Browsing Topic Best Monk Quotes

There are techniques of Buddhism, such as meditation, that anyone can adopt. And, of course, there are Christian monks and nuns who already use Buddhist methods in order to develop their devotion, compassion, and ability to forgive.

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.

I am simply just one monk. That’s all.

I certainly haven’t lived the life of a Buddhist monk.

Some consider me as a living Buddha. That’s nonsense. That’s silly. That’s wrong. If they consider me a simple Buddhist monk, however, that’s probably okay.

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.

We need to strengthen such inner values as contentment, patience and tolerance, as well as compassion for others. Keeping in mind that it is expressions of affection rather than money and power that attract real friends, compassion is the key to ensuring our own well-being.

I am a simple Buddhist monk.

I describe myself as a simple Buddhist monk. No more, no less.

I got a chance to listen to and watch Thelonious Monk and his quartet play two shows a night, for six weeks. It was a great education. There was my university, man.

Luther was guilty of two great crimes – he struck the Pope in his crown, and the monks in their belly.

I’m indebted to the teachers who shaped me – from the Sisters of St. Joseph at St. Croix Catholic elementary to the monks of St. John’s in Minnesota to my professors at Georgetown.

Possession of books denounced as heretical was made a criminal offense. Copies of such books were burned and destroyed. But in Upper Egypt, someone, possibly a monk from a nearby monastery of St Pachomius, took the banned books and hid them from destruction – in the jar where they remained buried for almost 1,600 years.

Pleasure and guilt are synonymous terms in the language of the monks, and they discovered, by experience, that rigid fasts, and abstemious diet, are the most effectual preservatives against the impure desires of the flesh.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

The tantras can be very confusing for a person who is new to Buddhism, and for several thousand years the rule was not to expose a person or a new monk to the tantras until they had practiced for many, many years.

The Devil was sick – the Devil a monk would be, The Devil was well the devil a monk was he

Indeed, said the monk, a mass, a matins, and vespers well rung are half-said.

As belief shrinks from the world, it is more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes.

In a quiet Franciscan monastery kind and silent monks looked after me. After many weeks I was discharged. Unfit for further service.

A Buddhist monk has a responsibility first and foremost to themselves, and that’s to find the truth each day in every part of their life.

If you understand why a monkey in a family is always mocked and harassed, you understand why monks are rejected by all–both old and young.

There are a lot of people who had past lives where they were monks and nuns and all their needs were provided for them. I feel like most people in the new age had this as their most recent lifetime experience, that kind of communal living.

The dress does not make the monk.[Fr., L’habit ne fait le moine.]

The peace of the Eastern church was invaded by a swarm of fanatics [monks], incapable of fear, or reason, or humanity; and the Imperial troops acknowledged, without shame, that they were much less apprehensive of an encounter with the fiercest Barbarians.

In both Surfing the Himalayas and Snowboarding to Nirvana, I have tried to transmit as best I could the spirit of humor, and the sense of humor of the monks I have encountered.

I listened to King Oliver and I listened to Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp… I listened to everything I could that came from that place that they call the blues but, in formality, isn’t necessarily the blues.

As a monk you have a responsibility to meditate many hours a day. Not just to sit there but to think of the ten thousand radiances.

When you visit the Zen Monasteries, one of the first things required is that you bring a donation. They have to pay for those monasteries. The upkeep is fantastic. The monks have to be fed, and so on.

Being a Buddhist monk means never losing one’s optimism in spite of all difficulties. It also means being harder on yourself than any of your teachers ever were.

In the Far East, it is taken for granted that the training of a monk is physically rigorous and academically challenging.

She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

Monks, we who look at the whole and not just the part, know that we too are systems of interdependence, of feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and consciousness all interconnected. Investigating in this way, we come to realize that there is no me or mine in any one part, just as a sound does not belong to any one part of the lute.

When I go visit my brother monks in Japan and sit down with other Zen Masters, they look at my crazy clothes and my strange expression, but they feel the power that emanates from my dedication to the practice. So they are comfortable with me, yet they’re very uncomfortable.

As Buddhist monks, our task is to bring ourselves resolutely more and more into light, to forgive and forget, to forget those who create problems for us because to remember them is only to keep problems is mind.