Quote from Shakyamuni

"Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared."

" ; Des milliers de bougies peuvent être allumés d'une seule bougie, et la vie de la bougie ne se raccourcira pas. Le bonheur ne diminue jamais en étant shared." ;

Ray Kurweil

The universe has been set up in an exquisitely specific way so that evolution could produce the people that are sitting here today [at Edge's REBOOTING CIVILIZATION II meeting on July 21, 2002] and we could use our intelligence to talk about the universe. We see a formidable power in the ability to use our minds and the tools we've created to gather evidence, to use our inferential abilities to develop theories, to test the theories, and to understand the universe at increasingly precise levels. That's one role of intelligence. The theories that we heard on cosmology look at the evidence that exists in the world today to make inferences about what existed in the past so that we can develop models of how we got here.
RAY KURZWEIL was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large vocabulary speech recognition. He has successfully founded, developed, and sold four AI businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, and reading technology. All of these technologies continue today as market leaders.

•Encouragements de Daisaku IKEDA

Je vous demande de toujours mener une vie intègre et de vous efforcer d’être de véritables
champions de kosen-rufu, dans cette nouvelle phase du développement de notre mouvement. — Daisaku IKEDA

We are responsible for our own actions

The question is basically the question of free will. Are our choices in response to craving and hatred really choices or are they a matter of karma playing itself out?

There are many ways to approach this. So let's start with cause and effect. Craving is an effect of previous choices. Choices cause craving (or not). The fact that we do crave influences our choices - but it does not determine them. When craving is present we are strongly drawn to the object we desire, but we are not inexorably or invariably drawn to it. Experientially you will know this to be true - sometimes you can say no to desire. This choice, according to Buddhism, is always present, and it is what distinguishes the human state from other possible states of being.

Buddhist magazine

Living Buddhism, a journal for peace, culture and education, was first published in the United States in 1981 as Seikyo Times. The name was changed to Living Buddhism in 1997. Providing a variety of Buddhist study material as well as special features on topics such as education, the arts, and human relations in America, Living Buddhism preserves the teachings of Nichiren Daishonin through its bi-monthly publication. "Without Practice and Study, There Can Be No Buddhism"-Nichiren

Ikeda qote

" The economy is after all , driven by people . No matter how dire the situation may be , as long as ppeople are firm , a turnaround , revival and progress can be possible "
Daisaku Ikeda , President of the SGI .