12 Pieces of Buddhist Wisdom That Will Transform Your Life
When I was little, my grandma had this little green Buddha statue.
It wasnât a statue of the original Buddha, but rather a statue of whatâs generally considered Maitreya, the âfutureâ Buddha, usually represented as a hefty man sitting with his robe partly opened and often with beads around his neck. This particular statue was a pretty common image, one where his belly protruded out to reveal his belly button.
My grandma would always tell me, âRub his tummy and youâll have good luck!â So naturally, as a kid, I rubbed his tummy every chance I got. I was supposed to rub his bellybutton specifically, as I remember trying to lay my finger on his tiny belly button and rub in a circle, despite the fact that the belly button was a fraction of a millimeter in diameter.
I, like many others in the West, grew up with a pretty distorted image of Buddhism. I thought the Buddha was a god, that it was just a bunch of charms and superstition for people trying to amass riches and other misguided pursuits, and I thought meditation was only for people who were interested in learning human levitation or something crazy like that.
But I also, like many others, had heard many a number of insightful Buddha quotes and sayings growing up that seemed to âpullâ me in, and almost always ring a response like, âExactly!â or, âThatâs so true!â
Itâs because of this that despite all my negative misconceptions, I continued to be interested in Buddhism growing up, until one day I actually picked up a book, stopped learning from the collective misconceptions of the Western consciousness, and began learning from the real thing.
Buddhism holds within it a treasure trove of wisdom, not to mention wisdom easily applicable in oneâs everyday life and by all people of various backgrounds, beliefs, and preferences.
Thich Nhat Hanh has said, âBuddhism is made up of all non-Buddhist elements.â And this couldnât be truer. When it comes down to it, Buddhism is really just a collection of methods and ways of realizing the ultimate truths of this life, and the path to discovering true peace and happiness.
Whether Buddhist, a collector of universal wisdom, or just someone interested in finding practical ways to improve their life, this list presents 12 powerful and potentially transformative pieces of Buddhist wisdom which you can benefit from.
Compassion is one of the most revered qualities in Buddhism and great compassion is a sign of a highly realized human being.
Compassion doesnât just help the world at large, and it isnât just about the fact that itâs the right thing to do. Compassion, and seeking to understand those around you, can transform your life for a number of reasons.
First, self-compassion is altogether critical towards finding peace within yourself. By learning to forgive yourself and accepting that youâre human you can heal deep wounds bring yourself back from difficult challenges.
Next, we can often be tortured because of the fact that we donât completely understand why people do certain things.
Compassion is understanding the basic goodness in all people and then seeking to discover that basic goodness in specific people. Because of this, it helps you from going through the often mental torture we experience because we donât understand the actions of others.
But even more than that, expressing compassion is the very act of connecting wholeheartedly with others, and simply connecting in this way can be a great source of joy for us.
The reasons for practicing compassion are numerous and powerful. Seek to live in a way that you treat everyone you meet as you would yourself. Once you begin trying to do this, it will seem altogether impossible. But keep at it, and youâll realize the full power of living with compassion.
2. Connect with others and nurture those connections
In Buddhism, a community of practitioners is called a âsanghaâ. A sangha is a community of monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen who practice together in peace towards the united âgoalâ of realizing greater awakening, not only for themselves but for all beings.
The sangha is a principle which much of the world can greatly benefit from. People come together in groups all the time, but itâs usually for the purpose of creating monetary riches or obtaining substantial power and rarely towards the united goal o1f attaining peace, happiness, and realizing greater wisdom.
The principle of the sangha can be expressed in your own life in many ways. The sangha is ultimately just one way of looking at life, through the lens of the individual âexpressionsâ of the totality.
By living in a way that youâre fully aware of the power of connecting with others, whether itâs one person or a group of 100, and seeking to nurture those relationships in the appropriate way, you can transform your life in ways that will pay dividends for years to come.
One of the most powerful points on this list, the power of simply living in a way that youâre fully awake to every moment of your life pretty much couldnât be exaggerated even if I tried.
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Mindfulness, greater awareness, paying attention, whatever you want to call it- it changes every facet of your life and in every way. Itâs as simple as that.
Strive to live fully awake to each moment of your daily life and overcome your greatest personal struggles, find a great sense of peace and joy, and realize the greatest lessons life can teach you as a result of living fully awake to the present moment.
To live deeply, in a way that you become keenly aware of the precious nature of life, is to begin down the path of true peace and happiness.
Why? Because to live in this way is to gradually become aware of the true nature of the world. This will happen essentially in âsectionsâ of the whole, such as realizing your interconnectedness (you begin to see how everything is connected to everything else) and impermanence (you begin to see how everything is ever-changing, constantly dying only to be reborn in another form).
These realizations are the bread and butter of Buddhism and all spiritual practice. These âsections of the wholeâ are fragments of the ultimate realization, ways for us to understand that which canât be fully understood in the traditional sense.
By living in a way that you seek to realize these various âqualities of the ultimateâ you find greater and greater peace in realizing the natural way of things. This cultivates in us the ability to savor every moment of life, to find peace in even the most mundane activities, as well as the ability to transform your typically ânegativeâ experiences into something altogether nourishing and healing.
5. Change yourself, change the world
Buddhists understand that you can hardly help another before you help yourself. But this isnât referring to you gaining power or riches before you can help others, or living in a way that you ignore others.
This is mostly referring to the fact that because weâre all interconnected, by you helping yourself you create an exponentially positive effect on the rest of the world.
If you want to make an impact on the world, donât falsely convince yourself that itâs âyou or themâ1. You donât need to drag yourself through the mud to help those around you. If you do this, youâll greatly hamper your ability to create a positive impact.
At the deepest level of understanding, by making it about you youâre also making it about them because you know thereâs no separating âyouâ and âthemâ.
Take care of yourself and seek to be more than just a help, but an example of how to live for others to follow and youâll create waves of exponential possibility that inspires others to do the same.
Death is an often taboo topic in Western society. We do everything we can to not only avoid the subject, but pretend that it doesnât even exist.
The reality is, this is really unfortunate and in no way helps us lead better lives. Becoming keenly aware of your own impermanence and deeply understanding the nature of death with regards to our interconnectedness are both things which can help us find great peace.
In Buddhism, students in many sects at one point or another âmeditate on the corpseâ as it were (a practice which is said to have originated at least as far back as the Buddhaâs lifetime).
This is literally what it sounds like. They meditate on the image of a corpse slowing decomposing and imagine that process through to its end, eventually resulting in a deep and profound realization on the true nature of death.
That might sound a little intense to you, but the truth is, if you live youâre entire life acting as if youâre never going to die or ignoring your own impermanence then you wonât ever be able to find true peace within yourself.
You donât necessarily have to meditate on the image of a corpse, but simply opening up to yourself about death so that youâre no longer shielding it from your mind (which youâre likely doing unconsciously, as thatâs how most of us were brought up in the West) can begin to be a great source of peace and help you appreciate the many joys in your everyday life.
A true appreciation for life can never be fully realized until you come face-to-face with your own impermanence. But once you do this, the world opens up in a new and profound way.
7. Your food is (very) special
Meditative practice offers the ability to transform every experience in your everyday life, which I discuss in my forthcoming book Zen for Everyday Life, and food is one of those everyday experiences which is greatly transformed and often in very interesting and rewarding ways. Buddhist meditative practice, particularly mindfulness and contemplation, helps you realize the precious nature of the food in front of you. Indeed, with how integral a part food plays in our
lives, to transform our relationship with food is to transform a key aspect of our entire lives, both now and in the future.
By contemplating on the food in front of us, for example, we can come to realize the vast system of interconnectedness that is our life, and how our food coming to be on our dinner plate as it is depended on numerous elements coming to be.
This helps us to deepen our relationship with food, cultivate a deep sense of gratitude before each meal, and learn to respect the delicate but ever-pressing balance that is life.
8. Understand the nature of giving
Giving is more than the act of giving Christmas and Birthday gifts, itâs also about those gifts which we give each and every day which we donât typically see as gifts at all.
Buddhists hold a very deep understanding of the nature of giving, particularly in that life is a constant play between the act of giving and receiving. This doesnât just help us find peace in understanding the way of the world around us, but helps us realize the amazing gifts we all have within us that we can give others in every moment, such as our love, compassion, and presence.
9. Work to disarm the ego
The easiest way to sum up all âspiritualâ practice is this: spirituality is the act of coming in touch with the ultimate reality or the ground of being, and as a result spiritual practice is the act of overcoming those obstacles which keep us from realizing that.
The primary obstacle in our way? The ego.
To put it short and sweet, the reason the ego is the major obstacle in spiritual practice, or simply the practice of finding true peace and happiness (whatever you choose to call it, itâs all the same), is because itâs very function is to pull you away from the ground of your being by convincing you that youâre this separate self.
The process of unraveling the ego can take time, as itâs something which has been with us, intertwined with us, for years. But itâs infinitely rewarding and altogether necessary if we want to realize our best life.
Life is filled with vices, things which attempt to bind us to unwholesome ways of living and therefore do the very opposite of cultivate peace, joy, and greater realization in our lives. Among these, the 3 poisons are some of the most powerful. The 3 poisons are:
Together, these 3 poisons are responsible for the majority of the pain and suffering we experience as a collective species. Itâs perfectly normal to be affected by each of these poisons throughout your life, so donât knock yourself for falling for them.
Instead, simply accept that theyâre something youâre experiencing and begin working to remove them from your life. This can take time, but itâs a key aspect on the path towards realizing true peace and happiness.
We should all strive to work and make our living in a way thatâs more âconsciousâ or aware. This generally means not selling harmful items such as guns, drugs, and services that harm other people, but it goes deeper than that.
Thereâs ultimately two aspects to this: making a living by doing something which doesnât inhibit your own ability to realize peace and making a living doing something which doesnât inhibit others ability to realize peace.
Facing this can lead to some interesting situations for some people, and as Thich Nhat Hanh has mentioned this is a collective effort as opposed to a solely personal one (the butcher isnât a butcher only because he decided to be, but because there is a demand from people for meat to be neatly packaged and made available for them to be purchased from supermarkets), but you should strive to do your best.
Following the teaching on right livelihood can help you realize the harmful effect that your own work is having on you and therefore coming up with a solution can result in a largely positive shift in your life as a whole. Only you can decide if a change needs to happen though.
Whatever the case, seek to make a living doing something that promotes the peace and happiness of yourself and those around you as much as possible.
12. REALIZE NON-ATTACHMENT
This is a difficult point to put into so few words, but a profound one I felt would be greatly beneficial to mention nonetheless.
To realize non-attachment in a Buddhist sense doesnât mean to abandon your friends and family and live alone for the rest of your life, never truly living again just so that you donât become attached to these desires.
Non-attachment refers to living in a way that you exist in the natural flow of life and generally living a typical modern life, building a family, working, etc., while simultaneously not being attached to any of these things. It simply means to live in a way that youâve become aware of and accepted the impermanence of all things in this life and live in a way that youâre ever-aware of this fact.
Itâs perfectly normal for a Zen student in Japan, once having completed his training, to actually de- robe and go âback into the worldâ so to speak. This is because, once theyâve reached this level of realization, they see the beauty in all things and are compelled to live fully absorbed in all the beauty and wonders of this life. From this point on, they can truly âlive life to the fullestâ, while not clinging to any of these things.
Keep in mind, this doesnât mean that you stop feeling emotions. On the contrary, these emotions are welcomed and expected, and fully experienced with mindfulness in the moment of their impact. But this is simply the natural course of things.
Once these emotions subside though, and when we have no mental formations or obstructions to block our path, a natural healing process takes place that heals the wound and allows us to continue on living in peace and joy instead of dragging us down into darkness.
Strive to live free, fully aware of the wonders of life and in the very midst of all of those wonders, while not clinging to any of it. To do this is to realize the greatest joy life has to offer.
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