Quotes by Zen Priests

We always believe that there's going to be some high, just around the corner that's going to pull us way, way, way up, where we'll stay forever. If our current romance doesn't do that for us, we'll look for a new one. When the giddy high of the first date wears off, we're ready for another fix.There's no problem with loving something, we coupling up, with enjoying someone's company, and all the rest. But if you want to enjoy all that stuff to the fullest, the best possible way to do it is to stop looking for the big highs, peak experiences, and sweeping flights of blissful romance. All that stuff just causes its own counterreactions. Watch your own body and mind, and you'll see this for yourself.
Brad Warner
When you get high on something - including "spiritual bliss" - there is always going to be a low. The comedown is your body / mind returning to balance, or the closest thing to balance that it knows. If you desperately crave bliss while your body / mind needs balance, you are bound to label the changeover as "feeling bad," when in fact it's the best thing that can happen.Zen practice is not about getting high on anything and in so doing, getting high on absolutely everything. We then find that everything we encounter - bliss and nonbliss - possesses a tremendous depth and beauty that we usually miss.
Brad Warner
[F]ocus not on ourselves as a force in charge of the manipulation of others, but on how our lives interpenetrate those of others – and … all creatures of a dynamic universe.
Steve Hagen
How can a hard and fast view of a world that is never hard and fast possibly be accurate?
Steve Hagen
Truth is not … something to believe or disbelieve. The things we believe are always less than Truth[.]
Steve Hagen
[A] view of the world is nothing more than a set of beliefs, a way to freeze the world in our mind. … [T]his can never match Reality, … because the world isn't frozen.
Steve Hagen
We can only be here. We can't leave. We are always here.
Steve Hagen
If your idea of good opposes something else, you can be sure that [it] is not absolute or certain.
Steve Hagen
Belief is at best an educated, informed conjecture about Reality.
Steve Hagen
Good and bad aren't absolutes. They are beliefs, judgements, ideas based on limited knowledge as well as on the inclinations of our minds.
Steve Hagen
Good times come and go. And bad times do the same.
Steve Hagen
[E]ven in getting the wonderful things we long for, we tend to live in want of something more[.]
Steve Hagen
We have all sorts of stories about heaven and hell, about oblivion and nothingness, about 'coming back,' and so on. But they are all stories.
Steve Hagen
Belief may serve as a useful stopgap measure in the absence of actual experience, but once you see … [it] becomes unnecessary.
Steve Hagen
There's nothing you can find - … nothing you can even imagine – that doesn't originate, develop, or exist in relation to other things.
Steve Hagen
We imagine that things come into existence, endure for a while, and then pass out of existence
Steve Hagen
To forget the self is to remember that we don't exist alone, but in relation to other people, to other creatures, to the planet, and to the universe.
Steve Hagen
[W]hen you practise right meditation, you 'cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inwardly to illuminate your self.
Steve Hagen
[A] book is not merely a book, it is the sun as well.
Steve Hagen
[W]e have endless opportunities to forget the self – in planting a tree for future generations; in creating a poem, a meal, a vessel of clay;
Steve Hagen
There's no rule in the end, but only the situation and the inclination of your mind
Steve Hagen
[H]ow can something cease to exist that has no solid existence in the first place?
Steve Hagen
The only way we can be free in each moment is to become what each moment is.
Steve Hagen
Whatever the world dishes up, we take it on--not on our own terms, but on the world's.
Steve Hagen
So I do fear death in the sense that I find the prospect of dying pretty scary. But I no longer fear that I will one day be annihilated and cease to exist.
Brad Warner
[I]mpermanence [is] the very thing that makes [life] vibrant, wonderful, and alive.
Steve Hagen
The buddha-dharma … is about directly seeing Truth, prior to forming any ideas about it. It is about responding to each particular situation as it comes … , not according to some … program of dos and don'ts.
Steve Hagen
[T]here is really nothing 'out there' to get because, already, within this moment, everything is whole and complete.
Steve Hagen
The impossibility of arriving at Truth by giving up your own authority and following the lights of others. Such a path will only lead to an opinion.
Steve Hagen
As we live out of such a mind, we become generous, with no sense of tolerance. We become patient, with no sense of putting up with anything. We become compassionate, with no sense of separation. And we become wise, with no sense of having to straighten anyone out.
Steve Hagen
The buddha-dharma does not invite us to dabble in abstract notions. Rather, the task it presents us with is to attend to what we actually experience, right in this moment. You don't have to look "over there." You don't have to figure anything out. You don't have to acquire anything. And you don't have to run off to Tibet, or Japan, or anywhere else. You wake up right here. In fact, you can only wake up right here.So you don't have to do the long search, the frantic chase, the painful quest. You're already right where you need to be.
Steve Hagen
What makes human life--which is inseparable from this moment--so precious is its fleeting nature. And not that it doesn't last but that it never returns again.
Steve Hagen
This will never come again
Steve Hagen
The Chinese ideograph for forbearance is a heart with a sword dangling over it, another instance of language's brilliant way of showing us something surprising and important fossilized inside the meaning of a word. Vulnerability is built into our hearts, which can be sliced open at any moment by some sudden shift in the arrangements, some pain, some horror, some hurt. We all know and instinctively fear this, so we protect our hearts by covering them against exposure. But this doesn't work. Covering the heart binds and suffocates it until, like a wound that has been kept dressed for too long, the heart starts to fester and becomes fetid. Eventually, without air, the heart is all but killed off, and there's no feeling, no experiencing at all.To practice forbearance is to appreciate and celebrate the heart's vulnerability, and to see that the slicing or piercing of the heart does not require defense; that the heart's vulnerability is a good thing, because wounds can make us more peaceful and more real—if, that is, we are willing to hang on to the leopard of our fear, the serpent of our grief, the boar of our shame without running away or being hurled off. Forbearance is simply holding on steadfastly with whatever it is that unexpectedly arises: not doing anything; not fixing anything (because doing and fixing can be a way to cover up the heart, to leap over the hurt and pain by occupying ourselves with schemes and plans to get rid of it.) Just holding on for hear life. Holding on with what comes is what makes life dear....Simply holding on this way may sound passive. Forbearance has a bad reputation in our culture, whose conventional wisdom tells us that we ought to solve problems, fix what's broken, grab what we want, speak out, shake things up, make things happen. And should none of this work out, then we are told we ought to move on, take a new tack, start something else. But this line of thinking only makes sense when we are attempting to gain external satisfaction. It doesn't take into account internal well-being; nor does it engage the deeper questions of who you really are and what makes you truly happy, questions that no one can ignore for long... Insofar as forbearance helps us to embrace transformative energy and allow its magic to work on us... forbearance isn't passive at all. It's a powerfully active spiritual force, (67-70).
Norman Fischer
The thinking brain influences the body’s responses and it makes a neat little loop.
Brad Warner
Consider this:1. Would you ride in a car whose driver was on the consciousness-expanding "entheogenic" drug LSD?And here's a bonus question:2. Why does an "expanded consciousness" include the inability to operate a motor vehicle?
Brad Warner
Renunciation isn't a moral imperative or a form of self-denial. It's simply cooperation with the way things are: for moments do pass away, one after the other. Resisting this natural unfolding doesn't change it; resistance only makes it painful. So we renounce our resistance, our noncooperation, our stubborn refusal to enter life as it is. We renounce our fantasy of a beautiful past and an exciting future we can cherish and hold on to. Life just isn't like this. Life, time, is letting go, moment after moment. Life and time redeem themselves constantly, heal themselves constantly, only we don't know this, and much as we long to be healed and redeemed, we refuse to recognize this truth. This is why the sirens' songs are so attractive and so deadly. They propose a world of indulgence and wishful thinking, an unreal world that is seductive and destructive. (142)
Norman Fischer
In a Zen retreat we have a format for working with these quicksilver changes: we sit with them, we pay attention to them... Being steady with mindfulness as an anchor for all the changes we go through is the way we practice forbearance. And you can employ this same method anywhere anytime: just pay close attention to the details of what is going on internally and externally. Don't flinch, don't run away. Trust what happens. Take your stand there." (71)
Norman Fischer
The only difference between meditation and non meditation is that when we meditate we are not grasping anything or trying to do anything: instead we are releasing ourselves to our lives, with trust that our lives are all we need. (78)
Norman Fischer
Meditation is doing what you are doing - whether you are doing formal meditation or child care.
Norman Fischer
We're never called on to do what hurts. We just do what hurts out of ignorance and habit. Once we see what we're doing, we can stop.
Steve Hagen
The Buddha encouraged people to "know for yourselves that certain things are unwholesome and wrong. And when you do, then give them up. And when you know for yourselves that certain things are wholesome and good, then accept them and follow them."The message is always to examine and see for yourself. When you see for yourself what is true-and that's really the only way that you can genuinely know anything-then embrace it. Until then, just suspend judgment and criticism.
Steve Hagen