Tao Te Ching
Ordinary Mind
Government, religion, business, and culture manipulate us by convincing that there is something missing, something not quite right about our life and basic experience, that we’re somehow “born bad” and need external sources to become okay. True wisdom traditions teach the opposite: that our basic existence, perceptions, and thoughts are sacred without need of manipulation.
Quotes (76)
“He who does not sweep the droppings at home is not likely to notice that weeds run riot on the sacred ceremonial mounds.”
“sages alone do not leave their sacred ground… They do not plan ahead yet do not abandon opportunity… They do not seek to gain yet do not reject misfortune.”
“Sages wear what no one looks at, do what no one watches, and say what no one disputes… they are different but appear ordinary.”
“Piety lies not in praying or prostrating to images, in going to temples, or in rituals, beliefs, and practices. It lies in looking upon all things with equanimity and peace.”
“Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretense.”
“These five tell us to refrain from acting and to govern things by relying on their nature rather than on their form.”
“To wear coarse cloth is to become one with what is ordinary. To keep one’s jade concealed is to treasure the truth. Sages are difficult to know because they do not differ from ordinary people and because they do not reveal their treasure of jade.”
“For ordinary man is Buddha… A foolish passing thought makes one an ordinary man, while an enlightened second though makes one a Buddha.”
“How miraculous and wondrous, hauling water and carrying firewood!”
“If you love the sacred and despise the ordinary, you are still bobbing in the ocean of delusion.”
“there is no distinction between the Buddha and sentient things, but that sentient being are attached to forms and so seek externally… By their very seeking they lose it.”
14. Finding and Following the Formless Form
64. Ordinary Mind
“When your home is nowhere, the mind is centered.
There is nothing to be gained by seeking elsewhere.”
“innate coemergent wisdom abides in the heart of all beings... the far-reaching, unfathomable meaning is apparent at this very moment. O how wonderous!”
“If you do not realize that all things are merely of the mind, endless apparitions will never cease.”
“Here is the unsophisticated Self—your original face. Here is the landscape of your birthplace—bare and beautiful.”
“I go to the marketplace with my wine bottle and return home with my staff. I visit the wine shop and the market, and everyone I look upon becomes enlightened.”
“When an ignorant person understands, he becomes a saint. When a saint understands, he becomes an ignorant person.”
“other approaches are like attempts to create the already-present sun by dispelling clouds and darkness through a process of effort and achievement.”
“To understand the essence, listen to the call of frogs, the billowing wind, the falling rain, all speaking the wonderful language of the essential Nature.”
“My miracle is that when I feel hungry I eat, and when I feel thirsty I drink.”
“Only original mind exists... Instead of holding onto things in your mind, let them go!”
“Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.”
“True emptiness is like the inner openness of a bell or a drum; when a bell is struck it rings, when a drum is beaten it resounds. It is because they have nothing inside that they are able to ring and resound. ineffable existence is like the sounding of a bell or a drum when struck... empty yet not empty, not empty yet empty, aware and efficient, lively and active, refining everything in the great furnace of Creation”
“But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants is the liberty of appearing.”
“Educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.”
“Besides the mind, there is no other Dharma. Therefore, you have no other action to carry out somewhere else.”
“The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.”
“Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.”
“Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, while all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”
“The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.”
“Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.”
“Life holds hardly any interest except on the days when the dust of reality is mingled with magic sand—when some ordinary incident of life becomes a springboard for the imagination.”
“The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.”
“The 'natural mind' is the mind which says absolutely straight and ruthless things. That is the sort of mind which springs from natural sources, and not from opinions taken from books; it wells up from the earth like a natural spring, and brings with it the peculiar wisdom of nature.”
“There is an artistry so deep, so primordial and elemental, that no yearning seems to it sweeter and more worthy of tasting than that for the raptures of common-placeness.”
“Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have at the last to take the whole world into your soul, cost what it may.”
“Time is your boat not your home.
God is not remote from us. He is at the point of my pen, my (pick) shovel, my paint brush, my (sewing) needle - and my heart and thoughts.”
“Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things...as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value.”
“In the particular is contained the universal.”
“This secret is concerned not with supramundane problems but with everyday ones in all their fervent detail, with the incessantly renewed problems of man's life here upon this earth.”
“One must have an extraordinary sense of energy which has no cause, which has no motive, which has the capacity to be utterly quiet, and this very quietness has its own explosive quality.”
“The Siddhas had rediscovered the direct way of spontaneous awareness and realization of the universal depth-consciousness which had been buried under the masses of scholastic learning, abstract philosophical speculation, hair-splitting arguments and monastic rules”
“To come to man's estate... The man who can see the miraculous in a poem, who can take pure joy from music, who can break his bread with comrades, opens his window to the same refreshing wind off the sea.”
“For a man to change the basic beliefs that determine his perception - his epistemological premises - he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be.”
“Everything is naturally perfect just as it is, completely pure and undefiled. All phenomena naturally appear in their uniquely correct modes and situation, forming ever-changing patterns full of meaning and significance, like participants in a great dance… The everyday practice is just ordinary life itself.”
“‘We have nothing on which to dine, Splendid, we shall have more time to sit outside and enjoy the moonlight, with music provided by the wind in the pines.”
“There is no knowledge except knowledge of the present, there is no observer separate from the flow of events and as a result, the sense of self shifts from an independent observer to everything that is observed.”
“In a world of tension and breakdown, it is necessary for there to be those who seek to integrate their inner lives not by avoiding anguish and running away from problems, but by facing them in their naked reality and in their ordinariness.”
“all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next.”
“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha - which is to demean oneself.”
“The Tao is that which first lets the light, then the dark; occasions the interplay of the two primal forces so that there is always renewal.”
“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to.”
“The more you see that it is very ordinary, the more that becomes an extraordinary case, which creates a further veil.”
“Suddenly you’re seeing something extraordinary arising out of a very ordinary thing.”
“In the case of primordial craziness of crazy wisdom, we do not permit ourselves to get seduced by passion or aroused by aggression at all... crazy wisdom becomes completely accurate out of the moment of things as they are... if anything comes up in the midst of that complete ordinariness and begins to make itself into a big deal, then we cut it down... Crazy wisdom is just the action of truth.”
“Don’t pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life and it’d lose even its imperfection.”
“The world was constantly speaking to Ancient Man... When they observed the world, the world observed them back.”
“When we look in the mirror, the one thing we don’t want to see is an ordinary human being.”
“It’s a huge psychological achievement to accept other humans in their bewildering mixture of good and bad… no one we love will ever satisfy us completely—but that this is never a reason to hate them either. We should move away from the naivety and cruelty of splitting people into the camps of the awful and the wondrous, to the mature wisdom of integrating them into the large collective of the ‘good enough’.”
“Real gods aren't what most of you Christians think of as gods. Gods are people. Sometimes dead people, sometimes still alive. Sometimes never lived... They fall in love. Have babies. Fight. Die. It's duty. It's normal. Get over it.”
“Use every distraction as an object of meditation and they cease to be distractions.”
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