Through countless births in the cycle of existence
I have run, not finding
although seeking the builder of this house;
and again and again I faced the suffering of new birth.
Oh housebuilder! Now you are seen.
You shall not build a house again for me.
All your beams are broken,
the ridgepole is shattered.
The mind has become freed from conditioning:
the end of craving has been reached.
This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance. A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky, Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.
There is, Oh Monks, a not-born, a not-become, a not-made, a not-compounded. Monks, if that unborn, not-become, not-made, not-compounded were not, there would be no escape from this here that is born, become, made and compounded.
One Mongolian leader became a very, very brutal dictator and eventually became a murderer. Previously, he was a monk, and then he became a revolutionary. Under the influence of his new ideology, he actually killed his own teacher. Pol Pot's family background was Buddhist. Whether he himself was a Buddhist at a young age, I don't know. Even Chairman Mao's family background was Buddhist. So one day, if the Dalai Lama becomes a mass murderer, he will become the most deadly of mass murderers.
The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole force of their religion is directed to the great central truth in every religion, to evolve a God out of man. They have not seen the Father, but they have seen the Son. And he that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father also.
He whose longing has been aroused for the indescribable, whose mind has been quickened by it, and whose thought is not attached to sensuality is truly called one who is bound upstream.
Our problem mostly in our abuse of each other and the planet is greed. Just the rampant, incredible greed that people have partly because they're empty and they can't get enough because they're - you know, it's that Buddhist thing about the hungry ghost with the little mouth and the big belly.
Without approval and without scorn, but carefully studying the sentences word by word, one should trace them in the Discourses and verify them by the Discipline. If they are neither traceable in the Discourses nor verifiable by the Discipline, one must conclude thus: 'Certainly, this is not the Blessed One's utterance; this has been misunderstood by that bhikkhu - or by that community, or by those elders, or by that elder.' In that way, bhikkhus, you should reject it.
Misunderstanding may arise by confusing the Buddhist and scientific definitions of death. Within the scientific system you spoke quite validly of the death of the brain and the death of heart. Different parts of the body can die separately. However, in the Buddhist system, the word death is not used in that way. You'd never speak of the death of a particular part of the body, but rather of the death of an entire person. When people say that a certain person died, we don't ask, "Well, which part died?"
At a personal level, as a Buddhist practitioner, I deliberately visualize and think about death in my daily practice. Death is not separated from our lives. Due to my research and thoughts about death, I have some guarantee and some conviction that it will be a positive experience.
Our problem mostly in our abuse of each other and the planet is greed. Just the rampant, incredible greed that people have partly because they're empty and they can't get enough because they're - you know, it's that Buddhist thing about the hungry ghost with the little mouth and the big belly.