings of “Cultureburg”: Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg. Wolfe argued that these three men were dominating the world of art with their theories and that, unlike the world of literature in which anyone can buy a book, the art world was controlled by an insular circle of rich collectors, museums and critics with out-sized influence.
Wolfe provides his own history of what he sees as the devolution to modern art. He summarized that history: “In the beginning we got rid of nineteenth-century storybook realism. Then we got rid of representational objects. Then we got rid of the third dimension altogether and got really flat (Abstract Expressionism). Then we got rid of airiness, brushstrokes, most of the paint, and the last viruses of drawing and complicated designs”. After providing examples of other techniques and the schools that abandoned them, Wolfe concluded with conceptual art: “…there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representation objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes. …Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until… it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture… and came out the other side as Art Theory!… Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision… late twentieth-century Modern Art was about to fulfill its destiny, which was: to become nothing less than Literature pure and simple”.