Atisha Quotes on Knowledge
Atiśa Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna (982–1054), the Bengali Buddhist scholar whose mid-eleventh-century journey to Tibet inaugurated the second great diffusion of Buddhism into the Tibetan plateau, gave Indo-Tibetan Buddhism one of its most influential pedagogical treatises in the Lamp for the Path to Awakening (Bodhipathapradīpa). The framework organizes the Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna teachings into a graded sequence of paths corresponding to three capacities of practitioners — the small, the middling, and the great — and supplies the structural template for the lamrim (graded path) literature that the Kadam school and, through it, the later Gelug tradition would carry forward as the principal pedagogical instrument of monastic training.
Quotes
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Attributed to Atisha:
“Receive every teaching as if it were medicine for the precise illness of your own heart.”
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“She who bears plants endowed with many varied powers, may Prithivī for us spread wide and favour us. In whom the sea, and Sindhu, and the waters, in whom our food and corn-lands had their being.”
Excerpt from the Prithvi Sukta in the Atharva Veda 12.1-63 (trans. by Maurice Bloomfield, Sacred Books of the East, Vol. 42, 1897). The Prithvi Sukta is often regarded as the first national song, e.g. C.f. Jain, M. (2010). Parallel pathways: Essays on Hindu-Muslim relations, 1707-1857. chapter V. -
“Atharva Veda, in A Garden of Deeds: Ramacharitmanas, a Message of Human Ethics , p.56”
God is really one, only one. -
“Whoever knows Atharva Veda knows all.”
Vyasa on Atharva Veda quoted in [ Seer of the Fifth Veda: Kr̥ṣṇa Dvaipāyana Vyāsa in the Mahābhārata (Google eBook) , p.5 -
“Vyasa on Atharva Veda quoted in [ Seer of the Fifth Veda: Kr̥ṣṇa Dvaipāyana Vyāsa in the Mahābhārata (Google eBook) , p.5”
Whoever knows Atharva Veda knows all. -
“Ralph T.H. Griffith , in The Hymns of the Atharvaveda”
The Atharva Veda is a Vedic-era collection of spells , prayers , charms , and hymns. There are prayers to protect crops from lightning and drought, charms against venomous serpents, love spells, healing spells, hundreds of verses, some derived from the Rig Veda , all very ancient.