Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
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Adi Shankara

788 – 820 CE

Philosopher, theologian, and sage; Shankara unified and established the main philosophical trends in Hinduism. He criticized the dogmatic and ritually oriented schools, emphasized that enlightenment can be realized in this lifetime, and established monastic, personal-practice and direct-experience traditions. Writer of fundamental texts of the Vedanta school and responsible for a major Hindu revival, he is called the source of all the main currents of modern Indian thought. His teachings are similar to Mahayana Buddhism and he was called a "crypto-Buddhist" but he explained the difference being the Buddhism teaching of no self and his that the whole universe is the self - which may be a way of saying the same thing.

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Quotes by Adi Shankara (3 quotes)

“Liberation never comes—even at the end of a hundred aeons—without the realization of the Oneness of Self.”

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“The key difference between Hinduism and Buddhism is that Hinduism asserts ‘Atman (Soul, Self) exists’, while Buddhism teaches that there is ‘no Soul, no Self’”

Themes: Buddhism Hinduism

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“Work is for the purification of the mind, not for the perception of Reality. The realization of Truth is brought about by discrimination, and not in the least by millions of acts.”

Themes: Livelihood

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Quotes about Adi Shankara (2 quotes)

“Just as Shankara in 8th century India brought the scattered insights of the Upanishads into an intellectual system; and just as Aquinas in 13th century Europe wove Aristotle and St. Paul into the Scholastic philosophy; so Zhu Xi took the loose apothegms of Confucius and built upon them a system of philosophy strong enough to preserve for 7 centuries the Confucian leadership in Chinese political and intellectual life.”

Will Durant 1885 – 1981 CE
Philosophy apostle and popularizer of history's lessons
from Our Oriental Heritage

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“a state of being where the mind knows the source of all light... the saints, the arhats, the bodhisattvas, the jivanmuktas who knew something or everything about this state of being... we wanted you to know who and what Jesus and Gautama and Lao Tzu and Shankaracharya and Huineng and Sri Ramakrishna, etc., were before you knew too much or anything about Homer or Shakespeare or even Blake or Whitman, let alone George Washington and his cherry tree... or how to parse a sentence”

J. D. Salinger 1919 – 2010 CE
from Franny and Zooey

Themes: Enlightenment

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