Nhat Hanh - The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975)

12 Sourced Quotes

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I clean this teapot with the kind of attention I would have were I giving the baby Buddha or Jesus a bath.

Nhat Hanh
Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the whole earth revolves—slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment. Only this actual moment is life.

Nhat Hanh
To think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is to see reality as it is. A pessimistic attitude can never create the calm and serene smile which blossoms on the lips of Bodhisattvas and all those who obtain the way.

Nhat Hanh
Contemplate to see that awakened people, while not being enslaved by the work of serving living beings, never abandon their work of serving living beings.

Nhat Hanh
The raft is used to cross the river. It isn't to be carried around on your shoulders. The finger which points at the moon isn't the moon itself.

Nhat Hanh
Those who are without compassion cannot see what is seen with the eyes of compassion.

Nhat Hanh
Be mindful 24 hours a day, not just during the one hour you may allot for formal meditation or reading scripture and reciting prayers. Each act must be carried out in mindfulness.

Nhat Hanh
Reality is reality. It transcends every concept. There is no concept which can adequately describe it, not even the concept of interdependence.

Nhat Hanh
In mindfulness one is not only restful and happy, but alert and awake. Meditation is not evasion; it is a serene encounter with reality.

Nhat Hanh
When reality is perceived in its nature of ultimate perfection, the practitioner has reached a level of wisdom called non-discrimination mind - a wondrous communion in which there is no longer any distinction made between subject and object.

Nhat Hanh
There's no way I can be tossed around like a bottle slapped here and there on the waves.

Nhat Hanh
Machine thinking is the opposite of mindfulness. If we're really engaged in mindfulness when walking along the path to the village, then we will consider the act of each step we take as an infinite wonder, and a joy will open our hearts like a flower, enabling us to enter the world of reality.

Nhat Hanh