In what is now known as Bodh Gaya…a Buddhist temple stands beside an ancient pipal, descended from that bodhi tree, or “enlightenment tree, ” and I watched the rising of the morning star and came away no wiser than before. But later I wondered if the Tibetan monks were aware that the Bodhi tree was murmuring with gusts of birds, while another large pipal, so close by that it touched the holy tree with many branches, was without life. I make no claim for the event: I simply declare what I saw at Bodh Gaya. Peter Matthiessen
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More Quotes By Peter Matthiessen
  1. When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions -...

  2. It is related that Sakyamuni [the historical Buddha] once dismissed as of small consequence a feat of levitation on the part of a disciple, and cried out in pity for a yogin by the river who had spent twenty years of his human existence learning...

  3. There is a difference between right and wrong, always was and always will be, but each man's wrong and each man's right are different.

  4. The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no "meaning, " they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the...

  5. Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. This retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the...

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