If you can cultivate the right attitude, your enemies are your best spiritual teachers because their presence provides you with the opportunity to enhance and develop tolerance, patience and understanding.
We should practice by showing one another love and helping one another. It is a mistake to pursue happiness and to seek to the avoid suffering by deceiving and humiliating other people. We must try to achieve happiness and eliminate suffering by being good-hearted and well-behaved.
I believe deeply that we must find a new spirituality... in such a way that all people of good will could adhere to it... We ought to promote this concept with the help of scientists... It could lead us to what we are looking for.
If we develop concern for other people's welfare, share other people's
suffering, and help them, ultimately we will benefit. If we think only
of ourselves and forget about others, ultimately we will lose. The more
we care for the happiness of others, the greater our own sense of
well-being becomes.
In the past, the respect people had for religion meant that ethical practice was maintained through a majority following one religion or another. But this is no longer the case. We must therefore find some other way of establishing basic ethical principles.
Action for Happiness encourages each of us to live more compassionately and put the happiness of others at the centre of our lives. This is the path to lasting peace and happiness
In this century we have made remarkable material progress, but basically we are the same as we were thousands of years ago. Our spiritual needs are still very great.
I myself feel, and also tell other Buddhists that the question of Nirvana will come later.
There is not much hurry.
If in day to day life you lead a good life, honesty, with love,
with compassion, with less selfishness,
then automatically it will lead to Nirvana.