It is all a question of pride, for if you revere Life and Reality only in particular types of personal living, you deny Life and Reality to such humble things as, for instance, saltshakers, specks of dust, worms, flowers, and the great unregenerate masses of the human race. We are reminded of the Pharisee’s prayer, thanking God that He had not made

I have never yet met anyone who tried to become a real person with success. The result of such attempts is invariably loss of personality, for there is an ancient paradox of the spiritual life whereby those who try to make themselves great become small. The paradox is even a bit more complicated than this; it also means that if you try, indirectly,

In Chinese philosophy Life is called Tao, and the Chinese speak of the wise man as one who realizes (makes real to himself) his accord and harmony with Tao. Therefore, it is asked whether Tao means Life in the sense of simple existence, or whether Tao is Life lived in a special way, lived faithfully, thoroughly, vitally and with a certain zest born

All that is necessary is to give up forever any idea of attaining merit by one’s own power, and then to have faith that one is accepted by the compassion of Amida from the very beginning, no matter what one’s moral condition. One must even give up the idea that faith itself is achieved by self-power, for faith, too, is Amida’s gift. Thus man as man

Mahayana philosophy is centered upon two closely related ideas. The first, descended from Vedanta, is that Enlightenment (the Buddhist life-goal) consists of an inner realization of nonduality. All those things upon which unenlightened man depends for his happiness are dual, and thus conditioned by their opposites. Life cannot be had without death,

To put it in another way: it is said that to be enlightened we must live in the eternal. Now, that infinitely small and therefore infinitely great point of time is called the present moment. The universe exists only in that moment, and it is said that the wise man moves with it, clinging neither to the past nor to the future, making his mind like

Dualism appears the moment we make an assertion or a denial about anything; as soon as we think that This is That or This is not That we have the distinction between This and That. And even when we say that in Reality there are no distinctions, we have the opposition of Reality and distinctions.

This curve represents the progress of human intellect towards

The highest Hindu philosophy bears the name advaita, which is the principle of “nonduality,” meaning that Brahman is that to which nothing can be opposed as long is opposed to short, light to dark, pleasure to pain, positive to negative and infinite to finite. This also is a cardinal principle of Mahayana Buddhism, from which it is clear that