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Do what you do as well as you possibly can. That's Buddhist morality.
Brad Warner
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Brad Warner
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: March 5
Author
OshÅ
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Buddhist
Possibly
Morality
Wells
Well
More quotes by Brad Warner
I was very attracted to the way that Zen did not go into the imagination land. And now I've forgotten what your first question was and how we were going to tie this together.
Brad Warner
But people do the same thing with the Bible. They memorize all the fictional characters, the parameters and the rules of the game and think it's important, but I can't get excited about that myself.
Brad Warner
So with science, it's original idea was to ignore the spiritual or nebulous side of reality and to strictly work on concrete things. Say there's a brick which we cut it in half and then see there's two half's of a brick. If we keep cutting we can then see there's particles and so on and so forth.
Brad Warner
Zen practice is about not getting high on anything and in so doing getting high on absolutely everything. We then find that everything we encounter - bliss or nonbliss - possesses a tremendous depth and beauty that we usually miss.
Brad Warner
Truly compassionate action arises spontaneously without thought and is carried out in real action with no anticipation of reward and, indeed, no concept of a doer of that action.
Brad Warner
People will come and give you sandwiches every six hours but you're really of no use. A lot of people get excited about guys like that but I can't get too excited about it because I think he's sorta useless. He's just sitting there in India under a blanket looking beautiful, so what.
Brad Warner
A lot of seriously insane people have managed to acquire huge followings based on the idea that their insanity is a kind of enlightenment. An obvious example would be Charles Manson or Shoko Asahara who is the person responsible for the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway.
Brad Warner
Those who hope for purity and righteousness always try and destroy that which disturbs them. They think the disturbance comes from outside themselves. This is a serious problem. Wars, suicide bombings, and all sorts of other nasty things start from the premise that we can destroy 'evil' outside ourselves without dealing with the evil within.
Brad Warner
Disappointment is just the action of your brain readjusting itself to reality after discovering things are not the way you thought they were.
Brad Warner
As you're implying, there's a new technology that can look even deeper into that brick and we can start getting into a level where it breaks down so that the brick isn't even there, but obviously it is because Moe can hit Curly on the head with it. It's quite bizarre and all relative.
Brad Warner
Buddhists have a long-standing tradition of believing that at some level we always know what the best course of action is in any given situation. We just have to be quiet enough to let that course of action present itself to us. And we need the confidence to act when life shows us what we need to do.
Brad Warner
At times, Zen does get into some Buddhist Cosmology. Nishijima Roshi, my main teacher would talk about that and almost every time immediately say that it was only one way of looking at it. Whenever addressing realms of Heaven or Hell, he'd also address that it was just a psychological state.
Brad Warner
How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!
Brad Warner
I remember writing the post but not what I said specifically, so I'll either repeat myself or say something completely different and baffle everybody.
Brad Warner
If he'd [Jesus] been a little more concerned for his own safety and well being he may have toned things down a little bit and probably at best he'd be remembered as a Rabbi who said some cool things but that nobody really reads anymore. There's tons of them.
Brad Warner
The truth comes when you can see that your self-image is just a convenient reference point and nothing more, and that you as you had imagined yourself do not exist.
Brad Warner
I mean, I can do that all day long. I can tell you the Vulcan's are not actually devoid of emotion. That they work hard to suppress their emotions. And of course, there actually are no real Vulcan's, though I know the ins and outs of them as fictional characters.
Brad Warner
So what I liked about Zen was that it never goes off into the realm of imagination land, or if it does occasionally, the good teachers will openly address it specifically as only imagination. Both of my teachers were very good at that.
Brad Warner
For a very long time science and philosophy were considered part of the same continuum and it was only within the last few hundred years they've been considered different areas of inquiry, and now we're starting to go back to the idea that maybe they aren't two separate realms of inquiry.
Brad Warner
It's crazy to me how concerned people get with what it looks like and what you can do there. People may as well be talking about JRR Tolkien or Star Trek or something.
Brad Warner