No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life

Touching the Earth is a very deep practice that can help us transform our fears, doubts, prejudice and anger.

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.

At that time, you will be liberated from fear.

I have told my disciples that they should watch the sunrise for me and I will watch the sunset and the stars for them with their eyes.

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.

Every time your fear is invited up, every time you recognize it and smile at it, your fear will lose some of its strength.

“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.

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

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.