Samsara Quotes

According to this very simple teaching, becoming immersed in these four pairs of opposites - pleasure and pain, loss and gain, fame and disgrace, and praise and blame - is what keeps us stuck in the pain of samsara. ~ Pema Chodron

The Samsara is the movement of life. And you, an individual self, a form, a moment on a wave, are bound. ~ Frederick Lenz

Faith is like pure eyes that enable us to see a pure and perfect world beyond the suffering world of samsara. ~ Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

By renouncing samsara, we renounce our habitual grasping, unhappy minds. And by renouncing samsara, we embrace our potential for enlightenment. ~ Thubten Zopa Rinpoche

Actively, we are motivated by the never-ending desires of the self. We are compelled to pursue whatever the self imagines will satisfy its desires. We are convinced that satisfaction of desire is the source of true happiness.
Yet the very nature of desire does not permit happiness. Like trying to quench one's thirst by drinking salt water, satisfying desire only stimulates the flow of desire. In the wake of fulfillment, desire once more stirs and reaches out. There is never lasting satisfaction, not even completion. ~ Dharma Publishing

Realization occurs only when samsara is witnessed, not reacted to. This is moksha. ~ Devdutt Pattanaik

Life is called Samsara - it is the result of the conflicting forces acting upon us. Materialism says, "The voice of freedom is a delusion." Idealism says, "The voice that tells of bondage is but a dream." Vedanta says, "We are free and not free at the same time." That means that we are never free on the earthly plane, but ever free on the spiritual side. The Self is beyond both freedom and bondage. We are Brahman, we are immortal knowledge beyond the senses, we are Bliss Absolute. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real. ~ Hermann Hesse

In Tantric Buddhism, we believe that Samsara is Nirvana. That is to say that everything in the universe is part of us. And we also are part of everything in the universe. ~ Frederick Lenz

Involvement with the eight worldly dharmas keeps beings imprisoned in the realms of samsara and renders them susceptible to the hosts of emotions. The eight worldly dharmas are: praise and blame, gain and loss, fame and disgrace, happiness and suffering.

The eight worldly dharmas constitute our attachment to hopes and fears: We hope for praise, gain, fame, and happiness while fearing blame, loss, disgrace, and suffering. Entangled in these eight concerns, we give our energy and intelligence to the pursuit of these hopes and the avoidance of these fears. Our way of thinking is completely dominated by these eight concerns, which the world proclaims to be of utmost importance. But Śāntideva reminds us that to achieve true peace of mind, one must "... turn this thinking upside down," becoming indifferent to hope and unmoved by fear. ~ Dharma Publishing

To encounter such a being is considered the ultimate karmic blessing in the sense that your life will be so configured that every single variant problematic karma will surface, which means you have the opportunity of passing through them all correctly, going over the ocean of the samsara and reaching nirvana yourself. ~ Frederick Lenz

Chogyam is spinning, watching the spinning / samsara; If there is no samsara / spinning, there is no Chogyam.
- from the poem Cynical Letter by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche ~ Trungpa Chogyam

All you want to do is run out there and get laid and get beat up and get screwed up and get old and sick and banged around by samsara, you fucking eternal meat of comeback you ~ Jack Kerouac

The word sacred comes from sacrifice, to cut up. That means that in order to have a sacred journey, you have to give up something, sacrifice; but few people today in the West want to hear about that. Americans want the boon without the labyrinth.Pilgrimage starts the wheel, it turns the wheel of samsara, the wheel of life, and we have to live with the consequences. ~ Anthony Lawlor

Searching outside of you is Samsara (the world). Searching within you leads to Nirvana. ~ Amit Ray

... ... When the secret is discovered, when the Truth is seen, all the forces which feverishly produce the continuity of samsara in illusion become calm and incapable of producing any more karma-formations, because there is no more illusion, no more 'thirst' for continuity. It is like mental disease which is cured when he cause or the secret of the malady is discovered and seen by the patients. ~ Walpola Rahula

Sometimes beings come forth from that realmless realm. Light incarnates and wanders around through the samsara, kind of looking at itself in various countless forms. We call beings that come from that realm "enlightened". ~ Frederick Lenz

Ask the river about it, my friend! Listen to it, laugh about it! Do you then really think that you have committed your follies in order to spare your son them? Can you then protect your son from Samsara? How? Through instruction, through prayers, through exhortation? My dear friend, have you forgotten that instructive story about Siddhartha, the Brahmin's son, whiuch you once told me here? Who protected Siddhartha the Samana from Samsara, from sin, greed and folly? Could his father's piety, his teacher's exhortations, his own knowledge, his own seeking, protect him? Which father, which teacher, could prevent him from living his own life, from soiing himself with life, from loading himself with sin, from swallowing the bitter drink himself, from finding his own path? Do you think, my dear friend, that anybody is spared this path? Perhaps your little son, because you would like to see him spared sorrow and pain and disillusionment? But if you were to die ten times for him, you would not alter his destiny in the slightest. ~ Hermann Hesse

Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly. ~ Pema Chodron

Samsara is the mind turned outwardly, lost in its projections. Nirvana is the mind turned inwardly, recognizing its true nature. ~ Sogyal Rinpoche

In tantra, samsara is viewed as the same thing as nirvana. Eating a hamburger is meditation. ~ Frederick Lenz

The Hindu views life as the opportunity to fulfill karmic obligations (dharma), indulge the ego with worldly power (artha), gratify the senses with worldly pleasure (kama), and discover the spirit (moksha). He can either react to samsara or simply witness it. The former fetters, the latter liberates. ~ Devdutt Pattanaik

We spend all our energy and waste our lives trying to re-create these zones of safety, which are always falling apart. That's the essence of samsara - the cycle of suffering that comes from continuing to seek happiness in all the wrong places. ~ Pema Chodron

We just think that we're being born, when we're born; (headfirst crying out of the smile of the womb, if we'd only known that it was all the same before getting involved in Samsara---saving motion and nervousness, not forsaking peace---I remember being forced out---to the discriminatory prickles and thorns of the world)--- We're still the same old substance, High Hearable Essence Light---(whatever it really is, & Empty)--- Unbornness is the above---

We just think that we're dying, when we die!---headfirst falling in the airplane, falling once again, from stage-emptiness to stage-emptiness---unborn and undying and undead---Birth and death not a dualism, no difference---same Dharmakaya Universal Essence---

No death, no birth, no error, no "prose", but uncreated single substance essence flow of transitory unreal words riding an unreal ride across the memory of the unreal word,

I can't say that the world is
Not that it is not -
Because it is just from Mind ~ Jack Kerouac

We also know life passes quickly and death is certain, yet in our
busy lives we find it difficult to practice as much as we wish we could. Perhaps
we meditate for an hour or two each day, but that leaves the other twenty-two
hours in which to be distracted and tossed about on the waves of samsara. But
there is always time for sleep; the third of our lives we spend sleeping can be
used for practice. ~ Tenzin Wangyal

The mind is always seeking zones of safety, and these zones of safety are continually falling apart. Then we scramble to get another zone of safety back together again. We spend all our energy and waste our lives trying to re-create these zones of safety, which are always falling apart. That's samsara. The ~ Pema Chodron

The charnel ground is that great graveyard in which the complexities of samsara and nirvana lie buried. ~ Chogyam Trungpa

To go beyond samsara and nirvana, we will need
the two wings of emptiness and compassion.
From now on, let us use these two wings
to fly fearlessly into the sky of the life to come. ~ Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

This in the context of turning the mind away from samsara, but this doesn't mean against samsara, it is for samsara. Because, what would be the best thing for all sentient beings in samsara? The best thing would be to have a Buddha to guide one, and each one of us wishes to be that Buddha. In ~ Chamgon Kenting Tai Situpa

The things you see are real, but they are not a complete seeing - Samsara. ~ Frederick Lenz

The Sanskrit word samsara - which traditionally represents the summation of all our confusion and destructive patterns of behavior - literally means "wandering around." The Tibetan word for a sentient being caught up in confusion - drowa - could be translated as "always on the go." I like to think of this word as meaning "commuter. ~ Ethan Nichtern

Death and Light are everywhere, always, and they begin, end, strive, attend, into and upon the Dream of the Nameless that is the world, burning words within Samsara, perhaps to create a thing of beauty. ~ Roger Zelazny

It is the rub that polishes the jewel," Enso Roshi says. "Nobody ever gets to nirvana without going through samsara. Nobody ever gets to heaven, without going through hell. The center of all things, the truth, is surrounded by demons. ~ T. Scott McLeod

It is not the outer objects that entangle us. It is the inner clinging that entangles us. - Tilopa ~ Lama Surya Das

Sometimes I think the greatest achievement of modern culture its its brilliant selling of samsara and its barren distractions. Modern society seems to me a celebration of all the things that lead away from the truth, make truth hard to live for, and discourage people from even believing that it exists. ~ Sogyal Rinpoche

[A]ccording to Buddhism in the Tibetan tradition, a being that achieves Buddhahood, although freed from Samsara,the 'wheel of suffering', as the phenomenon of existence is known, will continue to return to work for the benefit of all other sentient beings until such time as each one is similarly liberated. ~ Dalai Lama XIV

The essence of meditation practice in Dzogchen is encapsulated by these four points:
▪When one past thought has ceased and a future thought has not yet risen, in that gap, in between, isn't there a consciousness of the present moment; fresh, virgin, unaltered by even a hair's breadth of a concept, a luminous, naked awareness?
Well, that is what Rigpa is!
▪Yet it doesn't stay in that state forever, because another thought suddenly arises, doesn't it?
This is the self-radiance of that Rigpa.
▪However, if you do not recognize this thought for what it really is, the very instant it arises, then it will turn into just another ordinary thought, as before. This is called the "chain of delusion," and is the root of samsara.
▪If you are able to recognize the true nature of the thought as soon as it arises, and leave it alone without any follow-up, then whatever thoughts arise all automatically dissolve back into the vast expanse of Rigpa and are liberated.
Clearly this takes a lifetime of practice to understand and realize the full richness and majesty of these four profound yet simple points, and here I can only give you a taste of the vastness of what is meditation in Dzogchen.
…
Dzogchen meditation is subtly powerful in dealing with the arisings of the mind, and has a unique perspective on them. All the risings are seen in their true nature, not as separate from Rigpa, and not as antagonistic to it, but actually as none other–and this is ~ Sogyal Rinpoche

In order to escape from this prison, one must learn not to come to an arrangement with its indisputable comforts. ~ Nicolas Gomez Davila

Samsara is the world appearance, the cycle of rebirth, the physically manifest universes and states of mind that you perceive through the medium of ego. ~ Frederick Lenz

THE OPPOSITE OF samsara is when all the walls fall down, when the cocoon completely disappears and we are totally open to whatever may happen, with no withdrawing, no centralizing into ourselves. That is what we aspire to, the warrior's journey. ~ Pema Chodron

What is this mysterious masculine force which spurs you onwards, whence comes this will, this heroic initiative which seems to precede the start of the great journey? This is what prevents you turning back on the path. If you were to do so, if you failed to travel the path to its end, you would be guilty, because the practices of your initiation have mobilised enormous forces which destroy men and drive them insane if they are not aimed in the right direction. The signs will help you open a way for yourself in the virgin forest where no roads exist.

'Even the Gods are your enemies; because their impersonal lives are at risk in this war. You will have to overcome the Archetypes, dethrone them, reincorporating their tremendous numinous energies within yourself. Do you remember the Greek legend? Man was a circular androgynous. He began to roll up Mount Olympus. The Gods were frightened, fearing defeat, and so they resorted to artifice: they divided the man-sphere in half. The result was that he was so busy trying to find his other half that he had no time to make war with them. But, luckily, the Gods made a mistake. Because one day we will bring them back to life as well, giving them a face.

'When the water runs downhill, it gives rise to Samsara and human generations, to the circular movement of the involuted earth; when it runs uphill, the opposite direction, it provokes the mutation of the Gods themselves, the divinisation of the hero; it creates a free, ~ Miguel Serrano

Man must have results, real results, in his inner and outer life. I do not mean the results which modern people strive after in their attempts at self-development. These are not results, but only rearrangements of psychic material, a process the Buddhists call 'samsara' and which our Holy Bible calls 'dust'. ~ Jacob Needleman

The Buddha's insight into the middle way is not simply about a balance between extremes. This conventional understanding misses the deeper revelation of the middle way as being the very nature of unexcelled enlightenment. The middle way is an invitation to leap beyond nirvana and samsara and to realize the unborn Buddha mind right in the middle of everywhere. ~ Adyashanti

The system can be paralyzed in yet another way. Every feedback system needs a margin of "lag" or error. If we try to make a thermostat absolutely accurate–that is, if we bring the upper and lower limits of temperature very close together in an attempt to hold the temperature at a constant 70 degrees–the whole system will break down. For to the extent that the upper and lower limits coincide, the signals for switching off and switching on will coincide! If 70 degrees is both the lower and upper limit the "go" sign will also be the "stop" sign; "yes" will imply "no" and "no" will imply "yes." Whereupon the mechanism will start "trembling," going on and off, on and off, until it shakes itself to pieces. The system is too sensitive and shows symptoms which are startlingly like human anxiety. For when a human being is so self-conscious, so self-controlled that he cannot let go of himself, he dithers or wobbles between opposites. This is precisely what is meant in Zen by going round and round on "the wheel of birth-and-death," for the Buddhist samsara is the prototype of all vicious circles. We saw that when the furnace responds too closely to the thermostat, it cannot go ahead without also trying to stop, or stop without also trying to go ahead. This is just what happens to the human being, to the mind, when the desire for certainty and security prompts identification between the mind and its own image of itself. It cannot let go of itself. It feels that it should not do what it i ~ Alan W. Watts

So if you ask the question "What kinds of perceptions and thoughts and feelings guide us through life each day?" the answer, at the most basic level, isn't "The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that give us an accurate picture of reality." No, at the most basic level the answer is "The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that helped our ancestors get genes into the next generation." Whether those thoughts and feelings and perceptions give us a true view of reality is, strictly speaking, beside the point. As a result, they sometimes don't. Our brains are designed to, among other things, delude us. ~ Robert Wright

Samsara-the Wheel of Existence, literally, the "Perpetual Wandering"-is the name by which is designated the sea of life ever restlessly heaving up and down, the symbol of this continuous process of ever again and again being born, growing old, suffering, and dying. (It) is constantly changing from moment to moment, (as lives) follow continuously one upon the other through inconceivable periods of time. Of this Samsara, a single lifetime constitutes only a vanishingly tiny fraction. ~ Gautama Buddha

The willingness to not bypass illusion is very important. We come to nirvana by way of samsara. We come to see the true nature of things by seeing through the illusory nature of things. We don't come to nirvana by avoiding samsara. We don't come to clarity by avoiding confusion. ~ Adyashanti

The samsara is the sense of self. I've had past experiences. I'm aware of the moment. I will have future experiences. ~ Frederick Lenz

Through this process, wisdom clarifies the way that the mind manufacturers emotion and karma, and finally penetrates the illusion of self. Just as though one were investigating how a magician created his display of illusions, one studies mental events to understand the conditions and causes that support the operation of ordinary self-oriented experience. One first understands the root emotions as the basis for samsara, then studies the workings of the associated emotions and how each one manifests a distinctive character. Gradually, the manner in which the self supports emotion and emotion supports the sense of self becomes clear. Self and emotion are seen as relying on and reinforcing each other's existence. Understanding how this collusion gives rise to the whole range of samsaric delusion liberates the mind from all forms of deception. ~ Dharma Publishing

But that don't mean I don't love America, by God, though I hate these damn hunters, all they wanta do is level a gun at a helpless sentient being and murder it, for every sentient being or living creature these actual pricks kill they will be reborn a thousand times to suffer the horrors of samsara and damn good for 'em too." "Hear, ~ Jack Kerouac

Rest in natural great peace, this exhausted mind, beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thought, like the relentless fury of the pounding waves in the infinite ocean of samsara. ~ Nyoshul Khenpo Rinpoche

Suffering also has its worth. Through sorrow, pride is driven out And pity felt for those who wander in samsara; Evil is avoided, goodness seems delightful. ~ Shantideva

The great ideal of Mahayana Buddhism is to remain in this world, so tempting and full of snares, but at the same time attain this awareness of the Absolute which underlies it, thus remaining free while helping others to free themselves. Nagarjuna captures the essence of this state when he proclaims, There is no difference at all between samsara and nirvana; ~ Anonymous

The integral sage, the nondual sage, is here to show us otherwise. Known generally as "Tantric," these sages insist on transcending life by living it. They insist on finding release by engagement, finding nirvana in the midst of samsara, finding total liberation by complete immersion. ~ Ken Wilber

I waited for the Earth to stop spinning, for the rift to open and swallow us. Yet the ash tree remained framed in the window, refused to fall. Rain streaked the glass. Blood throbbed in my ears. Preternatural silence. The cruellest April.
I was not deceived. What I saw was samsara, illusion. The world had ended. I was sure of it. ~ John Dolan

You've really helped him a lot."

Samsara shrugged. "It's mostly Raz's insight. I just nudge him a little occasionally."

"Which is what a good teacher does. ~ Amy Thomson

The mind is a machine that is constantly asking: What would I prefer? Close your eyes, refuse to move, and watch what your mind does. What it does is become discontent with That Which Is. A desire arises, you satisfy that desire, and another arises in its place. This wanting and rewanting is an endless cycle for which, turns out, there is already a name: samsara. Samsara is at the heart of the vast human carnival: greed, neurosis, mad ambition, adultery, crimes of passion, the hacking to death of a terrified man on a hillside in the name of A More Pure And Thus Perfect Nation
and all of this takes place because we believe we will be made happy once our desires have been satisfied.
I know this. But still I'm full of desire ...
Buddha Boy ~ George Saunders

freedom attends reality:
free at the core, any effort is wasted;
timelessly free, no release is needed;
free in itself, no corrective is possible;
directly free, released in seeing;
completely free, pure in nature;
constantly free, familiarization is redundant;
and naturally free, freedom cannot be contrived.

yet 'freedom' is just a verbal convention,
and who is 'realized' and who is not?
how could anyone be 'liberated'?
how could anyone be lost in samsara?
reality is free of all delimitation!

freedom is timeless, so constantly present;
freedom is natural, so unconditional;
freedom is direct, so pure vision obtains;
freedom is unbounded, so no identity possible;
freedom is unitary, so multiplicity is consumed.

conduct changes nothing - our lives are already free!
meditation achieves nothing - our minds are already free!
the view realizes nothing - all dogma is freedom!
fruition demands nothing - we are free as we are! ~ Longchenpa

Consider the fact that no matter how many planets and stars are reflected in a lake, these reflections are encompassed within the water itself; that no matter how many universes there are, they are encompassed within a single space; and that no matter how vast and how numerous the sensory appearances of samsara and nirvana may be, they are encompassed within the single nature of mind (sem-nyid). ~ Dudjom Lingpa

The Sravaka (literally 'hearer,' the name given by Mahayana Buddhists to contemplatives of the Hinayana school) fails to perceive that Mind, as it is in itself, has no stages, no causation. Disciplining himself in the cause, he has attained the result and abides in the samadhi (contemplation) of Emptiness for ever so many aeons. However enlightened in this way, the Sravaka is not at all on the right track. From the point of view of the Bodhisattva, this is like suffering the torture of hell. The Sravaka has buried himself in Emptiness and does not know how to get out of his quiet contemplation, for he has no insight into the Buddha-nature itself. Mo Tsu When Enlightenment is perfected, a Bodhisattva is free from the bondage of things, but does not seek to be delivered from things. Samsara (the world of becoming) is not hated by him, nor is Nirvana loved. When perfect Enlightenment shines, it is neither bondage nor deliverance. Prunabuddha-sutra ~ Aldous Huxley

The people find great solace in the idea of a personal God whose grace, obtained through devotion, can overpower the shackles of karma and samsara. The ~ Devdutt Pattanaik