Tibetan Buddhism Quotes

“Real devotion is an unbroken receptivity to the truth. Real devotion is rooted in an awed and reverent gratitude, but one that is lucid, grounded, and intelligent.”
― Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

“As a man is taught, so he believes. Thoughts being things, they may be planted like seeds in the mind of the child and completely dominate his mental content. Given the favourable soil of the will to believe, whether the seed-thoughts be sound or unsound, whether they be of pure superstition or of realizable truth, they take root and flourish, and make the man what he is mentally.”
― W.Y. Evans-Wentz

“There is no miserable place waiting for you, no hell realm, sitting and waiting like Alaska—waiting to turn you into ice cream. But whatever you call it—hell or the suffering realms—it is something that you enter by creating a world of neurotic fantasy and believing it to be real. It sounds simple, but that's exactly what happens.”
― Lama Yeshe, Becoming Vajrasattva

“All the philosophical theories that exist have been created by the mistaken dualistic minds of human beings. In the realm of philosophy, that which today is considered true, may tomorrow be proved to be false. No one can guarantee a philosophy's validity. Because of this, any intellectual way of seeing whatever is always partial and relative. The fact is that there is no truth to seek or to confirm logically; rather what one needs to do is to discover just how much the mind continually limits itself in a condition of dualism.

Dualism is the real root of our suffering and of all our conflicts. All our concepts and beliefs, no matter how profound they may seem, are like nets which trap us in dualism. When we discover our limits we have to try to overcome them, untying ourselves from whatever type of religious, political or social conviction may condition us. We have to abandon such concepts as 'enlightenment', 'the nature of the mind', and so on, until we are no longer satisfied by a merely intellectual knowledge, and until we no longer neglect to integrate our knowledge with our actual existence.”
― Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State

“The Heart-mantra of Dependent Origination (rten-'brel snying-po [རྟེན་འབྲེལ་སྙིང་པོ]), which liberates the enduring continuum of phenomena and induces the appearance of multiplying relics ('phel-gdung [འཕེལ་གདུང་] and rainbow lights, is:
[OṂ] YE DHARMĀ HETUPRABHAVĀ
HETUN TEṢĀṂ TATHĀGATO
HY AVADAT TEṢĀṂ CA YO
NIRODHO EVAṂ VĀDI
MAHĀŚRAMAṆAḤ [YE SVĀHĀ]
('Whatever events arise from a cause, the Tathagāta [Buddha, "Thus-gone"] has told the cause thereof, and the great virtuous ascetic has taught their cessation as well [so be it]').”
― Graham Coleman, The Tibetan Book of the Dead

“Achala, worrying and scheming about your next life, before you have even completed this one, is not a good practice." Rinpoche”
― Daniel Prokop, Taking It With You: Everybody knows you can't take anything with you when you die... almost everybody.

“Primordial wisdom [Skt. jñāna; Tib. ཡེ་ཤེས་, yeshé; Wyl. ye shes] has many names, but in truth it refers simply to the inseparability of the ground and fruit, the one and only essence-drop [thig le nyag gcig] of the dharmakaya. If it is assessed from the standpoint of its utterly pure nature, it is the actual dharmakaya, primordial Buddhahood. For, from its own side, it is free from every obscuration. We must understand that we are Buddha from the very beginning. Without this understanding, we will fail to recognize the spontaneously present mandala of the ground, and we will be obliged to assert, in accordance with the vehicle of the paramitas, that Buddhahood has a cause. We will fail to recognize the authentic view of the Secret Mantra.”
― Jamgön Mipham, White Lotus: An Explanation of the Seven-line Prayer to Guru Padmasambhava

“People who know how to keep their mouths shut are rare.”
― Dudjom Rinpoche, Counsels from My Heart

“. . . install a tracking system--free of judgment or guilt--that you use just to record how you're doing, on a constant basis. In Tibetan this tracking system is known as tundruk, or "six times a day;" we call it a six-time book. If you follow this system, you'll get results.”
― Geshe Michael Roach, Lama Christie McNally, Michael Gordon

“The great master Padmasambhava said, Even if my view is higher than the sky, The attention I pay to my actions and their effects is finer than flour.”
― Matthieu Ricard, On the Path to Enlightenment: Heart Advice from the Great Tibetan Masters

“The initial function of spirituality emerged from questioning the human condition and also from deep experiences of wonder. The word religion itself, initially meaning to “reconnect,” seems to have come from direct experiences of something larger than just a set of fixed ideas. It marked a return to something essential that we just failed to recognize in the myopia of our everyday lives. How curious that we turn experiences of awe into dogmas and stagnant ideas. That we have come to associate faith with fundamentalism, blindness, and even terrorism gives us something important to look at.”
― Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel, The Logic of Faith: A Buddhist Approach to Finding Certainty Beyond Belief and Doubt

“Try not to be so analytical that you lose your creative vision, your soul‘s third eye of innate intuition. Open your heart. Be willing to be foolish, even if it means straying from the mainstream agenda and risking ridicule. I think we all sense that the world is ready for us to think outside the box, because that box of limited, conventional, rational thinking is destroying us. (p. 75)”
― Miles Neale, Gradual Awakening: The Tibetan Buddhist Path of Becoming Fully Human

“Timely Rain

In the jungles of flaming ego,
May there be cool iceberg of bodhicitta.

On the racetrack of bureaucracy,
May there be the walk of the elephant.

May the sumptuous castle of arrogance
Be destroyed by vajra confidence.

In the garden of gentle sanity,
May you be bombarded by coconuts of wakefulness.”
― Chögyam Trungpa, Timely Rain: Selected Poetry

“No matter how confused, perturbed, and negative we may sometimes feel, our Buddha nature is always there. It can never be lost or damaged. This Buddha nature is the essential nature of our mind. It is primordially pure, replete with all the qualities of a Buddha.”
― David Oromith (Johnson)

“But if you are not careful, spirituality can quite easily allow you to bypass the human dilemma, because spirituality can be anything you want it to be, whereas faith will challenge you. It’s not so comfortable. It carries with it the undeniable tension between your search for security and the limits of your ability to know. Faith keeps your spiritual quest relevant and connected to the heart of the human predicament.”
― Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel, The Logic of Faith: A Buddhist Approach to Finding Certainty Beyond Belief and Doubt

“There is a prophecy that the "teachings of the Buddha will spread further and further north". Nepal is to the north of India, and after that, isn't Tibet to the north of Nepal? "Later on, they will return to the central land and then go west." I'm not sure where these words are from; they may be from a terma of Padmasambhava or maybe they were spoken by the Buddha himself. But most certainly the prophecy exists; I heard it from Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche. "From now on the Buddhadharma will spread further west," he said. (p. 20)”
― Padmasambhava, Advice from the Lotus-Born: A Collection of Padmasambhava's Advice to the Dakini Yeshe Tsogyal and Other Close Disciples

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The great eleventh-century Nalanda pandit Lama Atisha understood this well, and with a mighty heart of wise compassion he set out to marshal the Buddha‘s eighty-four thousand teachings – found in hundreds of scriptures and thousands of verses – into a logical, sequential, and practical road map to help guide spiritual seekers on the path, from ordinariness to liberation on to full and final awakening. This unique style of teaching came to be called Lam Rim, or the Gradual Path to Enlightenment, and, attesting to its beauty and effectiveness, has been preserved in all lineages and schools of Tibetan Buddhism for the past thousand years.

One of the unique features of the Lam Rim is that it recognizes an alternative to the path of sudden, spectacular enlightenment and instead proposes a more modest, gradual awakening. From the beginning of Tibet‘s history of receiving dharma transmission from India, with the great debates involving the eighth-century Indian scholar Kamalashila, it was clear that for the masses the gradual process of studying, contemplating, and embodying insights over the course of a sustained, lifelong practice would be most appropriate and beneficial. While all methods have their validity and are useful for practitioners of various dispositions, the gradual approach explained in these pages is as relevant to modern students as it was to Tibetans centuries ago. – Geshe Tenzin Zopa”
― Miles Neale, Gradual Awakening: The Tibetan Buddhist Path of Becoming Fully Human

“Enlightenment is possible – for everyone. However, I don‘t think we will all awaken spontaneously in the way contemporary spiritual teachers Krishnamurti or Eckhart Tolle did. Most of us will never experience a voice from on high, a flash of life-altering insight, stigmata, or a transcendent miracle. Anything is possible, but the odds are not in our favor. What these teachers experienced is like winning the lottery. Yet, from the Buddhist perspective, most of us have already won the lottery: against all probability, we have been born as human beings with intact senses and a bit of interest in pursuing something spiritual. This is even more remarkable when we consider the obstacles and temptations of our materialistic culture, in which spirit is thrown out with the bathwater of religious dogma, God is proclaimed dead, consciousness is reduced to epiphenomena of the brain, and life‘s purpose is made a hedonic scramble on a treadmill to nowhere. What is far more likely than sudden enlightenment is gradual awakening. Following a systematic educational process like a college curriculum, gradual awakening builds on incremental insights into who we truly are, learning to care for ourselves and others, and discovering creative ways to engage the problems we all face. This gradual process of awakening doesn‘t offer an escape hatch to another realm of reality or disavow our human wounds, limits, and foibles in this realm; rather it embraces and transforms them, because the only way out is through.”
― Miles Neale, Gradual Awakening: The Tibetan Buddhist Path of Becoming Fully Human

“Much (if not all) of my spiritual growth was cultivated and punctuated by my encounters with a succession of incredible teachers. A qualified mentor is essential as we find our way from suffering to freedom, from spiritual darkness to the transcendent light of Divinity.”
― Miles Neale, Gradual Awakening: The Tibetan Buddhist Path of Becoming Fully Human

“Dharma literally means 'truth' or 'norm.' It is a particular way of thinking, a way of viewing the world, which is not a concept but experience. This particular truth is very painful truth—usually truths are. It rings with the sound of reality, which comes too close to home. We become completely embarrassed when we begin to hear the truth. It is wrong to think that the truth is going to sound fantastic and beautiful, like a flute solo. The truth is actually like a thunderbolt. It wakes you up and makes you think twice whether you should stay in the rain or move into the house. Provocative.”
― Chögyam Trungpa

“The purpose of life is maybe just to be. In order to be, you have to live life, which is not boring at all. In fact, there are a lot of exchanges taking place, and there is more of a sense of celebration than before. The qualities of celebration and groundlessness make for a delightful world. So you live that life. I think the conventional idea is that we lead our life because we have to struggle and we have to achieve something, which keeps us occupied. But maybe that’s just one way, and there’s an entirely different approach altogether.”
― Chogyam Trungpa, Cynicism and Magic: Intelligence and Intuition on the Buddhist Path

“In Tibetan societies, the deference to social inferior to superior, junior to senior, mundane to sacred, spiritually immature to spiritually advanced and so forth is very strongly marked.

Basic formulas recited before tea or meals:
The supreme teacher is the precious Buddha.
The supreme protector is the precious Dharma.
The supreme guide is the precious Sangha.
I offer worship to these three Refuge-granting jewels!

Om mani padme hum, the natural voice of reality is uninterrupted.
Om still pride
Ma still jealous rage
Ni stills lust
Pad stills stupidity
Me stills greed
Hum stills hatred.
From the Mani Kabum.”
― Matthew Kapstein

“Teaching the Dharma to people who are skilled in dry intellectual speculations and cling to mere words of sophistry will result in slandering the Dharma. By slandering the Dharma the slanderer will accumulate evil karma, and you yourself, by being angry, will also gather misdeeds. Thus both teacher and recipient will gather evil karma through the Dharma. There is no need for that.
Do not make the profound instructions into a sales item but practice with perseverance in remote places and mingle your mind with the Dharma.”
― Padmasambhava, Dakini Teachings: A Collection of Padmasambhava's Advice to the Dakini Yeshe Tsogyal

“Here is the explanation of how buddhahood acts for the welfare of sentient beings. Numerous reflections of the sun appear on the surface of many waters without leaving behind the single circle of the sun. Similarly, the truly and completely Enlightened One, the dharmakaya, without leaving behind the equality of the innate nature, magically appears, through the sambhogakaya and nirmanakaya, in accordance with the particular inclinations of those to be tamed in a number as great as the infinite space. Although acting for the benefit of beings, the dharmakaya holds no conceptual thinking.
For example, the sunlight does not conceive of benefiting beings. In the same way the two kayas hold no concepts of acting for the welfare of beings. The welfare of beings results from the power of aspiration.”
― Padmasambhava, Dakini Teachings: A Collection of Padmasambhava's Advice to the Dakini Yeshe Tsogyal

“Since their mind is free from doubt and hesitation they regard the teachings as a precious, wish-fulfilling jewel. Perceiving the misery of samsaric activities as poison they exert themselves in practice for the sake of the future. Seeing the pursuits of this life as futile they have great fortitude and perseverance when trying to accomplish the unexcelled enlightenment. Such noble people who are untainted by the faults of competitive and ambitious craving for material gain and prestige are the sublime spiritual offspring of the victorious ones.”
― Padmasambhava, Dakini Teachings: A Collection of Padmasambhava's Advice to the Dakini Yeshe Tsogyal

“In this modern age, people find it difficult to believe that human beings are able to fly, but such things were very common in ancient times when people had strong potentialities for spiritual attainments. Milarepa, who was a great practitioner of Heruka and Vajrayogini, at one time – as explained in his life story – told a large assembly of his disciples how he had gained the ability to fly. Through various methods, including his tummo meditation, he had released the central channel knots at his heart, navel and below the navel, and because of this he developed a very special physical suppleness that pervaded his body. This made his body extremely light, like a soft feather. At first he could only levitate but gradually he was able to move through space until finally he was able to fly like an eagle.”
― Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, Modern Buddhism: The Path of Compassion and Wisdom

“The way to develop the altruistic intention
a. Seven points of cause and effect
1. Equanimity between fnend, enemy and stranger is the preliminary.
2. Seven points: recognizing sentient beings as your mother, remembening their kindness, wishing to repay it, heart-warming love, compassion, great determination, altruistic intention
b. Equalizing and exchanging self and others: equalizing self and others, disadvantages of selfishness, advantages of cherishing others, exchanging self and others, taking others’ suffering and giving them your happiness and its causes
c. Combining the above two methods into one”
― Thubten Chodron

“From the Nyingma perspective, without emphasis on realization in this life, Buddhism will produce good people but not awakened saints. Thus their critique of a life consisting primarily of study and ethical behavior: when a religion is composed only of “good” and learned people without the freedom, wildness, and accuracy of awakened ones, it can become stuck.”
― Reginald A. Ray, Indestructible Truth: The Living Spirituality of Tibetan Buddhism

“As we remember the importance of the enlightened feminine in this book, as in the story of Tara that I shared in the Introduction, we must bear in mind that ultimately in the absolute sense, gender is an illusion, just another one of those illusions that we attach to and fixate on so firmly.

At the same time, as Tara also said, in the relative world, empowerment has been the domain of one gender. And therefore she vows:

"Those who wish to attain Supreme enlightment in a man's body are many, but those who wish to serve the aims of beings in a woman’s body are few indeed; therefore may I, until this world is emptied out, work for the benefit of sentient beings in a woman's body."

She makes a commitment not only for enlightenment, but to have all our voices heard: our human rights respected, violence and rape cease, serial harassment end, and women's issues represented at the table where decisions that affect us all are being made.”
― Lama Tsultrim Allione, Wisdom Rising: Journey into the Mandala of the Empowered Feminine

“The Sanskrit word DAKINI in Tibetan means Khandro, which means "Sky Dancer," literally "She Who Moves Through Space."

The Dakini is the most important manifestation of the feminine in Tibetan Buddhist teaching. She can appear as a human being or as a deity, often portrayed as fierce, surrounded by flames, naked, dancing, with fangs and a lolling tongue, and wearing bone ornaments. She holds a staff in the crook of her left elbow, representing her inner consort, her internal male partner.

In her raised right hand, she holds a hooked knife, representing her relentless cutting away of dualistic fixation. She is compassionate and, at the same time, relentlessly tears away the ego. She holds a skull cup in her left hand at heart level, representing impermanence and transformation of desire. She is an intense and fearsome image to behold. The Dakini is a messenger of spaciousness and a force of truth, presiding over the funeral of self-deception. Wherever we cling, she cuts. Whatever we think we can hide, even from ourselves, she reveals.

The Dakini traditionally appears during transitions, moments between worlds, between life and death, in visions between sleep and waking, in cemeteries and charnel grounds.”
― Lama Tsultrim Allione, Wisdom Rising: Journey into the Mandala of the Empowered Feminine