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| Sayings and Words of Wisdom in English
Introduction
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| This is the kind of book you can open anywhere and, hopefully, after browsing a bit, over a page or two, find an idea of interest to you. You shouldn't read it cover-to-cover, through and through, because the overall-jumble-of-ideas would only confuse you. Students should focus on a single idea, one-idea-at-a-time, and interpret it, step-by-step according to the following process:
• Scan through once to get the general idea
• Look-up any unfamiliar vocabulary
• Consider the relation of the parts to the whole
• Interpret the meaning so is clear in your mind
• Prepare to explain it in your own word
If you are working in a group or a class, you can also go on to:
• Discuss the saying within a peer-group
• Exchange ideas and interpretations
• Until a general agreement is reached.
If you are working in a class, you can also speak about the intended meaning with the help of a teacher in a general discussion.
There is nothing new in such a process. It is not only the way that poetry is taught but also the way, for example, we explicate, texts in foreign languages, both ancient and modern.
This book is intended to appeal to both native speakers of English and students of English as a foreign language alike.
The text is not a list of English sayings originating in the English language, but rather a compendium of sayings and words of wisdom, in English, from a wide spectrum of linguistic traditions and cultures.
The sayings do not fit together into a consistent and unified-whole. Indeed, they often contradict one another. This is to be expected, especially when we consider that a petty consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds and that the opposite of every truth is also true. It is remarkable, however, to see on how many points great minds think alike irrespective of periods of time or places of origin. PDF Format
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| Buddhist Sayings in English Introduction |
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This is the kind of book which you can open anywhere, and let your eye scan down a page until your it fixes on one saying at a time, so the mind will focus on just one single thought. This is not the kind of book you should read from cover to cover, page by page, from top to bottom. Indeed, it is arranged alphabetically so ideas and images will appear in random sequence, just the way things hit you in real life.
Sayings will jump out at you and make sense; others may not make sense. Disregard anything that looks confusing, and continue looking for statements that speak to your state of mind in the present moment. Just get started like this and keep coming back to the site whenever you have a taste for it.
The collection includes a wide spectrum of Buddhist sayings, beginning with the time of the Buddha, spanning more than twenty-five centuries, reaching right down into the present in living Dhamma practitioners of today.
The sayings come either from original Pali texts and commentaries or from sources such as Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, Burmese, and Thai teachings about Buddhist practice, which have been translated into English to be passed by English speaking practitioners around the world today. Wherever the sayings may come from or whoever said them, what they all have in common is that there is only one Dhamma.
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| Dhamma Sayings for Conversation and Discussion
Introduction
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When, in 2005 and 2006, every evening after chanting, in conversations and discussions with senior monks in English, in a monastic community on Sri Chang Island, in Thailand, my friends often left it up to me what topic we would talk about next, but after a couple of years of discussing texts in Buddhist Publication Society documents, day by day, prior to my donating them to the temple library, I was slowly running out of new ideas and ways to keep the interest up. But then, one monk, Pra Zaeo, my very good friend in the Dhamma, made the suggestion we talk about just—“One thing at a time”—which worked very well in stimulating the kind of talk which made us stronger in the medicine of the Dhamma in ways we had not expected.
As it happened, I had been collecting an e-library of audio dhamma talks, from teachers like Ajarn Geoff and Bhante H. Gunaratna and others which I later donated to the BPS Library in Kandy . Often, as I was listening, I would say to myself, “That is a good line,” and I would write it down as a quote. What at one time were just a lot of single lines scratched on pieces of paper scattered about in my kutti became the collection of quotations which follows below:
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| Buddhist Perception and Paradox Introduction |
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This book was compiled with five persons in mind:
The first, Wichat Burannaprasertsook, was doing his doctorate in linguistics at Chulalongkorn University and planning to ordain as a monk as soon as possible thereafter.
The second and third were senior teaching monks at Wat Thamyaiprick: Pra Zaeo and Pra Wichai, who would visit my kuti every evening for discursive talk on the Dhamma.
Pra Zaeo shared with me an interest in texts from the Pali Canon. Pra Wichai was not as interested in texts as he was in the practical applications of vipassana meditation.
The fourth was my long-time colleague and excellent companion in the Dhamma, Ajarn Banjob Bannaruji, a Pali scholar in the Faculty of Arts at Chula, who shared with me an interest in making Pali sources, available in English, to a wider world audience.
The fifth and last, but certainly not least, was Ajarn Preecha Changkhwanyuen of the Philosophy Department in the Faculty of Arts at Chula, with whom I had worked for many years, in his capacity as an editor of Chulalongkorn University Press, and with whom I had had a discussion many years before about phenomenology that had always remained in my mind.
The quotations are based on the Pali Canon, the commentaries thereon, and Theravada Tradition, as it is followed by Sri Lankan, Burmese and Thai teachers and practitioners. There is only one Dhamma which knows no boundaries of lands or languages.
In evening Dhamma discussions, usually • One person in the group would
• Open the book, randomly, at any page
• Put a finger blindly on a line, and
• Following the finger with the eye
• Read the saying aloud
• Stopping, as appropriate and
• Clarifying and discussing vocabulary and
• Explaining textual meaning(s)
• Using speech discursively to
• Explain and explicate the original intent
• Of the intended meaning of the chosen text.
This book is not intended to be read from the top-to-the-bottom of the page or from the front-to-the-back-cover, but rather in random sequence, focusing on single sayings, one-at-a-time.
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