Zen Quotes - Page 2

There is nowhere to arrive except the present moment.

Before we were born we had no feeling; we were one with the universe. This is called "mind-only," or "essence of mind," or "big mind," After we are separated by birth from this oneness, as the water falling from the waterfall is separated by the wind and rocks, then we have feeling. You have difficulty because you have feeling. You attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created. When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore, and we have no actual difficulty in our life.

Shunryu Suzuki

To think, or not to think...This is the true question.

Bert McCoy

I am not important. If I take a break, no one dies. And this is A Good Thing.

Helen Russell

Mountains like these and travelers in the mountains and events that happen to them here are found not only in Zen literature but in the tales of every major religion. This allegory of a physical mountain for the spiritual one that stands between each soul and its goal is an easy and natural one to make. Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there's no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls.

Robert M. Pirsig

We're all in this together and we don't have much time.

Richard Aitken

The title of this Chautauqua is "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," not "Zen and the Art of Mountain Climbing," and there are no motorcycles on the tops of mountains, and in my opinion very little Zen. Zen is the "spirit of the valley," not the mountaintop. The only Zen you fin on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

Robert M. Pirsig

Sharpen your sword daily , and let it serve your true master: YOU. You and the Master are one

Vernon Kitabu Turner

Po: Maybe I should just quit and go back to making noodles.Oogway: Quit, don't quit? Noodles, don't noodles? You are too concerned about what was and what will be. There is a saying: yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the "present.

Kung Fu Panda

Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.

Alan W. Watts

The mind's best trick is the illusion that it exists.

Marty Rubin

Don’t read books!Don’t chant poems!When you read books your eyeballs wither awayleaving the bare sockets.When you chant poems your heart leaks out slowlywith each word.People say reading books is enjoyable.People say chanting poems is fun.But if your lips constantly make a soundlike an insect chirping in autumn,you will only turn into a haggard old man.And even if you don’t turn into a haggard old man,it’s annoying for others to have to hear you.It’s so much betterto close your eyes, sit in your study,lower the curtains, sweep the floor,burn incense.It’s beautiful to listen to the wind,listen to the rain,take a walk when you feel energetic,and when you’re tired go to sleep.

Yang Wanli

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

And the question of Wester religion,” Flattery said, “is: What lies beyond death? But the question of the Zen master is: What lies beyond waking?

Frank Herbert

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

[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

The quality of our lives is determined by the focus of our attention.

Cheri Huber

For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.

Alan W. Watts

People of this world are deluded. They’re always longing for something-always, in a word, seeking. But the wise wake up. They choose reason over custom. They fix their minds on the sublime and let their bodies change with the seasons. All phenomena are empty. They contain nothing worth desiring.

Bodhidharma

The mind is the root from which all things grow if you can understand the mind, everything else is included. It’s like the root of a tree. All a tree’s fruit and flowers, branches and leaves depend on its root. If you nourish its root, a tree multiplies. If you cut its root, it dies. Those who understand the mind reach enlightenment with minimal effort.

Bodhidharma

When we attach to a problem, we make the problem worse. When we attach to a solution, we make the problem worse.

Barry Graham

You worry yourself unnecessarily. Put the thought of hitting right out of your mind!

Eugen Herrigel

...being able to wait without purpose in the state of highest tension...without continually asking yourself: Shall I be able to manage it? Wait patiently, as see what comes - and how it comes!

Eugen Herrigel

... the Master's warning that we should not practice anything except self-detaching immersion.

Eugen Herrigel

Zen is a double-edged sword, killing words and thoughts, yet at the same time, giving them life. Although beyond human intellect and philosophy, Zen is their root and source.

Masao Abe

My conscious mind must have its roots and origins in the most unfathomable depths of being, yet it feels as if it lived all by itself in this tight little skull.

Alan W. Watts

Three or four times, I have had the great death but my life is lived in the million tiny moments that make up the one dance

zen master

The changeless is what knows the change, the changeless is unconditioned

Adyashanti

This is shaping up even worse than you anticipated. Still, you feel a measure of detachment, as if you had suffered everything already and this were just a flashback. You wish that you had paid more attention when a woman you met at Heartbreak told you about Zen meditation. Think of all of this as an illusion. She can't hurt you. Nothing can hurt the samurai wh enters combat fully resolved to die. You have already accepted the inevitability of termination, as they say. Still, you'd rather not have to sit through this.

Jay McInerney

That's just the trouble, you make an effort to think about it. Concentrate entirely on your breathing, as if you had nothing else to do!

Master (Eugen Herrigel)

[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

You integrate something by first of all accepting it. To resist any aspect of your past is to keep yourself fragmented, and to keep yourself fragmented is exactly what the built-in mechanisms of the negative beliefs in your unconscious mind are designed to do. To become whole within yourself, you must treat each and every experience that you have and ever will have as simply a stepping stone because there’s always a bigger picture. Something challenging may be happening to you right now, and you may have no conscious recognition or idea of why it’s happening, but let me assure you that you will know why one day. How many times have you said to yourself, “Wow, so that’s why it happened?” The issue isn’t really what’s going on in the present moment or what has happened back in the past, the issue is the way you’re defining or looking it…

Craig Krishna

[A] book is not merely a book, it is the sun as well.

Steve Hagen

Newton invented a new form of reason. He expanded reason to handle infinitesimal changes and I think what is needed now is a similar expansion of reason to handle technological ugliness. The trouble is that the expansion has to be made at the roots, not at the branches, and that’s what makes it hard to see.

Robert M. Pirsig

But until then, and right now, the sun is bright, the air is cool, my head is clear, there’s a whole day ahead of us, we’re almost to the mountains, it’s a good day to be alive. It’s this thinner air that does it. You always feel like this when you start getting into higher altitudes.

Robert M. Pirsig

[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

Results for "What are the maintenance requirements of the human being? Life, Liberty, the pursuit of happiness and food, clothing, shelter and medical care. Keeping us confused and divided against one another about these rights, the multinational power elite teaches us in America that only life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are rights. In socialist nations they promote the view that only food, clothing, shelter and medical care are rights.

Kerry Thornley

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

13. A Buddha In Tokyo in th Meiji era there lived two prominent teachers of opposite characteristics. One, Unsho, an instructor in Shingon, kept Buddha's precepts scrupulously. He never drank intoxicants, nor did he eat after eleven o'clock in the morning. The other teacher, Tanzan, a professor of philosophy at the Imperial University, never observed the precepts. When he felt like eating he ate, and when he felt like sleeping in the daytime he slept. One da Unsho visited Tanzan, who was drinking wine at the time, not even a drop of which is supposed to touch the tongue of a Buddhist. "Hello, brother," Tanzan greeted him. "Won't you have a drink?" "I never drink!" exclaimed Unsho solemnly. "One who never drinks is not even human," said Tanzan. "Do you mean to call me inhuman just because I do not indulge in intoxicating liquids!" exclaimed Unsho in anger. "Then if I am not human, wht am I?" "A Buddha," answered Tanzan.

Nyogen Senzaki

clouds very high looknot one word helped them get up there

Ikkyu

born born everything is always bornthinking about it try not to

Ikkyu

The love of nature is religion, and that religion is poetry; these three things are one thing. This is the unspoken creed of haiku poets.

R.H. Blyth

The importance and unimportance of the self cannot be exaggerated.

R.H. Blyth

Once Seung Sahn Soen-sa and a student of his attended a talk at a Zen center in California. The Dharma teacher spoke about Bodhidharma. After the talk, someone asked him "What's the difference between Bodhidharma's sitting in Sorim for nine years and your sitting here now?"The Dharma teacher said, "About five thousand miles."The questioner said, "Is that all?"The Dharma teacher said, "Give or take a few miles."Later on, Soen-sa asked his student, "What do you think of these answers?""Not bad, not good. But the dog runs after the bone.""How would you answer?""I'd say, 'Why do you make a difference?' "Soen-sa said, "Not bad. Now you ask me.""What's the difference between Bodhidharma's sitting in Sorim for nine years and your sitting here now?""Don't you know?""I'm listening.""Bodhidharma sat in Sorim for nine years. I am sitting here now."The student smiled.

Seung Sahn

Nothing divides one so much as thought.

R.H. Blyth

5. If You Love, Love Openly Twenty monks and one nun, who was named Eshun, were practicing meditation with a certain Zen master. Eshun was very pretty even though her head was shaved and her dress plain. Several monks secretly fell in love with her. One of them wrote her a love letter, insisting upon a private meeting. Eshun did not reply. The following day the master gave a lecture to the group, and when it was over, Eshun arose. Addressing the one who had written her, she said: "If you really love me so much, come and embrace me now.

Nyogen Senzaki

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Zen Quotes - Page 2

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