A Quote by Shunryu Suzuki
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an enlightened person. There is only enlightened activity.
Related Quotes
There are, strictly speaking, no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity.
Strictly speaking, "you" cannot become enlightened, because who you take yourself to be is like a ripple in the ocean of consciousness - or a little wave if you're a VIP - and the ripple doesn't become enlightened until it realizes that its ripple-identity is ultimately a misperception, that it is the ocean taking on a fleeting ripple-form.
Very few people become enlightened in any given lifetime. On the planet earth their might be a dozen who are fully enlightened and several thousand who live in enlightened states of mind.
For a long time, I thought that I was an enlightened parent by virtue of being an enlightened person. What a fool.
No one on this earth attains enlightenment anymore without an enlightened master as a guide, unless that person was enlightened in many previous incarnations.
Celibacy doesn't make you enlightened, otherwise every nun or priest in Buddhism or Christianity would be enlightened. People who don't date and can't get any action would be enlightened.
Enlightened legislation or enlightened social activity of whatever kind, does play into the hands of people with agendas of their own. If you legalize euthanasia, you provide a field day for people who like killing other people.
It is not special to be enlightened, just different. An enlightened person is someone who has dedicated not just this lifetime but thousands of lifetimes to becoming awareness.
During five literary generations every enlightened person had despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.
The difference between you, if you consider yourself not enlightened, and an enlightened master is not that the enlightened master has more knowledge. University professors have knowledge, and many enlightened masters have very little knowledge. Jesus probably had less knowledge than any university professor alive today in terms of raw information. Even a relatively uneducated person has more information than Jesus or Buddha ever had about things, such as political things and so on.
It's one thing to have the attitude of enlightenment and another thing to act in an enlightened way, which is conduct or activity.
People have this kind of concept that they can't change but I feel like change is possible. So who you choose to be is who you are and who you will be. I think that you can be enlightened in many different ways and if you choose to be enlightened and are someone who seeks out those things then you can be that and you will be that. If you want to be enlightened you will be enlightened. If you want to be an asshole you will be an asshole. But the greater scope of this statement is if you look at the history of humans, really, nothing has changed.
How can one become enlightened? One can, because one is enlightened - one just has to recognize the fact.
Not everyone who is enlightened by an angel knows that he is enlightened by him.
I know that the blacks, take them half enlightened and ignorant, are more humane and merciful than the most enlightened and refined European that can be found in all the earth.
There's a Buddhist story about the guy who wants to be enlightened, and then he gets a cow and a wife and a child, and all these things get in the way of his enlightenment. So, yeah, I have no chance of being enlightened.
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