Koan Quotes

And what we’ve been always been is…?”“Is living on borrowed time. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs … planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There’s no uninnocent dead.”After a while, “You’re not going to explain that, or…”“Course not, it’s a koan.

clouds very high looknot one word helped them get up there

Ikkyu

born born everything is always bornthinking about it try not to

Ikkyu

When you paint Spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots, but just paint Spring. To paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots is to paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots - it is not yet painting Spring.

Dōgen

When fishermen cannot go to sea, they repair nets.

Nabil Sabio Azadi

What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light of the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else? What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this 'someone else' really have? If she who is now your mother had cohabited with someone else and had a son by him, and your father had done likewise, would you have come to be? Or were you living in them, and in your father's father... thousands of years ago? And even if this is so, why are you not your brother, why is your brother not you, why are you not one of your distant cousins? What justifies you in obstinately discovering this difference - the difference between you and someone else - when objectively what is there is the same?

Erwin Schrödinger

You listen to people, you listen so deeply that you can hear their past lives,The crackle of their funeral pyres,

Every day Zuigan used to call out to himself, "Master!" and then he answered himself, "Yes, Sir!" And he added, "Awake, Awake!" and then answered, "Yes, Sir! Yes, Sir!""From now onwards, do not be deceived by others!" "No, Sir! I will not, Sir!"

When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, 'What is the sound of the waterfall?' 'Silence,' he finally told me.

that stone Buddha deserves all the birdshit it getsI wave my skinny arms like a tall flower in the wind

Ikkyu

I'd love to give you somethingbut what would help?

Ikkyu

Hearing a crow with no mouthCry in the deepDarkness of the night,I feel a longing forMy father before he was born.

Ikkyu

it isn't that we're alone or not alonewhose voice do you want mine? yours?

Ikkyu

don't wait for the man standing in the snowto cut off his arm help him now

Ikkyu

we're lost where the mind can't find usutterly lost

Ikkyu