Dr. Noel Bormann

Zen Quotes 3

ENLIGHTENMENT

NATURE

Hope and fear cannot alter the seasons.
CHOGYAM TRUNGPA
Nature is what she is-amoral and persistent.
STEPHEN JAY GOULD
Nature is not anthropomorphic.
LAO TZU
Wind moving through grass so that the grass quivers. This moves me with an emotion I don't even understand.
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
Handle even a single leaf of green in such a way that it manifests the body of the Buddha. This in turn allows the Buddha to manifest through the leaf.
DOGEN
Except during the nine months before he dawns his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
It's very nice to feel. You're nothing. You're just nothing when you're near a volcano.
KATIA KRAFFT
Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.
ALAN WATTS
No snowflake falls in an inappropriate place.
ZEN SAYING
There is nothing useless in nature; not even uselessness itself.
MONTIAIGNE
Nature hath no goal though she hath law.
JOHN DONNE
Nature has neither kernel nor shell; she is everything at once.
GOETHE
Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, secretly all nature seeks God and works toward him.
MEISTER ECKHART
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
The world is not to be put in order, the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.
HERNRY MILLER
To the dull mind nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.
EMERSON
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Ink cannot tell the glow that lights me at this moment in turning to the mountains. I feel strong [enough] to leap Yosemite walls at a bound.
JOHN MUIR
Master Gensha (831-908)
Monk: "Where can I enter Zen?"
Gensha: "Can you hear the babbling brook?"
Monk: "Yes, I can hear it."
Gensha: "Then enter there."
The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.
JOHN MUIR
There is something about the Himalayas not possessed by the Alps, something unseen and unknown, a charm that pervades every hour spent among them, a mystery intriguing and disturbing. Confronted by them, a man loses his grasp of ordinary things, perceiving himself as immortal, an entity capable of outdistancing all changes, all decay, all life, all death.
FRANK SMYTHE
What I know of the divine science and Holy Scripture I learnt in woods and fields.
SAINT BERNARD
Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee.
JOB, 12:8
Earth with her thousand voices, praise God.
COLERIDGE
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
It were happy if we studied nature more in natural things, and acted according to nature, whose rules are few, plain, and most reasonable.
WILLIAM PENN
There is nothing that is supernatural, however mysterious, in the whole system of our redemption; every part of it has its ground in the workings and powers of nature and all our redemption is only nature set right, or made to be that which it out to be.
WILLIAM LAW
An old pond-
The sound of the water
When a frog jumps in.
BASHO

THE WAY

Those who speak the truth by means of intellect and learning only get further and further away from it. Not till your thoughts cease all their branching here and there, not till you abandon all thoughts of seeking for something, not till your mind is motionless as wood or stone, will you be on the right road to the Gate.
HUANG PO
I searched through rebellion, drugs, diets, mysticism, religions, intellectualism, and much more, only to begin to find…that truth is basically simple-and feels good, clean and right.
CHICK COREA
All composite things decay; work out your salvation with diligence.
THE BUDDHA
You must make the most strenuous efforts. Throughout this life, you can never be certain of living long enough to take another breath.
HUANG PO
It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.
CONFUCIUS
You don't have to try, you just have to be. DAVID VISCOTT
All know the way; few actually walk it.
BODHIDHARMA
When a monk asked, "What is the Tao?" Master Ummon (863-949) replied, "Walk on."
If you follow the present-day world, you will turn your back on the Way; if you would not turn your back on the Way, do not follow the world.
TAKUAN
There is a goal but no way; what we call the way is mere wavering.
FRANK KAFKA
The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away.
Puzzling.
ROBERT PIRSIG
Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.
ANDRE GIDE
Mumonkan (The Gateless Gate): A collection of forty-eight koan compiled by the Zen monk Mumon Ekai (1183-1260).
It derives its title from the verse:
The great path has no gates,
Thousands of roads enter it.
When one passes through this gateless gate
He walks freely between heaven and earth.
If a man wants to be of the greatest possible value to his fellow-creatures, let him begin the long, solitary task of perfecting himself.
ROBERTSON DAVIES
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.
BASHO
The true way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but just above the ground. It seems more designed to make men stumble than to be waked upon.
FRANZ KAFKA
If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.
SAINT JOHN OF THE CROSS
To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.
JOSEPH CONRAD
Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.
JAMES BALDWIN
First there is a time when we believe everything without reasons, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again-and, moreover, give reasons why we believe everything.
G. C. LICHTENBERG
The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the nonintellectuals have never stirred.
ALDOUS KUXLEY
The Perfect Way is only difficult for those who pick and choose; do no like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. Make a hairbreadth difference, and Heaven and Earth are set apart.
SENG TS'AN
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.
JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSET
I wonder why.
I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why
I wonder why I wonder!
RICHARD P. FEYNMAN
To attain Buddhahood … we must scatter this life's aims and objects to the wind.
MILAREPA
The Way that can be told is not the eternal way.
LAO TZU
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.
BODHIDHARMA
When you seek it, you cannot find it.
ZEN SAYING
Not only has one to do one's best, one must, while doing one's best, remain detached from whatever one is trying to achieve.
JANWILLEM VAN DE WETERING
If you know that fundamentally there is nothing to seek, you have settled your affairs.
RINZAI
The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp.
JOHN BERRY
If thou shouldst say, "It is enough, I have reached perfection," all is lost. For it is the function of perfection to make one know one's imperfection.
SAINT AUGUSTINE
Every day Master Shigen (c. 900) had the following dialogue with himself:
"Hey, Master!"
"Yes?"
"Are you listening?"
"Yes."
"Don't be complacent!"
"I won't!"
I had been proud of my awareness, aware of my pride, and proud of that awareness again. It went on like this: How clever I am that I know I am so stupid, how stupid I am to think that I am clever, and how clever I am that I am aware of my stupidity, etc.
JANWILLEM VAN DE WETERING
Attachment to spiritual things is … just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else.
THOMAS MERTON
What is important … is not the right doctrine but the attainment of the true experience. It is giving up believing in belief.
ALAN KEIGHTLEY
The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality. Ego is constantly attempting to acquire and apply the teachings of spirituality for its own benefit.
CHOGYAM TRUNGPA
The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappies.
ERIC HOFFER
When a monk asked, "what is the Buddha?"
Ummon (863-949) replied, "A shit-wiped stick."
A person who says, "I'm enlightened" probably isn't.
BABA RAM DASS
The Zen expression "Kill the Buddha!" means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from oneself. To kill the Buddha is to be the Buddha.
PETER MATTHIESSEN
Everyone is in the best seat.
JOHN CAGE
Look. This is your world! You can't not look. There is no other world. This is your world; it is your feast. You inherited this; you inherited these eyeballs; you inherited this world of color. Look at the greatness of the whole thing. Look! Don't hesitate-look! Open your eyes. Don't blink, and look, look-look further.
CHOGYAM TRUNGPA
There is no need to run outside
For better seeing…
… Rather abide
At the center of your being;
For the more you leave it, the less you learn.
Search your heart and see …
The way to do is to be.
LAO TZU

NO-KNOWLEDGE

I do not understand Buddhism.
HUI NENG
Knowledge is knowing as little as possible.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
To know what we do not know is the beginning of wisdom.
MAHA STGAVIRA SANGHARAKSHITA
To know what you do no know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is disease.
LAO TZU
Sometime it proves the highest understanding not to understand.
GRACIAN
What shall I say about poetry? What shall I say about those clouds, or about the sky? Look; look at them; look at it! And nothing more. Don't you understand that a poet can't say anything about poetry? Leave that to the critics and the professors. For neither you, nor I, nor any poet knows what poetry is.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear I know nothing.
JOHN CAGE
I don't know. I don't care. And it doesn't make any difference.
JACK KEROUAC
What is truth? I don't know and I'm sorry I brought it up.
EDWARD ABBEY
All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Nothing is more conductive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
G. C. LICHTENBERG
I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.
SOCRATES
Interviewer: "I've got lots of questions to ask you, Yogi."
Yogi Berra: "If you ask me anything I don't know, I'm not going to answer."
He who knows does not speak; He who speaks does not know.
LAO TZU
I lead up and down, across, and to and fro my pupils by the nose-and learn that we in truth can nothing know.
GOETHE
How dieth the wise man? As the fool.
ECCLESIASTES, 2:16
As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.
WILL DURANT
All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.
SRI SYADASTI
We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.
H. L. MENCKEN
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
We know too much and feel too little.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
It is the tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn't know; and the less a man knows, the more sure he is that he knows everything.
JOYCE CARY
In baseball, you don't know nothing.
YOGI BERRA

MEDITATION

What is called zazen is sitting on a zafu [pillow] in a quiet room, absolutely still, in the exact and proper position and without uttering a word, the mind empty of any thought, good or wicked. It is continuing to sit peacefully, facing a wall, and nothing more. Every day.
TAISEN DESHIMARU
Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.
PAUL VALERY
In doing zazen it is desirable to have a quiet room. You should be temperate in eating and drinking, forsaking all delusive relationships. Setting everything aside, think of neither good nor evil, right nor wrong. Thus having stopped the various functions of your mind, five up even the idea of becoming a Buddha.
DOGEN
Zazen is seated meditation-the opposite of contemplation-the emptying of the mind of all thoughts in order simply to be.
In the midst of all evil, not a thought is aroused in the mind-this is called za. Seeing into one's Self-nature, not being moved at all-this is called Zen.
HUI NENG
Zazen is not the practice of self-improvement, like a course in making friends and influencing people. With earnest zazen, character change does occur, but this is not a matter of ego-adjustment. It is forgetting the self.
ROBERT AITKEN
For the ordinary man, whose mind is a checkerboard of crisscrossing reflections, opinions, and prejudices, bare attention is virtually impossible; his life is thus centered not in reality itself but in his ideas of it. By focusing the mind wholly on each objects and every action, zazen strips it of extraneous thoughts and allows us to enter into a full rapport with life.
PHILIP KAPLEAU
Sitting is the gateway of truth to total liberation.
DOGEN
During zazen, brain and consciousness become pure. It's exactly like muddy water left to stand in a glass. Little by little, the sediment sinks to the bottom and the water becomes pure.
TAISEN DESHIMARU
Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.
KRISHNAMURTI
Zazen itself is God
DOGEN
Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.
T.S. ELIOT
We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.
ALAN WATTS
No thought, no action, no movement, total stillness: only thus can one manifest the true nature and law of things from within and unconsciously, and at last become one with heaven and earth.
LAO TZU
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
FRANZ KAFKA
In zazen, one is one's present self, what one was, and what one will be, all at once.
PETER MATTHIESSEN
When one devotes oneself to meditation, mental burdens, unnecessary worries, and wondering thoughts drop off one by one; life seems to run smoothly and pleasantly. A student may now depend on intuition to make decisions. As one acts on intuition, second thought, with dualism, doubt and hesitation, does not arise.
NYOGEN SENZAKI
If you have a glass full of liquid you can discourse forever on its qualities, discuss whether it is cold, warm, whether it is really and truly composed of H2O, or mineral water, or saki. Zazen is drinking it.
TAISEN DESHIMARU
The uniqueness of zazen lies in this: that the mind is freed from bondage to all thought forms, visions, objects, and imaginings, however sacred or elevating, and brought to a state of absolute emptiness, from which alone it may one day perceive its own true nature, or the nature of the universe.
PHILIP KAPLEAU
All the masters tell us that the reality of life - which our noisy walking consciousness prevents us from hearing - speaks to us chiefly in silence.
KARLFRIED GRAF DURCKHEIM
I neglect God and his angels for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.
JOHN DONNE
Intelligence is silence, truth is being invisible. But what a racket I make in declaring this.
NED ROREM
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
WITTGENSTEIN
The quieter you become the more you can hear.
BABA RAM DASS

SATORI

It was a morning in early summer. A silver haze shimmered and trembled over the lime trees. The air was laden with their fragrance. The temperature was like a caress. I remember - I need not recall - that I climbed up a tree stump and felt suddenly immersed in Itness. I did not call it by that name. I had no need for words. It and I were one.
BERNARD BERENSON
It is in the unearthly first hour of twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors to turn on the lights.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
Essentially Satori is a sudden experience, and it is often described as a "turning over" of the mind, just as a pair of scales will suddenly turn over when a sufficient amount of material has been poured into one pan to overbalance the weight in the other. Hence it is an experience which generally occurs after a long and concentrated effort to discover the meaning of Zen.
ALAN WATTS
I entered (into my inward self) and beheld with the eye of my soul…the Light Unchangeable.
SAINT AUGUSTINE
The sense itself was I. I felt no dross or matter in my soul, no brims or borders, such as in a bowl we see. My essence was capacity.
THOMAS TRAHERNE
At midnight I abruptly awakened. At first my mind was foggy…Then all at once I was struck as though by lightening, and the next instant heaven and earth crumbled and disappeared.
Instantaneously, like surging waves, a tremendous delight welled up in me, a veritable hurricane of delight, as I laughed loudly and wildly, "There's no reasoning here, no reasoning at all! Ha! Ha! Ha!" The empty sky split in two, then opened its enormous mouth and began to laugh uproariously: "Ha! Ha! Ha!"
KOUN YAMADA
I sat there listening with my whole being, and with my whole strength contemplating that mountain that I so dearly love…Was there anyone in the world, at that moment, as happy as I?
COLETTE RICHARD
At the next meal - I was head server - tears were pouring down my face as I served…and afterwards, when I went out of the zendo…there was a tree there, and looking at the tree, I didn't feel I was the tree, it went deeper than that. I felt the wind on me, I felt the birds on me, all separation was completely gone.
BERNARD TETSUGEN GLASSMAN
I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Buddha-nature: The intrinsic perfection of all living beings which Zen seeks to realize.
You are sitting on the earth and you realize that this earth deserves you and you deserve this earth. You are there - fully, personally, genuinely.
CHOGYAM TRUNGPA
Suddenly I was ruined and homeless.
JOSHU
I was sitting by the ocean one late summer afternoon, watching the waves rolling in and feeling the rhythm of my breathing, when suddenly I became aware of my whole environment as being engaged in a gigantic cosmic dance….I "saw" cascades of energy coming down from outer space, in which particles were created and destroyed in rhythmic pulses; I "saw" the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in this cosmic dance of energy; I felt its rhythm and I "heard" its sound, and at that moment I knew that this was the Dance of Shiva, the Lord of Dancers worshiped by the Hindus.
FRITJOF CAPRA
I took a walk, Suddenly I stood still, filled with the realization that I had no body or mind. All I could see was one great illuminating Whole - omnipresent, perfect, lucid and serene.
HAN SHAN
I suddenly felt very happy…I felt about me steadily rising tide of enormous joy…The warmth of tide was glorious, as of a huge, affectionate flame. I remained intellectually conscious; that is, I was critical of my own condition, considering it, comparing it, wondering what it might mean. Never before had I attained this discriminate consciousness which functions on a plane where all discrimination seemed absurd. Then the time ebbed slowly and I was left exhilarated, rested, refreshed.
CHRISTMAS HUMPHREYS
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
WILLIAM BLAKE
This moment, this being, is the thing. My life is all life in little. The moon, the planets, pass around my heart. The sun, now hidden by the round bulk of this earth, shines into me, and in me as well. The gods and the angels both good and bad are like the hairs of my own head, seemingly numberless, and growing from within. I people the cosmos from myself, it seems, yet what am I? A puff of dust, or a brief coughing spell, with emptiness and silence to follow.
ALEXANDER ELIOT
Kwatz!: An exclamation used by Zen masters to shock a student out of dualistic thinking.
Zen masters hold that an individual's full understanding of Zen is often precipitated by the hearing of a single phrase exactly calculated to destroy his particular demon of ignorance; so they have always favored the brief paradoxical dialogue as a means of instruction, finding it of great value in giving a sudden jolt to a pupil's mind which may propel him towards or over the bring of Enlightenment.
JOHN BLOFELD
Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late.
WILLIAM JAMES
Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment.
LAO TZU
Any enlightenment which requires to be authenticated, certified, recognized, congratulated, is (as yet) a false, or at least incomplete one.
R.H. Blyth
This is It and I am It and You are It and so is That and He is It and She is It and It is It and That is That.
JAMES BROUGHTON
The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.
SIR JAMES JEANS
That the world is, is the mystical.
WITTGENSTEIN
Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.
H.L. MENCKEN
We carry with us the wonders we seek without us.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
The kingdom of God is within you.
LUKE, 17:21
To obtain satori, one must let go of the ego. To receive everything, one must open one's hands and give.
TAISEN DESHIMARU
You can't be lonely on the sea - you're too alone.
TANIA AEBI
A simple fishing boat in the midst of the rippling waters is enough to awaken in the mind of the beholder a sense of vastness of the sea and at the same time of peace and contentment - the Zen sense oof the alone.
D.T. SUZUKI
The aim of Zen training is to attain the state of consciousness which occurs when the individual ego is emptied of itself and becomes identified with the infinite reality of all things.
ANNE BANCROFT
After many years of work on the koan Mu, Mumon Ekai (1183-1260) had a Great Awakening when he heard the dinner drum. When asked to describe his satori he said "It would be easier for a mute to explain his dreams."
All the problems vanish when you are in the nonverbal dimension of consciousness. Theology, philosophy and metaphysics as we ordinarily talk about them cease to be urgent problems. You see the answers to all the questions that theologians and metaphysicians ask and you see why their questions are absurd.
WITTGENSTEIN
It is inner abandonment that leads men to the highest truth.
HENRY SUSO
When, in its [the soul's] divine power, it completely possesses the body, it converts that into a luminous moving cloud and thus can manifest itself in the whole of its divinity. This is the explanation of the miracle of St. Francis walking on the sea. His body no longer weighed like ours, so light had it become through the soul.
ISADORA DUNCAN
The one and only thing required is to free oneself from the bondage of mind and body alike, putting the Buddha's own seal upon yourself. If you do this as you sit in ecstatic meditation, the whole universe itself scattered through the infinity of space turns into enlightenment. This is what I mean by the Buddha's seal.
DOGEN
If we achieve satori and the satori shows, like a bit of dogshit stuck to the top of our nose, that is not so good.
TAISEN DESHIMARU
When reality is perceived in its nature of ultimate perfection, the practitioner has reached a level of wisdom called non-discrimination mind - a wondrous communion in which there is no longer any distinction made between subject and object.
THICH NHAT HAHN

MIND

BEGINNER'S MIND

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginners' mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.
SHUNRYU SUZUKI
When you're green, you're growing. When you're ripe, you rot.
RAY KROC
To understand truth one must have a very sharp, precise, clear mind; not a cunning mind, but a mind that is capable of looking without any distortion, a mind innocent and vulnerable.
KRISHNAMURTI
Consciousness is always open to many possibilities because it involves play. It is always an adventure.
JULIAN JAYNES
It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers.
MAES THURBER
Keep your hands open, and all the sands of the desert can pass through them. Close them, and all you can feel is a bit of grit.
TAISEN DESHIMARU
A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.
RACHEL CARSON
We are all born charming, fresh, and spontaneous and must be civilized before we are fit to participate in society.
MISS MANNERS (JUDITH MARTIN)
How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.
ALEXANDRE DUMAS, fils
Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.
LUKE, 18:7
There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.
J ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
"Did you have a happy childhood?" is a false question. As a child I did not know what happiness was, and whether I was happy or not. I was too busy being.
ALISTAIR REID
You don't need Little League. You don't even need nine kids. Four is plenty-a pitcher, a batter, and a couple of shaggers. You can play ball all day long. My kids used to try to get me out there, but I'd just say, "Go play with your brothers." If kids want to do something, they'll do it. They don't need adults to do it for them.
YOGI BERRA
Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.
ALAN KEIGHTLEY