A bodhisattva doesn't have to be perfect. Anyone who is aware of what is happening and who tries to wake up other people is a bodhisattva. We are all bodhisattvas, doing our best.
You know the Zen question, 'The Bodhisattva of Great Mercy' has a thousand hands and a thousand eyes; 'which is the true eye?' I could not understand this for a long time. But the other day, when I looked at the pine trees bending before the cold blasts from the mountain, I suddenly realized the meaning. You see, all the boughs, branches, twigs, and leaves simultaneously bend to the wind with tremendous vigor.
Even fear itself is frightened by the bodhisattva's fearlessness.
Mother Earth is very talented. She has produced Buddhas, bodhisattvas, great beings.
Even if a bodhisattva investigates the highest wisdom, one is not a proper bodhisattva unless one applies skillful means for the benefit of other sentient beings.
I realize that there's a thing called the bodhisattva ideal, and it's a very nice pinnacle of attention. It's a very egotistical thought, ultimately.
Do not be a bodhisattva, do not be an arahant, do not be anything at all. If you are a bodhisattva, you will suffer, if you are an arahant, you will suffer, if you are anything at all, you will suffer.
We have compassion because of the incredible pain and suffering which we as unenlightened beings cause to ourselves and all others through our ignorance. This is why we're trying to get out. This is why the bodhisattva has meaning. Because we're saying, no we won't get out, we won't escape until we've helped all other beings to escape, but most other beings don't even want to escape. They don't even know that there is an escape, and it's hard, so it's going to take an awfully long time.
A mantra is like meeting the Buddha or Bodhisattva himself.
The idea of the Bodhisattva is the one who out of his realization of transcendence participates in the world. The imitation of Christ is joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.
Even if the sun were to rise from the west, the Bodhisattva has only one way.
So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.
A bodhisattva is someone who has compassion within himself or herself and who is able to make another person smile or help someone suffer less. Every one of us is capable of this.
Meat-eating is condemned by the Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and Sravakas; if one devours meat out of shamelessness he will always be devoid of sense.
