Mayra Cisneros

“For the practitioner, the understanding of wisdom and compassion—and the inherent tension between the two—is not to be resolved on a theoretical level, but to be experienced in one’s own mind and body. In this way one finds emptiness and compassion to be mutually supportive rather than mutually contradictory.”
― Mu Soeng, The Diamond Sutra: Transforming the Way We Perceive the World

“When my father was killed, the Japanese people I’d heard about became real to me, and my sense of nationalistic enmity became a blood feud.”
― Ling Zhang, A Single Swallow

“Consciousness naturally resists anything unconscious and unknown. I have already pointed out the existence among primitive peoples of what anthropologists call “misoneism,” a deep and superstitious fear of novelty. The primitives manifest all the reactions of the wild animal against untoward events. But “civilized” man reacts to new ideas in much the same way, erecting psychological barriers to protect himself from the shock of facing something new.”
― C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols

“The bodhisattva vow provides the context and the inspiration to motivate the individual to gain insight into shunyata (emptiness), the essential nature of all phenomena, which leads to an experience of tathata (of suchness), of things as they are in their essential nature, of the mutual identity of phenomenal and transcendent reality. At the same time they cultivate karuna (compassion) for all those still caught in delusions, and help them through upaya (skillful means) so that they too may become free and attain buddhahood”
― Mu Soeng, The Diamond Sutra: Transforming the Way We Perceive the World