An old Japanese tale recounts how once a warlike samurai challenged a teacher of Zen to explain the concept of heaven and hell. Then the monk replied with scorn: "You're nothing but a measly - I cannot lose my time with your peers!".With insulted egoism,...
The action bias is accentuated when a situation is new or unclear. The action bias exists even in the most educated circles. If a patient’s illness cannot yet be diagnosed with certainty, and doctors must choose between intervening (i.e. prescribing something) or waiting and seeing, they are...
Buddha was passing. A few people gathered and they insulted him very much. He listened to them very attentively, very lovingly. When they were finished, he said, 'If you have said all that you wanted to say, can I go now? -- because I have to...
So, this is the first basic fact to understand: that except for yourself, nobody can penetrate your privacy. That is the difference between a rock and you. The rock can be penetrated to the very center; it has no privacy. That is the difference between...
We have created society and that society has conditioned us. Our minds are tortured and heavily conditioned by a morality which is not moral; the morality of society is immorality, because society admits and encourages violence, greed, competition, ambition and so on, which are essentially...
There was one great master, a Buddhist master, Nagarjuna. A thief came to him. The thief had fallen in love with the master because he had never seen such a beautiful person, such infinite grace. He asked Nagarjuna, "Is there some possibility of my growth also? But...
ON TALKATIVENESS If however it seems that no attempt at cure has been left untried, let us say to the talkative person, "Be silent, boy; silence has great advantages;" two of the first and foremost of which are hearing and being heard, neither of which can happen...
One foggy evening in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, the bourgeois narrator of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1922) travels to an expensive restaurant to have dinner with an aristocratic friend, the Marquis de Saint-Loup. He arrives early, Saint-Loup is...
A fisherman in the month of May stood angling on the bank of the Thames with an artificial fly. He threw his bait with so much art, that a young trout was rushing toward it, when she was prevented by her mother. "Never," said she,...
Somebody is asking for money, somebody is asking for bread, somebody is asking for approval. All are beggars. Don’t ask. In asking you will miss much that is already available to you. Look rather than asking. Look within yourself and the emperor of emperors is...
