Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Lama Surya Das (American Buddhist Scholar)

Lama Surya Das (b.1950,) born Jeffrey Miller, is an American Buddhist scholar, teacher, poet, and translator. A leading voice in Western Buddhism, he is one of the foremost meditation teachers of the Tibetan tradition.

Born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, Miller graduated from State University of New York at Buffalo in 1971. He traveled throughout India and Nepal, studying with various spiritual teachers. He was given the name “Surya Das” by the Indian Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba in 1972.

After working as an English teacher in Kyoto 1973–74, Surya Das shifted to Tibetan Buddhism, completed two three-year silent meditation retreats, and became one of the first Westerners to be approved as a Tibetan lama. The Dalai Lama affectionately calls him “the American Lama.”

Surya Das dedicated his life to the preservation and propagation of Dzogchen teachings of the Nyingma lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. He is the founder of the Dzogchen Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and organizes interfaith dialogues, social activism, courses, and retreats.

Surya Das is the best-selling author of Awakening the Buddha Within (1997,) Awakening to the Sacred (1999,) Letting Go of the Person You Used to Be (2003,) and Buddha Standard Time (2011.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Lama Surya Das

With every breath, the old moment is lost; a new moment arrives. We exhale and we let go of the old moment. It is lost to us. In doing so, we let go of the person we used to be. We inhale and breathe in the moment that is becoming. In doing so, we welcome the person we are becoming. We repeat the process. This is meditation. This is renewal. This is life.
Lama Surya Das

Enlightenment is not about becoming divine. Instead it’s about becoming more fully human… . It is the end of ignorance.
Lama Surya Das

An answer seeks to dissolve the question, a response recognizes the ongoing validity of the question, and seeks to remain in connection with it.
Lama Surya Das

It almost seems as though this roiling world is conspiring to test our patience at every turn. In fact, it is. with this in mind, we would be wise to look on our imperfect environment as a teacher rather than an antagonist. It constantly shows us that we need to be patient on an ongoing basis, not just every now and then, if we’re going to realize true inner peace, happiness, and fulfillment.
Lama Surya Das

Expecting good things to last and unwanted things to stay away forever is simply unrealistic, even when we are amid good karma and bounty aplenty.
Lama Surya Das

We are in the habit of rating our lives in real time—a sad day, a nice visit, a terrible commute, a good meditation—qualifying and quantifying everything. There are actually neither unequivocally good nor bad events, things, or people—only the wanted and the unwanted—and everything is subjective. This is strong medicine; think about it. It’s a matter of perspective.
Lama Surya Das

My constant daily question is, “What is the best thing I can do now in this situation, given these circumstances? Much is provided; now what is required from me?”
Lama Surya Das

The secret, or innermost, level of wisdom is pure intuition, clarity, lucidity, innate wakefulness, presence, and recognition of reality. This transcendental wisdom is within all of us—it just needs to be discovered and developed, unfolded and actualized.
Lama Surya Das

When we are no longer so tightly identified with who we used to be and how we think things should continue to be—based on the past—every moment of wakefulness is an opportunity to actualize and enjoy our inherent freedom, wholeness, and perfection. The heart-mind is gorgeous in its authentic natural state!
Lama Surya Das

Breath by breath, let go of fear, expectation, anger, regret, cravings, frustration, fatigue. Let go of the need for approval. Let go of old judgments and opinions. Die to all that, and fly free. Soar in the freedom of desirelessness.
Lama Surya Das

Taking the decision-making process away from people disempowers them. It also makes them much less likely to buy into the decision, however right it may be. One’s own conscience remains the ultimate arbiter.
Lama Surya Das

Forgiveness means letting go of the hope for a better past.
Lama Surya Das

As long as we’re preoccupied with our former traumas and triumphs, or our fears and dreams about what might happen down the road, or who said what to whom, it’s very difficult to appreciate and cherish the intrinsically joyful gift of life right here, now.
Lama Surya Das

We are not trying to suppress thoughts. Changing our thoughts and moods are like redecorating our cell on the Titanic. It is so temporary. But finding the timeless awareness, pure presence… What words do we have for it, our true nature?
Lama Surya Das

It is not what happens to us that determines our character, our experience, our karma, and our destiny – but how we relate to what happens.
Lama Surya Das
Topics: Questions

Everyone is a little crazy. Remembering this helps us lighten up.
Lama Surya Das

All the happiness and virtue in this world come from selflessness and generosity, all the sorrow from egotism, selfishness, and greed.
Lama Surya Das

We are obliged to live as if there’s meaning in life, without any guarantee that there is.
Lama Surya Das

Our sorrows provide us with the lessons we most need to learn.
Lama Surya Das

When bad things happen, we want to stay honest with ourselves about our feelings. We don’t want to lose our capacity to feel; we don’t want to become so hardened and frozen that we can’t experience or remember the negative things that happened to us. Repressing difficult experiences and feelings can make us ill. Acknowledging our pain is a necessary part of our healing.
Lama Surya Das

Having a calling or meaningful and fulfilling purpose in life does not necessarily mean being drawn to a certain kind of job, task, or professional mission. Many people are compelled instead to commit themselves to a particular set of values – ones that they infuse into every aspect of their life, regardless of the various roles they play or situations they address as they go through their daily lives.
Lama Surya Das

Other people can’t cause us to be impatient unless we let them do so. In other words, others don’t make us impatient. We make ourselves impatient, through our expectations and demands, fixated attachments and stuckness.
Lama Surya Das

It is usually a mistake to believe that any opinion or situation is objectively good or bad, since everything depends on the perspective of the viewer.
Lama Surya Das

Non-attachment is not complacency. It doesn’t imply a lack of caring and commitment. The philosophy of non-attachment is based in the understanding that holding on too tightly to those things, which in any case are always going to be slipping through our fingers, hurts and gives us rope burn.
Lama Surya Das

Learning how to love is the goal and the purpose of spiritual life—not learning how to develop psychic powers, not learning how to bow, chant, do yoga, or even meditate, but learning to love. Love is the truth. Love is the light.
Lama Surya Das

The past is over, and the future is unknown. We can dwell in the imagined worlds of yesterday and tomorrow if we so choose. But the more we do so, the more we miss out on life itself as it is happening, moment by moment, and the more we fail to realize who we actually are, moment by moment.
Lama Surya Das

All too easily, however, we can become distracted, scared, frustrated, gullible, cynical, or just plain inattentive. We suppress our natural questing spirit. We plow ahead without taking a good, hard look at what we’re doing and why. And whether we realize it or not, we buy into ready-made systems of thought, habit, and belief sold to us by our culture, families, friends, and associates. We fall into step with the herd and almost unthinkingly adhere to whatever cult(ure) we’re brought up in, unconsciously living our received beliefs and assumptions, for the most part without question or examination.
Lama Surya Das

When we ground ourselves in the present moment, we spontaneously connect better with others. We become more responsive and less reactive, listening more deeply and speaking with greater clarity.
Lama Surya Das

I’ve also learned that you don’t always get to pick the people with whom you travel the journey. You sometimes may think you do, but don’t be deceived. And the corollary of that – and this was my real lesson – is that you start to realize that you can love even the people you don’t like and must love and help everyone.
Lama Surya Das

You don’t need to see different things, but rather to see things differently.
Lama Surya Das

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