expression of being
Tree
It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.
Even in this
one lifetime
you will have to choose.
That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books -
Already the branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.
- Jane Hirshfield
"Real fearlessness is the product of our tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your raw and beautiful heart."
- Chogyam Trungpa
Waveless, windless,
The old boat's swamped
With moonlight.
- Dogen
"Zen is at once irresistibly attractive and unutterably repulsive. Zen draws us to it for many reasons. First because at last we have a belief which we need not believe in. No dogmas, no ritual, no mythology, no church, no priest, no holy book, - what a relief!
Second, Zen, even the word itself, enables us to perceive that all our deepest experiences of life, of music, of art, poetry, humor and so on, however varied they may be, and deriving as they do from the most widely different circumstances, have all a similar "taste" or odor, a common element that seems fundamental. This idea is of course dangerous in its monistic, scientific, philosophical, unpoetical tendency, and we need all the more to insist upon the variety, the plurality, the disparateness of Zen. But we must have a unity as well as a diversity, and so the word Zen usually refers to this depth of oneness in our depth of life. But just as deep is our experience of difference. For a thing to exist at all it must have this separateness; at the same time it has no existence if only separate."
- R. H. Blyth
"There towers a huge mountain, here lies a boundless ocean,
birds are singing, trees are growing, and I sit here
looking over the verdant meadow; yet in spite of all these,
nay indeed by reason of these, I believe in the nothingness
of existence, in the non-reality of realities, and in the absolute
oneness of all things; and it is thereby that I gain my peace of mind
and realize the sense of perfect freedom in my everyday life."
- Shaku Soen
"I could walk on the clouds," says a child. But if he reached the clouds, he would find nowhere to place his foot. Likewise, if one does not examine thoughts, they present a solid appearance; but if one examines them, there is nothing there."
- Dilgo Khyentse
"Soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day . . . we become seekers."
- Peter Matthiessen
The clouds never make any commotion.
In this world there is a tree without any roots;
Its yellow leaves send back the wind."
- Sozan
[his dying words]
"There are in Zen no sacred books of dogmatic tenets. If I am asked, therefore, what Zen teaches, I would answer - Zen teaches nothing. Whatever teachings there are in Zen, they come out of one's mind. We teach ourselves; Zen merely points the way."
- D.T. Suzuki
"The aim of Zen is to focus attention on reality itself, instead of our intellectual and emotional reactions to reality – reality being the ever-changing, ever-growing, indefinable something known as life, which will never stop for a moment for us to fit it satisfactorily into any rigid system of pigeonholes and ideas."
- Alan Watts
"Basically, there can only be two answers. One is to overcome separateness and find unity by regression to the state of unity that existed before awareness ever arose; this is, before man was born. The other answer is to be fully born, to develop one's awareness, one's reason, one's capacity to love to such a point that one transcends one's own egocentric involvement and arrives at a new harmony – at a new oneness with the world."
- Erich Fromm
"The thing about Zen is that it pushes contradictions to their ultimate limit where one has to choose between madness and innocence. And Zen suggests that we may be driving toward one or the other on a cosmic scale. Driving toward them because, one way or the other, as madmen or innocents, we are already there. It might be good to open our eyes and see."
- Thomas Merton
"To be uncertain is uncomfortable, but to be certain is ridiculous."
- Chinese Proverb
"Life happens too fast for you to ever think about it.
If you could just persuade people of this,
but they insist on amassing information."
- Kurt Vonnegut
"Reality is flowing. This does not mean that everything moves, changes, becomes. Science and common experience tell us that. It means that movement, change, becoming is everything that there is. There is nothing else; everything is movement, is change. The time that we ordinarily think about is not real time, but a picture of space."
- Henri-Louis Bergson
"Even though you think you know exactly who you are, it is very difficult to have real understanding of oneself. Your self-conception continually changes as you discover more and more about yourself. If you have complete understanding then even ideas of the wisdom of enlightenment or the status of detachment will be seen for what they are - tentative and delusive."
- Dogen
Shobogenzo
"The insight that everybody and everything has surfaced to the enlightened state of mind simultaneously with you is definitely accompanying the very moment of realization. This is why you know that the reality is perfect. It is not perfect in its potentiality, it is perfect in its fully actualized state, standing with you hand in hand, face to face.
This feeling is extremely pronounced in the first several weeks following the enlightenment. Talking, even thinking about it is felt to be as superfluous as asking a fellow passenger on a train: "Are you, too, traveling in this train?" It's meaningless. Since everybody else is also enlightened, what's there to talk about?"
- Alex Bunard
"Enlightenment is sudden only because it is not in time (subject to sequential duration). It is reintegration in intemporality."
- Wei Wu Wei
"Satori [enlightenment] comes only after one has exhausted one's thinking, only when one is convinced the mind cannot grasp itself."
- Wu-men
"Thinking is useful in many ways, but there are some occasions when thinking interferes with the work, and you have to leave it behind and let the unconscious come forward. In such cases, you cease to be your conscious master but become an instrument in the hands of the unknown. The unknown has no ego-consciousness and consequently no thought of winning the contest, because it moves at the level of non-duality, where there is neither subject nor object."
- D.T. Suzuki
"Neither mind alone nor imagination alone is sufficient to attain full enlightenment. But both are necessary. Without a very highly developed rational mind, it is impossible to reach full enlightenment. Ultimately, the mind is not a barrier, but a path. In the impure lands of dualistic thinking, the mind is partly a barrier. But you must not back away from mind, but rather, commit even more to it and develop it through its problems. You cannot overcome the weaknesses of faulty thinking by eliminating thinking, but only by improving thinking. Not all thinking is dualistic thinking. The dualistic mind is a passageway."
- Michael Hoffman
The Egoic and Transcendent Mental Worldmodels
A Zen Master said to his disciple, "Go get my rhinoceros horn fan."
The disciple replied, "Sorry, Master, it is broken."
The Master said, "Okay, then get me the rhinoceros."
- zen mondo
- John Tarrant
Bring Me the Rhinoceros
"One of the most curious characteristics of human beings - particularly westerners - is that pain and inconvenience stimulate their vitality far more than pleasure. In a very precise sense of the word, human beings are spoilt. A spoilt child is one who has come to expect certain privileges and accepts them as rights. He is not grateful for these privileges; in fact, they bore him. The only time he feels strongly about them is when they are curtailed; then he sulks. All human beings take their happiness for granted, and only question life when they are in pain."
- Colin Wilson
Beyond the Outsider
"You don't want awakening, you want high quality samsara."
- Leigh Brassington
Your Catfish Friend
If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
. . . one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
. . . of my affection
and think, "It's beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
. . . somebody loved me,"
I'd love you and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
. . . at peace,
and ask yourself, "I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them."
- Richard Brautigan
The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster
"Nobody today is normal, everybody is a little bit crazy or unbalanced, people's minds are running all the time. Their perceptions of the world are partial, incomplete. They are eaten alive by their egos. They think they see, but they are mistaken; all they do is project their madness, their world, upon the world. There is no clarity, no wisdom in that!"
- Taisen Deshimaru
"Marvelous vision of the hills at 7:45 A.M. The same hills as always, as in the afternoon, but now catching the light in a totally new way, at once very earthy and very ethereal, with delicate cups of shadow and dark ripples and crinkles where I had never seen them, and the whole slightly veiled in mist so that it seemed to be a tropical shore, a new discovered continent. And a voice in me seemed to be crying, "Look! Look!" For these are the discoveries, and it is for this that I am high on the mast of my ship (have always been) and I know that we are on the right course, for all around is the sea of paradise."
- Thomas Merton
Turning Toward the World
"In Zen even the most mundane objects are things of wonder, if we stop to look at them, and the fact that we are alive is the biggest wonder of all."
- David Fontana
On Existential Silence
Silence is the total manifestation of our whole personality,
in which we have digested the three flavors
of optimism, pessimism and mysticism.
They never come up, because they are all digested.
They become just energy for us.
This silence is quite different from silence
in terms of human eyes.
According to human eyes,
there is a vague disconsolate pain or pensiveness
in the depths of our life that we cannot wipe out.
(According to open eyes,)
silence is exactly the total manifestation
of our whole personality.
Whole personality means our individual personality
is manifested with the whole universe.
All other beings are the contents of our personality.
So when we manifest our whole personality
it is not just our individual personality;
but simultaneously through this personality
we can feel the whole universe.
That is why we can feel
magnanimity, tolerance, and compassion.
- Dainin Katagiri
Returning to Silence: Zen Practice in Daily Life
"There is a silent self within us whose presence is disturbing precisely because it is so silent: it can't be spoken. It has to remain silent. To articulate it, to verbalize it, is to tamper with it, and in some ways to destroy it."
- Thomas Merton
Love and Living
"One's whole being must be an act for which there can be found no word. This is the primary meaning of faith. On this basis, other dimensions of belief can be made credible. Otherwise not. My whole being must be a yes and an amen and an exclamation that is not heard. Only after that is there any point in exclamations and even after that there is no point in exclamations. One's acts must be part of the same silent exclamation . . . If only [we] could realize that nothing has to be uttered. Utterance makes sense only when it is spontaneous and free."
- Thomas Merton
At Home in the World
"Actually one decides one's life by responding to a word that is not well defined, easily explicable, safely accounted for. One decides to love in the face of an unaccountable void, and from the void comes an unaccountable truth. By this truth one's existence is sustained in peace - until the truth is too firmly grasped and too clearly accounted for. Then one is relying on words - i.e., on his own understanding and his own ingenuity in interpreting existence and its "signs." Then one is lost - has to be found once again in the patient Void."
- Thomas Merton
Learning to Love
"We are all too ready to believe that the self that we have created out of our more or less inauthentic efforts to be real in the eyes of others is a "real self." We even take it for our identity. Fidelity to such a nonidentity is of course infidelity to our real person, which is hidden in mystery. Who will you find that has enough faith and self-respect to attend to this mystery and to begin by accepting himself as unknown?"
- Thomas Merton
"The world consists of imaginary people, claiming imaginary virtues and suffering from imaginary happiness."
- Vernon Howard
"At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely . . . I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere."
- Thomas Merton
"I have my own way to walk and for some reason or other Zen is right in the middle of it wherever I go. So there it is, with all its beautiful purposelessness, and it has become very familiar to me though I do not know "what it is." Or even if it is an "it." Not to be foolish and multiply words, I'll say simply that it seems to me that Zen is the very atmosphere of the Gospels, and the Gospels are bursting with it. It is the proper climate for any monk, no matter what kind of monk he may be. If I could not breathe Zen I would probably die of spiritual asphyxiation."
- Thomas Merton
Encounter: Thomas Merton and D.T. Suzuki
"Do you imagine the universe is agitated?
Go into the desert at night and look out at the stars.
This practice should answer the question."
- Lao Tzu
"Do not, I beg you, look for anything behind phenomena. They are themselves their own lesson."
- Goethe
"It is easy to suppose that few people realize on that occasion, which comes to all of us, when we look at the blue sky for the first time, that is to say: not merely see it, but look at it and experience it and for the first time have a sense that we live in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that exists there - few people realize that they are looking at the world of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings."
- Wallace Stevens
The Necessary Angel
"You have to experience duality for a long time until you see it's not there."
- Thomas Merton
The Road to Joy
"In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life."
- Alan Watts
"That each day I may walk unceasingly on the banks of water, that my soul may repose on the branches of trees which I planted, that I may refresh myself under the shadow of a sycamore."
- Egyptian tomb inscription
circa. 1400 B.C.
"Happiness is a how, not a what; a talent, not an object."
- Hermann Hesse
"Each one of you is perfect the way you are and you can use a little improvement."
- Shunryu Suzuki
Roshi
I never really understood
what he said
but every now and then
I find myself
barking with the dog
or bending with the irises
or helping out
in other little ways
- Leonard Cohen
To My Friends
Dear friends, and here I say friends
In the broad sense of the word:
Wife, sister, associates, relatives,
Schoolmates of both sexes,
People seen only once
Or frequented all my life;
Provided that between us, for at least a moment,
A line has been stretched,
A well-defined bond.
I speak for you, companions of a crowded
Road, not without its difficulties,
And for you too, who have lost
Soul, courage, the desire to live;
Or no one, or someone, or perhaps
only one person, or you
Who are reading me: remember the time
Before the wax hardened,
When everyone was like a seal.
Each of us bears the imprint
Of a friend met along the way;
In each the trace of each.
For good or evil
In wisdom or in folly
Everyone stamped by everyone.
Now that time crowds in
And the undertakings are finished,
To all of you the humble wish
That autumn will be long and mild.
- Primo Levi
love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places
yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfully curled)
all worlds
- e.e. cummings
"I do not know if I have found answers. When I first became a monk, yes, I was more sure of "answers." But as I grow old in the monastic life and advance further into solitude, I become aware that I have only begun to seek the questions. And what are the questions? Can man make sense out of his existence? Can man honestly give his life meaning merely by adopting a certain set of explanations which pretend to tell him why the world began and where it will end, why there is evil and what is necessary for a good life? My brother, perhaps in my solitude I have become as it were an explorer for you, a searcher in realms which you are not able to visit . . . I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man's heart in which explanations no longer suffice, and in which one learns that only experience counts. An arid, rocky, dark land of the soul, sometimes illuminated by strange fires which men fear and peopled by specters which men studiously avoid except in their nightmares. And in this area I have learned that one cannot truly know hope unless he has found out how like despair hope is."
- Thomas Merton
The Hidden Ground of Love
The Coming of Light
Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow's dust flares into breath.
- Mark Strand
"If we're willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated, then we can have the courage to relax with the groundlessness of our situation. This is the first step on the path."
- Pema Chodron
"We cannot begin perfectly . . . There is confusion, messiness, untidiness - and constant dichotomy, constant reference point. But at least, we are moving in the direction of unconditional being. We are gazing at the star of Bethlehem on the horizon. It is far, far away, but still there is hope. A spark of luminosity is there. The land may be dark, the sky may be gray and black. It might be chilly, and we might be cold, uncomfortable, tired, and restless. But nevertheless, the star of Bethlehem is over there. Human beings hope. The final hope that human beings could ever be hopeful of is enlightenment, the star of Bethlehem on the horizon."
- The Star of Bethlehem
The Path is the Goal: A basic handbook of Buddhist meditation
edited by Sherab Chodzin
"Jacques Lusseyrans, who became blind at the age of seven but found all of his senses, even vision, opening in an extraordinary way instead of closing down, said, "Being blind I thought I should have to go out to meet things, but I found that they came to meet me instead. I have never had to go more than halfway, and the universe became an accomplice of all my wishes."
- Susan Murphy
Upside-Down Zen: Finding the Marvelous in the Ordinary
The mystery of things – where is it?
Why doesn't it come out
To show us at least that it's a mystery?
What do the river and the tree know about it?
And what do I, who am no more than they, know about it?
Whenever I look at things and think about what people think of them,
I laugh like a brook cleanly splashing against a rock.
For the only hidden meaning of things
Is that they have no hidden meaning.
It's the strangest thing of all,
Stranger than all poets' dreams
And all philosophers' thoughts,
That things are really what they seem to be
And there's nothing to understand.
Yes, this is what my senses learned on their own:
Things have no meaning; they exist.
Things are the only hidden meaning of things.
- Fernando Pessoa
The Keeper of Sheep
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