Dr. Noel Bormann

Zen Quotes 1

ZEN

• Before you study Zen, a bowl is a bowl and tea is tea. While you are studying Zen, a bowl is no longer a bowl and tea is no longer tea. After you've studied Zen, a bowl is again a bowl and tea is tea.
  ZEN SAYING

• The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
  ROBERT PIRSIG

• Zen is the a Japanese translation of a Chinese translation (ch'an) of Sanskrit word (dhyana) for meditation.

• The aim of Zen is enlightenment: the immediate, unreflected grasp of reality, without affective contamination and intellectualization, the realization of the relation of myself to the universe.
  ERICH FROMM

• Among the most remarkable features characterizing Zen we find these: spirituality, directness of expression, disregard of form or conventionalism, and frequently an almost wanton delight in going astray from respectability.
  D.T. SUZUKI

• The term "Zen Buddhism" is generally used to mean a school of Buddhism based on Zen and teaching Zen, an established religion treated as a social organization comparable to other religious sects and schools. "Zen," however, is one of the basic components characterizing oriental thought, and as such has great influence not only in religion but in various phases of culture. It develops our ideas, and builds our characters. It is wisdom based on religious experience directly connected with the very source of our existence.
  ZENKEI SHIBAYAMA

• Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness.
  THOMAS MERTON

• Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.
  ALAN WATTS

• Zen teaches nothing; it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach, it points.
  D.T. SUZUKI

• Zen Buddhism does not preach. Sermons remain words. It waits until people feel stifled and insecure, driven by a secret longing.
  EUGEN HERRIGEL

• Zen holds that there is no god outside the universe who has created it and has created man. God - if I may borrow that word for a moment - the universe, and man are on indissoluble existence, one total whole. Only THIS - capital THIS - is.
  NANCY WILSON ROSS

• Zen is simply a voice crying, "Wake up! Wake up!"
  MAHA STHAVIRA SANGHARAKSHITA

• Studying about Zen should never be confused with practicing Zen, just as studying aesthetics should not be confused with being an artist.
  T.P. KASULIS

• Zen insists on personal experience and insight. Being aware of the glibness of words, it stresses the showing of insight-understanding, the clear seeing and actual expression of it.
  IRMGARD SCHLOEGL

• Zen is not interested in high-flown statements; it wants its pupil to bit his apple and not discuss it.
  ANNE BANCROFT

• The Diamond Sutra is a basic Buddhist text written in Sanskrit which prescribes practices for the attainment of Ultimate Wisdom. So called because it is deemed "indestructible."

• There are three kinds of disciples: those who impart Zen to others, those who maintain the temples and shrines, and then there are the rice bags and the clothes hangers.
  NYOGEN SENZAKI

• Zen teaches us to discover the transcendental core of our own selves in an immediate and practical sense, to "taste" divine Being in the here-and-now.
  KARLFRIED GRAF DURCKHEIM

• Zen is like looking for the spectacles that are sitting on your nose.
  ZEN SAYING

• Zen is…joyous iconoclasm which respects nothing and no one, particularly itself.
  DAVID BRANDON

• Zen is the way of complete self-realization; a living human being who follows the way of Zen can attain satori and then live a new life as a Buddha.
  ZENKEI SHIBAYAMA

• Tokusan Sengan (782-865 lived in northern China, where he studied the sutras and became a respected Buddhist scholar. When he heard that a sect in southern China advocated a "transmission outside the scriptures," he got angry and vowed to "exterminate the Zen devils." He set out for the south with a copy of the Diamond Sutra in a large box. On his way he stopped at a tea house, where he ordered a snack from the old woman there. Now, "snack" in Chinese literally means "to light up the mind."

  The old woman asked Tokusan what he had in the box, and he told her it was the Diamond Stura. "Is that so?" said the woman, "Then answer this question: If you want a snack to light up your mind, which mind are you going to light up?" The Diamond Sutra contains a famous passage that says, "Past mind is unattainable, present mind is unattainable, future mind is unattainable."

  Tokusan knew the passage well and could discourse about it with great erudition, but when the womas challenged him to apply its wisdom to a practical matter, he was at a loss. Thus realizing the limits of scholarship, Tokusan decided to study Zen instead of trying to destroy it.

• The study of Zen is like drilling wood to make fire: the wisest course is to forge ahead without stopping.
  HAKUIN

• Zen aims at freedom but its practice is disciplined.
  GARY SNYDER

• Zen training is designed to break through to Nonduality. This is the sole and only purpose of all Zen effort, and the effort must come from within. Fellow seekers and - with far greater skill - Zen masters will help to point the seeker in the right direction, but when all this help is given, the road of Zen is a road of "Do it yourself" - teach yourself Zen.
  CHRISTMAS HUMPHREYS

• Zen has no business with ideas.
  D.T. SUZUKI

• In life as well as in art Zen never wastes energy in stopping to explain; it only indicates.
  ALAN WATTS

• If you wish to obtain an orthodox understanding of Zen, do not be deceived by others. Inwardly or outwardly, if you encounter any obstacles kill them right away. If you encounter the Buddha, kill him.
  RINZAI

• Zen has no secrets other than seriously thinking about birth-and-death.
  TAKEDA SHINGEN

• Zen is to have the heart and soul of a little child.
  TAKUAN

• To be a good Zen Buddhist it is not enough to follow the teaching of its founder; we have to experience the Buddha's experience.
  D.T. SUZUKI

• Sanzen is the personal interaction between Zen master and student designed to allow the student to demonstrate his Zen - or lack of it - to the master. The face-to-face confrontation can involve verbal sparring, harsh reprimands, even corporal punishment.

• Zen functions in non-duality. The process of thought of reasoning, takes place in the field of duality. It follows that no thinking will achieve Zen.
  CHRISTMAS HUMPHREYS

• Zen is practice, experience, life - not explaining, interpreting, investigating, quibbling. All talk, as the Chinese masters of old say, is at best a finger pointing to the moon. The finger is not the moon and cannot pull the moon down.
  HEINRICH DUMOULIN

• To have Zen is to be in a state of pure sensation. It is to be freed from the grip of concepts, to see through them. This is not the same as rejecting conceptual thinking. Thoughts and words are in the world and are as natural as flowers. It is a mistake therefore to think that Zen is anti-intellectual.
  ALAN KEIGHTLEY

• In the Zen the ego enters into God. God enters into the ego. Both.
  TAISEN DESHIMARU

• Delusions and attachments consisting of self-centered and conceptual thinking obscure the living fact. The Zen path is devoted to clearing away these obstructions and seeing into true nature.
  ROBERT AITKEN

• The practice of Zen is forgetting the self in the act of uniting with something.
  KOUN YAMADA

• Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine.
  SHUNRYU SUZUKI

• Zen enriches no one. There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the "nothing," the "no-body" that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey.
  THOMAS MERTON

• Koan are spiritually instructive conundrums designed to force the student beyond logic to sudden illumination. There are some 1700 koan, many of which are compiled in the Hekiganroku and the Mumonkan.

• Zen cannot be defined. It is not a "thing" to be surrounded or reflected by words. When the last word is trowelled into the prison it escapes and laughs away on the horizon.
  DAVID BRANDON