Philosophy quotes — page 28

There must be an overturning, a radical conversion of mind, in any religion. Without it there is no religion.

The religious consciousness does not arise out of our own selves; it is simultaneously the call of God or Buddha.

Compassion always signifies that opposites are one in the dynamic reciprocity of their own contradictory identity. The religious will arise as the self-determination of this dimension of sympathetic coalescence.

For what purpose do I exist?

At the point of our deepest questioning of ourselves, the religious quest awakens in us.

So long as the field of separation between within and without is not broken through, and so long as a conversion from that standpoint does not take place, the lack of unity and contradiction spoken of earlier cannot help but prevail among the things we take as real.

Nothingness in the sense of emptiness (śūnyatā) is not separate from being, but always in a relationship with being: being-sive-nothingness, nothingness-sive-being.

Religion cannot be fully understood either within the parameters of utility or from a sociological viewpoint alone.

The locus of ethical problems lies not in the consciousness of the isolated individual, but precisely in the in-betweenness of person and person.

Ethics is, in the final analysis, the study of ningen — the human person as both individual and social, as “betweenness.”

Fūdo means wind and earth — the natural environment of a given land.

We discover ourselves in the cold — and in the same moment we discover the cold in ourselves — before any sharp division of subject and object.

Whatever is dependently co-arisen, that is explained to be emptiness. That, being a dependent designation, is itself the middle way.

Neither from itself nor from another, nor from both, nor without a cause, does anything whatever, anywhere arise.

There is not the slightest difference between cyclic existence and nirvana. There is not the slightest difference between nirvana and cyclic existence.

Something that is not dependently arisen — such a thing does not exist. Therefore a non-empty thing does not exist.

Perception is free from conceptual construction.

There are only two instruments of knowledge: perception and inference.

The abstract issues [of philosophy] will have to be seen from the Latin American man’s own circumstance. … When we [Latin Americans] address abstract issues, we shall formulate them as issues of our own.

If we are to be faithful to our calling, we have to affirm that our situation is not that of Jean-Paul Sartre. Our situation is not that of the European bourgeoisie.

Because man had been slave he cannot enslave without negating himself.

Before the ego cogito there is an ego conquiro; “I conquer” is the practical foundation of “I think.”

From the “I conquer” applied to the Aztec and Inca world and all America, from the “I enslave” applied to Africans … from this “I” appears the Cartesian ego cogito.

Philosophy, when it is really philosophy and not sophistry or ideology, does not ponder philosophy. … Philosophy ponders the nonphilosophical; the reality.