Do like this if you want to practice the true Dharma! Keep your master’s oral instructions in mind. Don’t conceptualize your experience, as it just makes you attached or angry. Day and night, look into your mind. If your stream of mind contains any nonvirtue, renounce it from the core of your heart and pursue virtue.

Moreover, when you see other people committing evil, feel compassion for them. It is entirely possible that you will feel attachment to or aversion for certain sense objects. Give that up. When you feel attachment towards something attractive or aversion towards something repulsive, understand that to be your mind’s delusion, nothing but a magical illusion.

When you hear pleasant or unpleasant words, understand them to be an empty resounding, like an echo. When you encounter severe misfortune and misery, understand it to be a temporary occurrence, a deluded experience. Recognize that the innate nature is never apart from you.

To obtain a human body is extremely difficult, so it is foolish to ignore the Dharma once having found it. Only the Dharma can help you; everything else is worldly beguilement.

Padmasambhava

from the book Advice from the Lotus-Born

Read a random quote or see all quotes by Padmasambhava.

Further quotes from the book Advice from the Lotus-Born:

• Path of enlightenment
• Mingle the practice with your own being
• Diligence
• Present in yourself
• Your natural face
• Possessing the view of realization
• Although
• All This
• Meditator
• Hermit
• Generosity
• Gain mastery over your mind!
• Degenerate age
• The union of samsara and nirvana