Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks: 1960-1969

Or that the substance of life is something like water, which I can hold in my hand so long as I cup it gently, but if I clutch at the water, I immediately lose it. And so, in this way, through our failure to see that everything is alive because it flows, we try to possess it, and this is trishna, or grasping. In other words we try to hold on as tig

After meeting author and mythologist Joseph Campbell and composer John Cage in New York he headed to California and began teaching at the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. There his popular lectures spilled over into coffeehouse talks and appearances with the well-known beat writers Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. I

in saying that Buddhism is something like psychotherapy, it might be correct to say that Gautama, the Buddha, was the world’s first great psychotherapist.

Buddhism envisages a transformation, a very radical transformation, of the way in which ordinary people feel themselves and the surrounding world. And so, in this sense, I have coined for Buddhism a special term to contrast it with a religion. I would call it a “way of liberation,” a way of liberation from the ordinary way in which most civilized a

When you are worried, and you say to yourself, “All right, worry. Get with that worry,” it neutralizes the worry because you are not worrying about not worrying anymore.

Buddhism is a method of liberation which has emerged as a way of life in Asia, but which is not so closely tied to the different cultures of Asia as such other philosophies or religions as Hinduism or Confucianism or Shinto.

We say pleasure is distinctly separate from pain. I want pleasure, but I don’t want pain. I would like to have pleasure without pain. And so we set our lives to this task. But actually this is as contradictory as trying to have up without down. Supposing we try to arrange everything around here so that everything was up and there was nothing down,

I have to let go, breathe out, and lose my breath in order to have breath. So you might say that the whole idea of clinging is put in the metaphor of trying to hold on to one’s breath, trying to hold on to one’s life, refusing to let one’s self go.