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Dalai Lama Quote of the Week


If things did in fact exist the way they appear - if things did exist so concretely - then when one looked into and investigated them, this inherent existence should become even clearer, more obvious. However, when you seek for the object designated, you cannot find it under analysis.

...[That] which gives rise to the appearance of I is mind and body, but when you divide this into mind and body and look for the I, you cannot find it. Also the whole, body, is designated in dependence upon the collection of parts of the body; if you divide this into its parts and look for the body, you cannot find it either. Even the most subtle particles in the body have sides and hence parts. Were there something partless, it might be independent, but there is nothing that is partless. Rather, everything exists in dependence on its parts... There is no whole which is separate from its parts.

...No matter what the phenomenon is, internal or external, whether it be one's own body or any other type of phenomenon, when we search to discover what this phenomenon is that is designated, we cannot find anything that is it.

...However, these things appear to us as if they do exist objectively and in their own right, and thus there is a difference between the way things appear to our minds and the way they actually exist... Since phenomena appear to us in a way that is different from what we discover when analysing, this proves that their concrete appearance is due to a fault of our minds.

-- by The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, co-edited by Elizabeth Napper, from Kindness, Clarity, and Insight published by Snow Lion Publications