Best 132 quotes in «zen buddhism quotes» category

Good times come and go. And bad times do the same.

Here might not be a place of great activity or planning, but it is possibly a place of rest, or of seeing things a different way, or of something yet undiscovered. Even now, turning toward here, I feel the struggle lessen and some deep clenching subtly ease.

If he hadn’t become a Buddhist monk, Sawaki Roshi would have been successful in a worldly sense in business, politics, or the military. Instead, he devoted his life to wholeheartedly practicing Dogen Zenji’s just sitting, or shikantaza, which according to him was good for nothing. For him, social climbing in pursuit of fame and profit was meaningless. The Japanese expression for “waste” is bonifuru, which means “sacrifice,” “lose all,” or “ruin.” So when we say he wasted his life, we use the expression in a paradoxical way—like saying that zazen is good for nothing.

How can a hard and fast view of a world that is never hard and fast possibly be accurate?

However, for human beings, practice is much too tiresome. We want to show our appreciation like sightseers, without doing it ourselves. Like spectator sports, which are very popular, the Zen fad is really a spectator Zen or Zen sightseeing fad. Roshi, Kosho Uchiyama. Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo (Kindle Locations 2165-2167). Wisdom Publications. Kindle Edition.

I feel like a single-celled bacterium that has taken up permanent residence in the welcoming darkness of my intestinal track—content to do my part in the ongoing work of digestion even though I know nothing of “food” or “nourishment” or the impossibly larger multicelled biped that believes itself to be 'David.

[H]ow can something cease to exist that has no solid existence in the first place?

However, for human beings, practice is much too tiresome. We want to show our appreciation like sightseers, without doing it ourselves. Like spectator sports, which are very popular, the Zen fad is really a spectator Zen or Zen sightseeing fad.

How much does he lack himself who must have many things?

How you anything is how you do everything

[H]uman experience is determined as much by the nature of the mind and the structure of its senses as by the external objects whose presence the mind reveals.

If you desire to gaze out over wide vistas, you do well to climb up to a high spot. But if you wish to gaze into the human heart, you must climb down and look from a low place.

If you are lost in a forest at night, you can follow the North Star to find your way out. You follow the North Star, but your goal is to get back home; it’s not to arrive at the North Star.

If you don’t understand, please keep your mouth shut and just live with all sentient beings in peace and harmony beyond your intellectual speculation. It’s not necessary to think how much that helps people or how many people it helps. All you have to do is be peaceful with people right now, right here, day by day.

If you have a gun, you can shoot one, two, three, five people; but if you have an ideology and stick to it, thinking it is the absolute truth, you can kill millions.

If your idea of good opposes something else, you can be sure that [it] is not absolute or certain.

If you wish to have children, please do something for the world you will bring them into. That will make you someone who works for peace, in one way or another.

If you try to examine your life analytically, asking yourself who you are, finally you will realize that there is something you cannot reach. You don’t know what it is, but you feel the presence of something you want to connect with. This is sometimes called the absolute. Buddha and Dogen Zenji say true self. Christians say God.

I have encountered something of unsurpassable value—something I have found to be utterly dependable and infinitely resourceful. In Buddhism, we call it the Dharma, but it could just as easily be called the Tao or God or the Source of All Things or Rama-Lama-Ding-Dong.

I had joked about my bones being found by the roadside. Notify the four winds. Up here i might never be found. Keen-eyed vultures would pick the bones clean. Wind and rain would bleach them and in time they'd dissolve into the earth. I looked up, and a gust of wind swirled the mist, and i saw that glint of gold, so close now, just up ahead. one last effort, to haul and drag myself up over ragged rocks, and at last I stood, breath rasping, limbs shaking, my body one long ache, covered in grime and thick greasy sweat, in front of Hakuyu's cave. The patch of colour I'd seen was a simple bamboo blind, yellowed with age, and painted on it was the outline of a dragon, and the dragon's eye was a dot of gold. That was what had led me all this way.

I haven't learned how to confront a problem by avoiding it.

Imagine you’re at a movie, and the person sitting in front of you is so huge and fat you can’t see the screen because he’s completely blocking your view. He’s also talking loudly, so you can’t hear the movie. That person is you. You can’t see the perfection of your life, as it is right now, because you’re in your own way.

Indicating his twisted legs without a trace of self-pity or bitterness, as if they belonged to all of us, he casts his arms wide to the sky and the snow mountains, the high sun and dancing sheep, and cries, ’Of course I am happy here! It’s wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!’ In its wholehearted acceptance of what is;I feel as if he had struck me in the chest. Butter tea and wind pictures, the Crystal Mountain, and blue sheep dancing on the snow-it’s quite enough! Have you seen the snow leopard? No! Isn’t that wonderful?

[I]mpermanence [is] the very thing that makes [life] vibrant, wonderful, and alive.

In a universe whose fundamental principle is relativity rather than warfare there is no purpose because there is no victory to be won, no end to be attained. For every end, as the world itself shows, is an extreme, an opposite, and exists only in relation to it other end. Because the world is not going anywhere there is no hurry. One may as well "take it easy" like nature itself [...].

In our normal, everyday forms of consciousness, we suffer form what [William] James calls a 'lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self.' Insofar as the self that encases the seed of a wider consciousness like a husk is seen as 'conventionally healthy,' cracking it open to uncover the higher part leaves the individual exposed to neurosis; but then, as James reminds us and as Jung himself knew, this may well be the chief condition for receptivity to these higher realms.

In Zen training the hungry ghost realm ... presents as the attempt to “get” emptiness. “I needed so much to have nothing to touch,” sings Leonard Cohen, “I’ve always been greedy this way.

In the zazen posture, your mind and body have, great power to accept things as they are, whether agreeable or disagreeable. In our scriptures (Samyuktagama Sutra, volume 33), it is said that there are four kinds of horses: excellent ones, good ones, poor ones, and bad ones. The best horse will run slow and fast, right and left, at the driver's will, before it sees the shadow of the whip; the second best will run as well as the first one does, just before the whip reaches its skin; the third one will run when it feels pain on its body; the fourth will run after the pain penetrates to the marrow of its bones. You can imagine how difficult it is for the fourth one to learn how to run!

In short, zazen is seeing this world from the casket, without me.

Interbeing: If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are. If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist. Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here-time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. “To be” is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is. Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this sheet of paper will be possible? No, without sunshine nothing can be. And if we return the logger to his mother, then we have no sheet of paper either. The fact is that this sheet of paper is made up only of “non-paper elements.” And if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be no paper at all. Without “non-paper elements,” like mind, logger, sunshine and so on, there will be no paper. As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.

In zazen, leave your front door and your back door open. Let thoughts come and go. Just don't serve them tea.

Life's Journeys Inward seeking moves towards being-time Outward seeking journies among life's ornaments

I see that this body-made of the four elements-is not really me, and I am not limited to this body. I am the whole of the river of life, of blood ancestors and spiritual ancestors, that has been continuously flowing for thousands of years and flows on for thousands of years into the future. I am one with my ancestors and my descendants. I am life manifesting in countless different forms. I am one with all people and all species, whether they are peaceful and joyful or suffering and afraid. At this very moment I am present everywhere in this world. I have been present in the past and will be there in the future. The disintegration of this body does not touch me, just as when the petals of the blossom fall it does not mean the end of the plum tree. I see that I am like a wave on the surface of the ocean. I see myself in al the other waves, and I see all the other waves in me. The manifestation or the disappearance of the waves does not lessen the presence of the ocean. My Dharma body and spiritual life are not subject to birth or death. I am able to see my presence before this body manifested and after this body disintegrates. I am able to see my presence before this body manifested and after this body disintegrates. I am able to see my presence outside this body, even in the present moment. Eighty or ninety yeas is not my life span. My life span, like that of a leaf or of a buddha, is immeasurable. I am able to go beyond the idea that I am a body separate from all other manifestations of life, in time and in space.

It is both dangerous and absurd for our world to be a group of communions mutually excommunicate.

It is the rub that polishes the jewel,” Enso Roshi says. “Nobody ever gets to nirvana without going through samsara. Nobody ever gets to heaven, without going through hell. The center of all things, the truth, is surrounded by demons.

KODO SAWAKI ~ To practice the buddha way is not to let our minds wander but to become one with what we’re doing. This is called zanmai (or samadhi) and shikan (or “just doing”). Eating rice isn’t preparation for shitting; shitting isn’t preparation for making manure. And yet these days people think that high school is preparation for college and college is preparation for a good job.

Life gives you exactly what you need to awaken.

I stole this from Zen Master Suzuki Roshi: If it's not paradoxical it's not true!

It is difficult to receive and accept oneness because human speculation doesn’t catch it. But if you practice with full devotion, finally you will come to the final goal—silence. When you touch the core of existence and see the fundamental truth, there is nothing to say; you are just present in silence. This silence really makes your life alive. Then, even though you don’t say anything, your silence has lots of words, demonstrating the truth in a physical and mental way, which can be seen by others. This is Buddha’s teaching appearing through the form of a person who sees into the pure and clear depth of human existence.

[I]t is rather the past and the future which are the fleeting illusions, and the present which is eternally real. We discover that the linear succession of time is a convention of our single-track verbal thinking, of a consciousness which interprets the world by grasping little pieces of it, calling them things and events. But every such grasp of the mind excludes the rest of the world, so that this type of consciousness can get an approximate vision of the whole only through a series of grasps, one after the other.

KODO SAWAKI: Studying originally meant aspiring to discover the meaning of life. These days studying has become all about getting a job.

Old age and death are in the natural course of things. There is nothing a doctor can do about them.

MEDITATION is not to get out of society, to escape from society, but to prepare for a reentry into society

Release seems to come only when we allow ourselves to be truly stuck—when we find ourselves all out of tricks and skillful means. As we allow ourselves to surrender to the prosaic and the holy in the particular form of this moment, we open ourselves to the grace of letting things be—the grace that functions effortlessly and is, indeed, the very fabric of our life.

Once at a workshop, the instruction was to walk mindfully over to the lunchtime food across the room. In that short walk across the room, I noticed how automatically I get ahead of myself—how I lose track of these miraculous feet on the ground and miss the space in between. And I’m beginning to suspect that most of life is “in between.

On my journey from the fantastical to the practical, spirituality has gone from being a mystical experience to something very ordinary and a daily experience. Many don’t want this, instead they prefer spiritual grandeur, and I believe that is what keeps enlightenment at bay. We want big revelations of complexity that validates our perceptions of the divine. What a let down it was to Moses when God spoke through a burning bush! But that is exactly the simplicity of it all. Our spiritual life is our ordinary life and it is very grounded in every day experience. For me, it is the daily practice of kindness, mindfulness, happiness, and peace.

Question everything, even the question mark, that shepherd's crook floating in the air above that small round rock If you - stubbornly - still wish to be unhappy, maybe you can grasp it.

Render unto meditation the things that are meditation’s, and unto medication the things that are medication’s.

SHOHAKU OKUMURA ~ If we feel we’re becoming enlightened, that’s delusion.

Scientism proposes that scientific investigation is nothing more than the accumulation of ‘facts’. The question thus arises: what actually are ‘facts’? They are not simply existing there, waiting for scientific investigation. Only a little phenomenological reflection reveals that they show themselves as facts because of the construction of, or at least the correlation with, what is usually called mind. Mind thus is a fundamental fact. It is psychology that reveals this truth.