Dr. Noel Bormann

Zen Quotes 4

ART

• Correct handling of flowers refines the personality.
  BOKUYO TAKEDA

• If one really wishes to be master of an art, technical knowledge is not enough. One has to transcend technique so that the art becomes an "artless art" growing out of the Unconscious.
  D.T. SUZUKI

• The Zen ways and arts draw a bridge from real artistic creation (in painting, architecture, poetry) to artistic skills like flower arrangement and gardening, and ultimately to all of everyday life. The religious is found in the everyday, the sacred in the profane; indeed the everyday is religious, the profane is sacred.
  HEINRICH DUMOULIN

• Archery, fencing, spear fighting, all of the martial arts, tea ceremony, flower arranging…in all of these, correct breathing, correct balance, and correct stillness help to remake the individual. The basic aim is always the same: by tirelessly practicing a given skill, the student finally sheds the ego with its fears, worldly ambitions, and reliance on objective scrutiny - sheds it so completely that he becomes the instrument of a deeper power, from which mastery falls instinctively, without further effort on his part, like a ripe fruit.
  KARLFRIED GRAF DURCKHEIM

• Wabi means spare, impoverished; simple and functional. It connotes a transcendence of fad and fashion. The spirit of wabi imbues all the Zen arts, from calligraphy to karate, from the tea ceremony to Zen archery.

• The Zen way of calligraphy is to write in the most straightforward, simple way as if you were a beginner, not trying to make something skillful or beautiful, but simply writing with full attention as if you were discovering what you were writing for the first time; then your full nature will be in your writing.
  SHUNRYU SUZUKI

• Haiku is a particularly Zen form of poetry; for Zen detests egoism in the form of calculated effects or self-glorification of any sort. The author of haiku should be absent, and only the haiku present.
  ANNE BANCROFT

• A haiku is the expression of a temporary enlightenment in which we see into the life of things.
  R.H. BLYTH

• The Way of Tea lies in studying the ceremony, in understanding the principles, and in grasping the reality of things. These are its three rules.
  HOSOKAWA TADAOKI

• The art of the tea Way consists simply of boiling water, preparing tea and drinking it.
  RIKYU

• The essential art of Zen is Sumi.

  Brush painting with ink on rice paper. It is wonderfully flexible, capable of both the most robust and delicate of forms. But what makes it most truly Zen is the clarity with which it conveys the mond of the painter. The first stroke is the final stroke; there are no touch-ups.

  The Zen painter approaches his art as a part of his practice, as contemplation: Canvas blank, mind empty.

  This art conveys the unity of Being and Action that leads to enlightenment. To freedom.
  MICHAEL GREEN

• Everything ultimately depends on what is outside and beyond the opposites, on the spirit, and on man's capacity not only to dissolve himself in it through passionate self-immersion, but also to live out of it with equal composure.
  GUSTIE L. HERRIGEL

• There is a certain point of unity within the self, and between the self and its world, certain complicity and magnetic mating, a certain harmony, that conscious mind and will cannot direct. Perhaps analysis and the separate mastery of each element are required before the instincts are ready to assume command, but only at first. Command by instinct is swifter, subtler, deeper, more accurate, more in touch with reality than command by conscious mind. The discovery takes one's breath away.
  MICHAEL NOVAK

• If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.
  VINCENT VAN GOGH

• There is one art, no more, no less: to do all things with artlessness.
  PIET HEIN

ILLUSION

• The foolish reject what they see, not what they think; the wise reject what they think, not what they see.
  HUANG PO

• Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?
  C.S. LEWIS

• As in Rome there is, apart from the Romans, a population of statues, so apart from this real world there is a world of illusion, almost more potent, in which most men live.
  GOETHE

• What one believes to be true either is true or becomes true within limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are beliefs to be transcended.
  JOHN LILLY

• I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it raging and roaring like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free and ending just where it began.
  WILLIAM HAZLITT

• A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
  SAUL BELLOW

• I think I think; therefore, I think I am.
  AMBROSE BIERCE

• Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." I say, "I do not think, that is why I exist."
  TAISEN DESHIMARU

• When one sees that everything exists as an illusion, one can live in a higher sphere than ordinary man.
  THE BUDDHA

• One may explain water, but the mouth will not become wet. One may expound fully on the nature of fire, but the mouth will not become hot.
  TAKUAN

• The one life has not form and is empty by nature. If you become attached by any form, you should reject it. If you see an ego, a soul, a birth, or a death, reject them all.
  BODHIDHARMA

• Two monks were arguing about the temple flag. One said the flag moved, the other said the wind moved. Master Eno (638-713) overheard them and said, "It is neither the wind nor the flag, but your mind that moves," The monks were speechless.

• We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
  ALBERT EINSTEIN

• Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.
  SAINT-EXUPÉRY

• A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.
  RABINDRANATH TAGORE

• One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is.
  FRANK HERBERT

• Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
  PABLO PICASSO

• The way to solve conflict between human values and technological needs is not to run away from technology. That's impossible. The way to resolve the conflict is to break down the barriers of dualistic thought that prevent a real understanding of what technology is - not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both
  ROBERT PIRSIG

• We cannot get grace from gadgets.
  J.B. PRIESTLEY

• Since the concepts people live by are derived only from perceptions and from language and since the perceptions are received and interpreted only in light of earlier concepts, man comes pretty close to living in a house that language built.
  RUSSESS R.W. SMITH

• Words, as is well known, are great foes of reality.
  JOSEPH CONRAD

• Articulate words are a harsh clamor and dissonance. When man arrives at his highest perfection, he will again be dumb!
  NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

• Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.
  TOM ROBBINS

• How to describe the delicate thing that happens when a brilliant insect alights on a flower? Words, with their weight, fall upon the picture like birds of prey.
  JULES RENARD

• Having failed to distinguish thoughts from things, we then fail to distinguish words from thoughts. We think that if we can label a thing we have understood it.
  MAHA STHAVIRA SANGHARAKSHITA

• The map is not the territory.
  ALFRED KORZBYBSKI

• Truth is a river that is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between the arms, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the main river.
  CYRIL CONNOLLY

• Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
  WILLIAM JAMES

• The universe was a vast machine yesterday, it is a hologram today. Who knows that intellectual rattle we'll be shaking tomorrow.
  R.D. LAING

• My studies in Speculative philosophy, metaphysics, and science are all summed up in the image of a mouse called man running in and out of every hole in the Cosmos hunting for the Absolute Cheese.
  BENJAMIN DE CASSERES