Here’s photo of a rare ”Buddha’s halo” as it appears over Tianchi Lake (Heavenly Lake) in China:
It’s actually a solar halo, formed by the refraction of light as it goes through ice crystals in the clouds. The phenomenon is only possible when sunlight, clouds or fog, and observers are all in a line, so it’s pretty rare.
Here’s another photo taken on the west side of the same lake, above Denggan Mountain.
[Photos/Chinanews.com]
Ink Painting by Miyamoto Musashi
Miyamoto Musashi: the master swordsman, the incomparable strategist, and the ultimate loner, a ronin or masterless samurai, who roamed Japan, spending many of his years living off the land.
Through rigorous training he made his body as hard as the steel of his blade and his mind as sharp as its edge. Yet, he knew the value of soft words, and as an artist, he could wield a gentle brush.
His Way was Heiho, the Way of Strategy, which he explained in The Book of Five Rings, a book on strategy, tactics, and philosophy still studied today, not only by martial artists, but throughout the business community, as it is considered a classic text on Japanese management.
To Musashi, strategy was the path to awakening. He said, “Having awakened to the the principles of strategy, I apply it to various arts and skills.”
These principles were crafted for warriors. We are all warriors and the battle we are engaged in is the battle to win over ourselves.
1. Do not think dishonestly.
2. The Way is in training.
3. Become acquainted with every art.
4. Know the ways of all professions.
5. Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters.
6. Develop the ability to see the truth in all matters.
7. Learn to perceive those things which are not obvious.
8. Pay attention to even small things.
9. Do nothing which is of no use.
I have more than a few thoughts on the subject of sangha. Too many to cram into one post, so I’m going to spread them out over a number of posts which may not be consecutive.
First, a little background:
Thich Nhat Hanh walking with sangha members
In the Buddha’s day, “sangha” was a common term used to describe various assemblies and groups, some of which were governing bodies. Sangha had the connotation of “collective” and “republic” and it appears that it was interchangeable with another term “ganas” meaning “flock, troop, multitude, number, tribe” etc.
It’s likely that the Shakya clan to which the Buddha belonged had a form of republican government, and that the Buddha’s father, instead of being a rich and powerful monarch as popularly described, was actually the elected head of the tribal council.
J.P. Sharma, in Republics of Ancient India says that in the tribal sanghas “each member of the assembly was called a ‘raja’ (ruler), but none had the individual power to mold the decisions of the assembly.”
The Buddha infused his sangha with this same spirit. He repeatedly told his disciples that “It is [not] I who leads the brotherhood” and that “the community is not dependent upon me.” The original sangha functioned as a small, mobile republic. You could even call it a form of collectivism, and certainly it was a community founded on the values of “sharing, participation, and fellowship.”
The community may have been centered around the Buddha as the founder and the teacher, but the sangha did not exist for the Buudha. Its purpose was to serve all the members of the community, and society as a whole. A sangha should not exist for its own sake, as a sort of corporational person. The jewel of sangha is people. Sangha is about people.
The members of the Buddhist community were called Bhikkhus, which normally we see translated as “monk,” but they were not monks. The word bhikkhu means “sharesman.” The sangha members were sharesmen in two senses: they shared in the life of the community, and they received shares of food from the householders who supported them.
While based on the republican ideal of earlier sanghas, the Buddhist community was something entirely new in the way it introduced the very idea of community into the spiritual tradition of India, stressing the importance of human interaction. Prof. Trevor Ling writes,
One of the important achievements of early Buddhism was that it developed a new context for the spiritual quest. Traditionally, in India, the search for salvation from the evils of human existence meant a life of solitude. For the Buddhist it meant a life in the community. For a time, however, in the earliest period of Buddhist history, the old idea seems to have survived. So strong a hold did the Indian tradition of solitude have that even among Buddhists there were those who tried to practice the Buddha’s teaching by the old method and, as an ancient text [Khaggavisana Sutta] puts it, ‘fare lonely as rhinoceros.” But it was among the Buddhists that there soon emerged, for the first time in Indian history, an ordered community of those who were seeking for salvation from the human malaise as they saw it.
The sangha was not to be a community set apart from the larger community, either. The Buddha and his followers almost always stayed on the edge of cities and towns, and daily went into these places and interacted with ordinary people.
This is a poem I wrote some years ago after listening to a tape of songs by Francoise Hardy.
desire
someone
is singing a song of love
made from alien words
i am listening
“je vous désire”
the songs are songs
of nights of tongues
thoughts dreamed by fire
i dream i hear
the flowers sing
i question the sky (i would
hold up the sky) between
the sky and my face
tears
come into my heart
empty place the unoccupied zone
come shivering naked
i am alone
i dream that you are smiling
love is not dead you say
without breathing
touched by the lips
on some far shore
passionate sad
for love is an affection
the other limit
a hungry word
found
beyond the cry of dawn
I may have been unfair the other day in my post Sufferings are Nirvana with my characterization of the early Buddhist view, and that of present day Theravada, on nibbana. Richard, who blogs at My Buddha is Pink, pointed out in his thoughtful response that annihilation “is a mistaken translation . . . Nibbana is not annihilation, but really is an image of freedom because the underlying Pali root in the term ‘nibbana’ means ‘unbinding’.”
I am not convinced that annihilation or something on that order doesn’t figure in somewhere, however I will leave it for others to explain those teachings.
Statue of Nagarjuna at Samye Ling Monastery
I would like to share a few more thoughts on how nirvana is viewed in Mahayana, specifically in Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka or Middle Way philosophy, as far as I understand it.
I should point out that Madhyamaka looks at everything through the lens of the Two Truths: the conventional or relative truth (vyavahara) and the ultimate or absolute truth (paramartha). What is valid from the standpoint of the relative truth of our everyday world is not necessarily valid from the ultimate side. In the final analysis, though, the relative and the ultimate are neither different, nor identical. Nor does one stand independently of the other.
The same can be said of samsara and nirvana. In Madhyamaka, samsara represents the world of birth and death, the world of suffering, while nirvana represents realization of the ultimate truth, without which freedom from the bondage (bandhana) of suffering is not possible.
As noted above, one sense of nirvana is that of “unbinding.” In the Madhyamaka-karika or “Roots Verses on the Middle Way,” Nagarjuna says, “If binding, would exist prior to one who is bound, there would be bondage, but that does not exist.”
Binding/bondage belongs to the relative truth. In the ultimate truth, if binding existed prior to the bondage of a sentient being, then it would have inherent existence. Yet, ultimately, neither bondage nor anything else has inherent existence (Svabhava, own-being, self), and so release from bondage is not an inherently existent phenomenon either.
This is important because grasping onto the false idea of inherent existence is the primary cause for suffering. Nagarjuna felt that the term “nirvana” was useful for indicating spiritual release, but only if the term did not refer to something that could be an object for clinging. A few verses on, he says, “Those who grasp at the notion, ‘I will be free from grasping and Nirvana will be mine,’ have a great grasp on grasping.”
In The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, Jay Garfield provides a good explanation of this:
If things do not exist in themselves, then from the ultimate truth they are unreal, illusions. Nirvana, for Nagarjuna, if seen as something inherently existent, is only an illusion that will perpetuate more grasping, followed by more suffering.
There are no real distinctions in Madhyamaka philosophy because all things are considered empty of inherent existence or own-nature. For samsara and nirvana to be distinct from one another, they would have to be inherently existent things. But they are empty, and within this emptiness, they are without distinction.
Samsara and nirvana are only different in the relative sense, because they designate entirely different things. Again, in the ultimate sense, there is no difference, because of their emptiness. Everything is empty, including emptiness.
This many sound like theoretical nonsense, but it has a practical application. The aim of this thinking is to shatter all dualities and destroy all avenues for grasping. When we can get past dualistic thinking, that is, seeing only the distinctions, not recognizing the parity or the correspondence between things, then the world opens up for us. We then see the wholeness of life. We become whole. Being whole means to be healthy, and this sort of spiritual health translates into release from the things that bind us to suffering. It is freedom.
Frederick Streng has written,
Without suffering, one can never know release. As long as we see freedom as something separate from our suffering, we are grasping onto an object, inviting more suffering. Just as we are related to our karma, we are related to our suffering, and nirvana, our freedom, is also related to our suffering.
If we can understand that samsara “is” nirvana in this way, in each moment, and know that suffering, ultimately related to our goal, is the very tool that allows us to reach the goal, then I think, we are one step closer to where we want to be. Of course, we need take that extra step of realizing that the goal of freedom is ultimately empty, for as long as we live we will experience suffering in one form or another. The goal of complete release is an illusion. There is only the Endless Further.
MAYBE you heard about the “Buddha Boy”: Ram Bahadur Bamjan, age 20, known by his monastic name, Palden Dorje, and believed to be enlightened, in fact the reincarnation of the Buddha. He sat meditating in the hollow of a tree for nearly a year, between May 2005 and March 2006, where he received thousands of visitors and much media attention.
The Buddha Boy recently went berserk, savagely beating 17 people who sacrificed animals during an annual fair near Kathmandu, Nepal. Bomjan and a few of his associates more or less kidnapped these 17 villagers, jammed them in a small room and beat them up with sticks.
I don’t have much sympathy for anyone who would sacrifice an animal. Nonetheless, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I don’t think that Buddhas beat people with sticks, either.
TIBETAN environmentalist Rinchen Samdrup was sentenced to five years in prison by a Chinese court earlier this month. His crime was inciting separatism by posting a pro-Dalai Lama article on his website. Samdrup is the third brother in his family to be jailed. His website is devoted to protecting the environment in the Himalayan region.
It is amazing to me that this man will spend five years in prison for doing what I have on this blog many times. I feel sad for him and I also feel thankful to live in a free society. Read the BBC report here.
I HAVE mixed feelings about the proposed Ground Zero Mosque, which is actually going to be two blocks away. I’m not crazy about any of the three Western Monotheistic religions, but Islam I find particularly disturbing. For many reasons.
Likewise, even though I have great respect the man, I also have mixed feelings about Robert Thurman’s recent editorial in the Washington Post. He thinks it’s a wonderful idea to build a mosque and says that it would send a positive message of tolerance and peace.
Thurman says, “. . . let the 9/11 tragedy be mourned with museums and monuments to those who lost their lives, and let the building of mosques, churches, synagogues, temples, Dharma centers – and ideally a world religions’ Temple of Mutual Understanding . . .”
Maybe I have the wrong attitude, but I think it would be better to have a very simple, non-sectarian monument to remember and then take the money they would spend building all those mosques, churches, museums, etc., and create a global program or organization that would go out into the world to teach and foster tolerance and peace. That’s where the need is. Some readers will remember my recent post about a UN report that cited 24 countries where religious persecution was widespread in one form or another. Those are the places where we should send living monuments, in the form of dedicated practitioners of peace, a sort of Peace Corps of tolerance.
I suppose such an entity would require a building to be housed in, but I think one would suffice. Perhaps the idea is unworkable, I don’t know. I just feel that monuments are somewhat passive. We have enough of them already. If we are ever going to really deal with the underlying causes for terrorism and religious intolerance, I think we need to take a more active approach.
In any case, you can read the complete editorial by Robert Thurman here.
Henry David Thoreau
American transcendentalism as advocated by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman and others became the first real port of entry for Eastern philosophy on these shores.
The New England Transcendentalists were exposed to Eastern in a number of ways: from the commercial ships returning from Asia and bringing with them snatches of Eastern wisdom, from their university studies, and from the writings of such individuals as Rammohan Roy, a Bengali social reformer.
Emerson was editor of The Dial, the Transcendentalist publication they called a “Journal in a new spirit”, and worked with Thoreau on the “Ethical Scriptures” column that featured excerpts from various Eastern texts. Both men were greatly influenced by Hinduism, and in particular, the Bhagavad Gita.
At this time there was some confusion in the minds of Americans between Hinduism and Buddhism, a situation that was not completely resolved until Edwin Arnold’s story of the life of the Buddha, The Light of Asia, was published in 1878. Nonetheless, Emerson and Thoreau, apparently well-versed in the classics of India, China, which in addition to Hindu scriptures included classical Chinese texts, such as the writings of Confucius and Mencius, had each expressed a deep interest in Buddhism.
Unfortunately for them, the translation into European languages of Buddhist texts had not moved at the same pace as those of other Indian and Chinese philosophies. As a result, most Buddhist texts were unavailable to Western readers. However, Henry David Thoreau had a copy of Burnouf’s French translation of the Lotus Sutra, possibly a very early edition, which was translated into English (probably by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody) and subsequently published in the “Ethical Scriptures” column in 1844.
Here, then, is an excerpt on medicinal plants from “Thoreau’s Lotus Sutra” – quite possibly the first appearance of one of the most important pieces of Buddhist literature in English, predating Kern’s translation by some forty years:
The Tathágata [ Thus-Come-One] is equal and not unequal towards all beings, when it is the question to convert them: “He is, Oh Kassapa, as the rays of the sun and moon, which shine alike upon the virtuous and the wicked, the high and the low; on those who have a good odor, and those who have a bad; on all these the rays fall equally and not unequally at one and the same time. So, Oh Kassapa, the rays of intelligence, endowed with the knowledge of omnipotence, make the Tathágatas venerable.
I who am the king of the law, I who am born in the world, and who governs existence, I explain the law to creatures, after having recognized their inclinations. Great heroes, whose intelligence is firm, preserve for a long time my word; they guard also my secret, and do not reveal it to creatures. Indeed, from the moment that the ignorant hear this science so difficult to comprehend, immediately conceiving doubts in their madness, they will fall from it, and fall into error. I proportion my language to the subject and strength of each; and I correct a doctrine by contrary explication (clarification). It is, Oh Kassapa, as if a cloud, raising itself above the universe, covered it entirely, hiding all the earth. Full of water, surrounded with a garland of lightning, this great cloud, which resounds with the noise of thunder, spreads joy over all creatures. Arresting the rays of the sun, refreshing the sphere of the world, descending so near the earth as to be touched with a hand. It pours our water on every side. Spreading in a uniform manner an immense mass of water, and resplendent with the lightning which escape from its sides, it makes the earth rejoice.
And the medicinal plants which have burst from the surface of this earth, the herbs, the bushes, the kings of the forest, little and great trees; the different seeds, and everything which makes verdure (greenness); all the vegetables which are found it the mountains, in the caverns, and in the groves; the herbs, the bushes, the trees, this cloud fills them with joy, it spreads joy upon the dry earth, and it moistens the medicinal plants; and this homogeneous (uniform) water of the cloud, the herbs and the bushes plump up, every one according to its force and its object. And the different kinds of trees, the great as well as the small, and the middle sized trees, all drink this water, each one according to its age and its strength; they drink it and grow, each one according to its need. Absorbing the water of the cloud by their trunks, their twigs, their bark, their branches, their boughs, their leaves, the great medicinal plants put forth flowers and fruits. Each one according to its strength, according to its destination, and conformably to the nature of the germ whence it springs, produces a distinct fruit, and nevertheless there is one homogeneous water like that which fell from the cloud. So, Oh Kassapa, the Buddha comes into the world, like a cloud that covers the universe, and hardly is the chief of the world born, then he speaks and teaches the true doctrine to creatures.
And thus, says the great sage, honored in the world, in union with gods. I am Tathágata, the conqueror, the best of men; I have appeared in the world like a cloud . . . I fill the whole universe with joy, like a cloud which pours everywhere a homogeneous water, always equally well disposed towards respectable men, as towards the lowest, towards virtuous men as towards the wicked; towards abandoned men as towards those who have conducted most regularly; towards those who follow heterodox (contrary to accepted belief) doctrines and false opinions as towards those whose doctrines are sound and perfect . . .
This teaching of the law, Oh Kassapa, is like the water which the cloud pours out over all, and by whose action the great plants produce in abundance mortal flowers. I explain the law, which is the cause of itself; I tried, in its time, the state of Buddha, which belongs to the great sage; behold my skillfulness in the use of means; it is that of all the guides of the world.
What I have said is the supreme truth; may my auditors arrive at complete annihilation; may they follow the excellent way, which conducts to the state of Buddha; may all the auditors, who hear me, become Buddhas.
In Root Verses on the Middle Way, Nagarjuna says, “Samsara has nothing that distinguishes itself from Nirvana; Nirvana has nothing that distinguishes itself from Samsara. The limit of Nirvana is the limit of Samsara, there is not the slightest difference between the two.”
Samsara, as we know, is our mundane world of suffering, the world of birth and death. When Nagarjuna, talked about “samsara is nirvana,” he was referring primarily to the non-dual nature of samsara and nirvana.
Dogen put it this way in Shoji (On Life and Death): “Living and dying is what nirvana is.” In Bendowa (On Practicing the Way of Buddhas), he says, “You must realize that birth and death is in and of itself nirvana. Buddhism has never spoken of nirvana apart from birth and death.”
This is not just Dogen speaking figuratively, it is, to some extent, a literal fact, for the Buddha never taught that nirvana was outside of this world, or this life.
The word “nirvana” literally means “to blow out” or “to extinguish” and originally referred to the extinguishing of passion, desire, the blowing out of the flames that cause suffering.
In early Buddhism, nibbana [the Pali transliteration of nirvana] was seen, according to Nyanatiloka, as “The full ceasing of the groups of existence . . . ‘Nibbana without the groups remaining’, in other words, the coming to rest, or rather the ‘no-more-continuing’ of this physico-mental process of existence. This takes place at the death of the Arahat.” Nirvana/nibbana then was seen as the extinction of the human entity transmigrating through the cycle of birth and death.
But is that really what the Buddha had in mind? Professor Max Muller, quoted in Mind Unshaken by John Walters:
The idea of annihilation, of checking out of the cycle of birth and death, of nirvana as some other-worldly realm, or as pure nothingness, is definitely not what the Buddha was teaching. Most likely it was layered onto the Buddha’s teachings after his passing, possibly to bring Buddha-dharma more in line with the mainstream of Indian metaphysical thinking. However, Prof. Trevor Ling, in his book, The Buddha, writes,
When Dogen used the phrase shoji soku nehan, or “birth and death are themselves nirvana”, he, like Nagarjuna was saying that our sufferings and nirvana are the same. We can reach nirvana at any time. Sufferings are already nirvana, if we choose to look at it in that way.
When we talk about nirvana as being the other shore, about ferrying living beings across the sea of suffering to the other shore of nirvana, this is simile. We are already standing on the other shore, we can’t see where where we are because of the fog of delusion, pride, ego, attachment.
If you practice, the fog will lift.
It’s funny. When I began editing this post, the marine layer was in, the sky was nice and gray. Now the morning sun has burned off the fog, and the sky is nice and kind of blue. There is still some haze remaining, perhaps it will a day of hazy sunshine as we often have here in Southern California.
Nirvana is like that, too. The dharma sun will burn off the fog and the haze remains because we will never be free of suffering. That’s okay. That’s the way life is, and should be. Buddhism does not really offer the promise of a peaceful life, rather the potential for a peaceful mind.
However, it is not as simple as merely saying, “Okay, from now on I’ll see that sufferings are nirvana.” It is not a purely intellectual thing but rather a sort of intuitive understanding that comes from the depths of one’s entire being. We practice in order to be able to get this message.
When we cool off the passions, when we recover from our fever and become healthy, whole – when our mind is clear, then we see that sufferings are nirvana. Indeed, without suffering, there is no way that we could know joy or peace.
In the Kevaddha-Sutta, the Buddha is asked, “Where do earth, water, fire, and air come to an end?” And the Buddha replies, “The answer is: In the invisible, infinite, all-radiant, consciousness (Vinnanam anidassanam).” This term, Vinnanam anidassanam refers to consciousness in its undivided purity, no longer split into the duality of subject and object. This consciousness is said to be identical with nirvana.
We do not need to look any further beyond our own world, our own lives and our suffering to find nirvana, for it is always within our mind. As the Dalai Lama says,
Raymond Chandler and Bogart as Marlowe
Today I feel compelled to note the 122 anniversary of the birth of my favorite author, Raymond Chandler. The main reason being that I am currently re-reading what I think is the true Great American Novel, Chandler’s masterpiece, The Long Goodbye.
Chandler, as some of you may know, was the creator of arguably the second most famous fictional private detective in the world, Philip Marlowe. [Sherlock Holmes is undoubtedly Number 1] Marlowe is a tough, down-at-heels private eye, who in spite of the cynicism he tries to project is at heart an idealist and an optimist. Over the narrative course of five novels he continually gets involved in the messy lives of the people he meets even when he doesn’t really need to.
In The Long Goodbye, Marlowe meets a guy named Terry Lennox:
When Lennox is abandoned by the girl he’s with just because he’s just run out of dough, Marlowe takes him home and sobers him up. Marlowe knows better than to get involved with drunks, but he does it anyway.
Marlowe says, “Terry Lennox made me plenty of trouble. But after all that’s my line of work.” Well, maybe. Usually a private eye gets paid for helping people. Lennox has no money, and in fact, Marlowe rarely makes a dime off any of the people he helps. So, it’s more than just Marlowe’s “line of work.” More like his mission.
“I’m supposed to be tough but there was something about the guy that got me,” Marlowe ruminates after his first encounter with Terry Lennox. Later, he tells Lennox,
Tricycle Magazine did an article once on Marlowe as a Bodhisattva. I wish I could find it. If you’re a subscriber, you can log in a read it. I think It’s called “Zen Master Marlowe.” There might be an earlier one, from the ‘90’s also. I remember they described him as the “true American Bodhisattva.”
I don’t know how this went down but The Endless Further has received an award as one of the fifty Top Buddhism Blogs of 2010. Now before you congratulate me, or if you are a fellow “winner” before you begin to congratulate yourself, let me share this with you:
According to the website, “Top Buddhism Blog Awards are brought to you by Online Schools & Awarding the Web.” And who might they be? Neither website provide any real information about who they are. This alone tells me a story. Except that they also give out awards in such categories as Top Allergy Blog, Top Literary Studies Blog, and so on.
There is nothing on the web that provides any background information about either of these entities.
I Googled onlineschools.org and came up with their main site, which has links to contact various educational institutions, also pages like “15 Things You Should Know About Breasts”, “15 Things to Know About Steve Jobs” and “The Facts about Poop.” Okay, that makes me go Hmmm . . .
Next, Googling awardingtheweb.com, I found this at MISH’S Global Economic Trend Analysis, dated June 16, 2010: “Today I received an email from Awarding the Web congratulating me for making their best of web category. There was just one catch. I had to post their badge on my blog or they would give my spot away.”
I didn’t receive an email, perhaps because I don’t have an email link on this blog. If someone wants to contact me they need to go to the Contact page. I discovered my status as a winner by accident. Anyway, this “post the badge or loose the award” business seems fishy.
Also, their process for nominating blogs and judging the winners is a bit vague. There is a panel of 5 judges, but who are they? Okay so maybe they don’t want put the names out to the public for privacy reasons, but are they professionals, other bloggers, where do they come from and how were they picked? How about just a general idea? It’s definitely starting to smell now. Not only that, although that someone would nominate me does not seem beyond the realm of possibility, I seriously doubt that I would have garnered enough votes to rank in the top fifty.
A guy named Robert Archambeau at Samizdat Blog won a award and he checked with a colleague who informed him that it was basically a list to shore up Online School’s credibility as a diploma-mill. Archambeau says, “As it turns out, the awards are sponsored by a consortium of online doctoral programs, some run by for-profit institutions. What’s more, the html code for the badge one is meant to display on one’s blog contains a text link, just below the badge, for a site promoting these programs.”
The secondary purpose of the awards seems to be to drive traffic to the Online Schools website, which is not anything I want to do. That’s just another form of advertising and I don’t want ads on this blog.
I don’t think it qualifies as a scam, but it’s certainly a hustle. Maybe some one else has some better information, and if so, it’d be nice if they put it out there.
I went through the list of the 2010 Top 50 Buddhism Blogs, and if nothing else, at least I discovered a couple of interesting blogs I didn’t know about, so I thank the Awards people for that. I noticed that about 1/3 of the winners displayed the badge on their blog, but only two or three had a post about winning the award.
I’m ambivalent about stuff like blog awards. I submitted The Endless Further to the Blogisattva Awards Blog Directory. I do want people to know about this blog, find it and read it, but I am not particularly interested in the awards. Unless I win one, of course. Which ain’t gonna happen.
No, I feel that perhaps the most fitting award that I could win would be something along the lines of The Best Curmudgeonly Buddhist Blog, because in regards to being a member of an award winning group, I kind of feel like Groucho Marx who once turned down membership in an elite club with this line, “I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.”
I haven’t decided if or how I will respond to the Awarding The Web folks, but while I am making up my mind, here’s few other “curmudgeonly” takes on the subject of awards to muse on:
Bill MurrayAwards are only a publicity gimmick.
Tony RandallI could have a roomful of awards and it wouldn’t mean beans.
Bobby DarinI have done so much for hip-hop and ’til this day, I haven’t received any awards or any recognition for it.
Luther CampbellMost awards, you know, they don’t give you unless you go and get them – did you know that? Terribly discouraging.
Barbra StreisandI didn’t get a lot of awards as a [baseball] player. But they did have a Bob Uecker Day Off for me once in Philly.
Bob UeckerTo those of you who received honours, awards and distinctions, I say well done. And to the C students, I say you, too, can be president of the United States.
George W. BushUp there with my awards, I have a great big statue of Groucho Marx, just to put everything in perspective.
John Lithgow
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