No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life

When we can understand someone else’s suffering and feel love for him or her, we are in touch with the bodhisattva of great understanding.

When there is no more fear, there is true happiness.

I too am someone who has enough peace, joy and freedom to be able to offer fearlessness and joy to those around me. I do not feel loneliness or despair when I feel the love and the happiness of bodhisattvas presently alive on this earth. Seeing their love and seeing the suffering of all beings helps me to live in a meaningful way with true peace an

Look deeply at yourself and you see the tree, the cloud, the rose and the squirrel in you.

To practice is not to store up a lot of ideas about no self, impermanence, nirvana or anything else; that is just the work of a cassette recorder.

When I look at myself, I see positive, admirable and even remarkable things, but I also know that there are negative parts of me. So first I recognize and accept myself.

“Awakened understanding is the practitioner’s only career” is a quotation from the sutra on the Eight Realizations of Great Beings.2 All other careers are not really worth following. No honors or fame can be compared with the awakened understanding that we have when we practice stopping and looking deeply into the nature of things.

If you do this practice, one day you will touch your true nature of no birth and no death.

But birth and death are just ideas. All we need to do is overcome these ideas. When I learned that, I saw that such a feat was not impossible. These two ideas have imprisoned us for so many lifetimes.