Dr. Noel Bormann

Zen Quotes 6

ORDINARY MIND

• If you walk, just walk. If you sit, just sit; but whatever you do, don't wobble.
  UMMON

• The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.
  ROBERT PIRSIG

• In Buddhism there is no place for using effort. Just be ordinary and nothing special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you're tired go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.
  RINZAI

• If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do.
  HERMAN HESSE

• I have a simple philosophy: Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. Scratch where it itches.
  ALICE ROOSEVELT LONGWORTH

• Ken Boswell: I'm in a rut. I can't break myself of the habit of swinging up at the ball.
  Yogi Berra: Then swing down.

• Learn your lines and don't trip over the furniture.
  SPENCER TRACY (advice to young actors)

• Stay out of jail.
  ALFRED HITCHCOCK (advice to young filmmakers)

• Just sit out there and have them go through the moves. When you see something you don't like, change it.
  JOSHUA LOGAN (advice to young directors)

• I'm not expressing anything. I'm presenting people moving.
  MERCE CUNNINGHAM

• I go about looking at horses and cattle. They eat grass, make love, work when they have to, bear their young. I am sick with envy of them.
  SHERWOOD ANDERSON

• Learn to wish that everything should come to pass exactly as it does.
  EPICTETUS

• If you are not happy here and now, you never will be.
  TAISEN DESHIMARU

• God is in the details.
  MEIS VAN DER ROHE

• Details are all there are.
  MAEZUMI

• Faith and philosophy are air, but events are brass.
  HERMAN MELVILLE

• The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
  HANS HOFMAN

• Monk: Master, I have just entered the monastery, please teach me.
  Joshu (778-897): Have you eaten your rice?
  Monk: Yes, I have.
  Joshu: Then wash your bowl.
  At these words the monk was enlightened.

• While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means the while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes. At first glance, that might seem a little silly: why put so much stress on a simple thing? But that's precisely the point. The fact that I am standing there and washing these bowls is a wondrous reality. I'm being completely myself, following my breath, conscious of my presence, and conscious of my thoughts and actions. There's no way I can be tossed around mindlessly like a bottle slapped here and there on the waves.
  THICH NHAT HANH

• When we pay attention, whatever we are doing-whether it be cooking, cleaning or making love-is transformed and becomes part of our spiritual path. We begin to notice details and textures that we never noticed before; everyday life becomes clearer, sharper, and at the same time more spacious.
  RICK FIELDS

• Reporter: Were you apprehensive in the twelfth inning?
  Yogi Berra: No, but I was scared.

  If we live, we live; if we die, we die; if we suffer, we suffer; if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it.
  ALAN WATTS

• While I have been fumbling over books And thinking about God and the Devil and all, Other young men have been battling with the days And others have been kissing the beautiful women.
  ALDOUS HUXLEY

• Look for knowledge not in books but in things themselves.
  WILLIAM GILBERT

• It is the familiar that usually eludes us in life. What is before our nose is what we see last.
  WILLIAM BARRETT

• It requires a certain kind of mind to see beauty in a hamburger bun. Yet, is it any more unusual to find grace in the texture and softly curved silhouette of a bun than to reflect lovingly on … the arrangement of textures and colors in a butterfly's wing?
  RAY KROC

• Sacred cows make great hamburgers.
  ROBERT REISNER

• There's a certain Buddhistic calm that comes from having … money in the bank.
  TOM ROBBINS

• The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.
  WITTGENSTEIN

• Nansen (748-834) was a disciple of Basso and the teacher of Joshu. The following exchange occurred when Joshu was a young man:
  Joshu: What is the Way?
  Nansen: Ordinary mind is the Way.
  Joshu: Shall I seek it?
  Nansen: No, if you seek it you cannot find it.
  Joshu: Then how shall I know the Way?
  Nansen: The way is not a matter of knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion; now knowing is confusion.
  The true Way is as vast and boundless as outer space. How can you talk about it in terms of right and wrong?
  At this Joshu became enlightened.

• I have been waiting twenty years for someone to say to me: "You have to fight fire with fire" so that I could reply, "That's funny-I always use water.
  HOWARD GOSSAGE

• In what is seen there should be just the seen; in what is heard there should be just the hear; in what is sensed there should be just the sensing; in what is thought there should be just the thought. THE BUDDHA

• This-the immediate, everyday, and present experience-is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.
  ALAN WATTS

• I raise my hand; I take a book from the other side of this desk; I hear the boys playing ball outside my window; I see the clouds blown away beyond the neighboring woods:--in all these I am practicing Zen, I am living Zen. No worldly discussion is necessary, or any explanation.
  D.T. SUZUKI

• Don't let me catch anyone talking about the Universe in my department.
  ERNEST RUTHERFORD

NO-MIND

When the mind is nowhere it is everywhere. When it occupies one tenth, it is absent in the other nine tenths.
TAKUAN
• Mindfulness is a state wherein one is totally aware in any situation and so always able to respond appropriately. Yet one is aware of being aware. Mindlessness, on the other hand, or "no-mindness" as it has been called, is a condition of such complete absorption that there is not vestige of self-awareness.
  PHILIP KAPLEAU

• Don't think: Look!
  WITTGENSTEIN

• When you try to stop activity to achieve passivity your very effort fills you with activity.
  SENG TS'AN

• The mind of a perfect man is like a mirror. It grasps nothing. It expects nothing. It reflects but does not hold. Therefore, the perfect man can act without effort.
  CHUANG TZU

• The truth of a thing is the feel of it, not the think of it.
  STANLEY KUBRICK

• More wisdom is latent in things-as-they-are than in all the words men use.
  SAINT-EXUPERY

• No one is more liable to make mistakes than the man who acts only on reflection.
  VAUVENARGUES

• The wild gees do not intend to cast their reflections, The water has no mind to receive their images.
  ZEN HAIKU

• Think enough and you won't know anything.
  KENNETH PATCHEN

• How should men know what is coming to pass within them, when there are no words to grasp it? How could the drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.
  SAINT-EXUPERY

• When you are at sea, keep clear of the land.
  PUBLILIUS SYRUS

• In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.
  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

• We can only exist by taking our minds off the fact that we exist.
  THOMAS BERNHARD

• At times I think and at times I am. PAUL VALERY

• You think too much, Boss.
  ANTHONY QUINN in Zorba the Greek,
  Screenplay by MICHAEL CACOYANNIS

• The only free mind is one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.
  E.M. CIORAN

• The no-mind not-thinks no-thoughts about no-things.
  THE BUDDHA

• When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only of how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
  R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER

• The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her matter of operation.
  JOHN CAGE

• People think the Beatles know what's going on. We don't. We're just doing it.
  JOHN LENNON

• Man, if you gotta ask, you'll never know.
  LOUIS ARMSTRONG (asked to define jazz)

• My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?
  CHARLES M. SCHULZ

• A drunken man who falls out of a cart, though he may suffer, does not die. His bones are the same as other people's; but he meets his accident in a different way. His spirit is in a condition of security. He is not conscious of riding in the car; neither is he conscious of falling out of it.

  Ideas of life, death, fear and the like cannot penetrate his breast; and so he does not suffer from contact with objective existence. If such security is to be got from wine, how much more is to be got from God?
  CHUANG TZU

• How old would you be if you didn't know how old you was?
  SATCHELL PAIGE

NOTHINGNESS

• Clay is molded to make a vessel, but the utility of the vessel lies in the space where there is nothing …. Thus, taking advantage of what is, we recognize the utility of what is not.
  LAO TZU

• God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
  PAUL VALERY

• It's the nothing that makes us something, it's what we miss that hits the mark.
  7-UP JINGLE

• The game is not about becoming somebody, it's about becoming nobody.
  BABA RAM DASS

• Seeing into nothingness-this is the true seeing, the eternal seeing.
  SHEN HUI

• We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends.
  We turn clay to make a vessel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.
  We pierce doors and windows to make a house; And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends.
  Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, We should recognize the usefulness of what is not.
  LAO TZU

• It is precisely because there is nothing within the One that all things are from it.
  PLOTINUS

• Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?
  HAROLD PINTER

• At a given moment I open my eyes and exist. And before that, during all eternity, what was there?
  Nothing.
  UGO BETTI

• It takes a long time to understand nothing.
  EDWARD DAHLBERG

• The unrest which keeps the never stopping clock of metaphysics going is the thought that the nonexistence of this world is just as possible as its existence.
  WILLAM JAMES

• My: Literally "no" or "not." Mu signifies the absence of everything, but it does not mean "nothing"-it transcends the illusory distinction between positive and negative and is sometimes translated as "not two." It is said that once you have grasped Mu, you have grasped Zen.

• Every thing is of the nature of no thing.
  PARMENIDES

• One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.
  JOAN DIDION

• I was twenty when I went in, thirty-one when I come out. You don't count months and years-you don't do time that way. You gotta forget time; you gotta not give a fuck if you live or die. You gotta get to where nothin' means nothin'.
  JAMES CAAN in Thief, Screenplay by MICHAEL MANN

• Everything depends on this: a fathomless sinking into a fathomless nothingness.
  JOHANNES TAULER

• Act non-action; undertake no undertaking; taste the tasteless.
  LAO TZU

  All Buddhas preach emptiness. Why? Because they wish to crush the concrete ideas of the students. If a student even clings to an idea of emptiness, he betrays all Buddhas.
  BODHIDHARMA

ONENESS

• Nothing is born, nothing is destroyed. Away with you dualism, your likes and dislikes. Every single thing is just One Mind. When you have perceived this, you will have mounted the Chariot of the Buddhas.
  HUANG PO

• Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.
  JOHN FOWLES

• All numbers are multiples of one, all sciences converge to a common point, all wisdom comes out of one center, and the number of wisdom is one.
  PARACELSUS

• The truth is that everything is One, and this of course is not a numerical One.
  PHILIP KAPLEAU

• There is no remainder in the mathematics of infinity. All life is one; therefore, there cannot be God and man, nor a universe and God. A god not in the world is a false god, and a world not in God is unreal. All things return to one, and one operates in all.
  NYOGEN SENZAKI

• In the "Not Two" are no separate things, yet all things are included.
  SENG TS'AN

• Knowledge is one. Its division into subjects is a concession of human weakness.
  SIR HALFOR JOHN MACKINDER

• All know that the drop merges into the ocean but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.
  KABIR

• Everything in the universe is connected, everything is osmosis. You cannot separate any part from the whole: interdependence rules the cosmic order.
  TAISEN DESHIMARU

• The one is none other than the All, the All none other than the One.
  SENG TS'AN

• And I have felt…a sense sublime
  Of something far more deeply interfused,
  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
  And the round ocean and the living air,
  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
  A motion and a spirit, that impels
  All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
  And rolls through all things.
  WORDSORTH

• The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should be God, as if He stood there and they here.
  This not so.
  God and I, we are one in knowledge. MEISTER ECKHART

• The highest wisdom has but one science-the science of the whole-the science explaining the whole creation and man's place in it.
  TOLSTOY

• When you sit in the full lotus position, your left foot is on your right thigh and your right foot is on your left thigh. When we cross our legs like this, even though we have a right leg and a left leg, they become one. The position expresses the oneness of duality: not two and not one. This is the most important teaching: not two, and not one. Our body and mind are not two and not one. If you think your body and mind are two, that is wrong; if you think that they are one, that is also wrong. Our body and mind are both two and one.
  SHUNRYU SUZUKI

• All beings are Buddha. All beings are the truth, just as they are.
  ROBERT AITKEN

• A Definition of Success To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
  To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of False friends;
  To appreciate beauty;
  To find the best in others;
  To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;
  To know even one life has breathed easier because you lived.
  This is to have success.
  HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK

• If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?
  DOGEN

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

• When the student is ready, the Master appears.
  BUDDHIST PROVERB

• Elder Ting asked Lin-chi, "Master, what is the great meaning of Buddha's teaching?" Lin-chi came down from his seat, slapped Ting and pushed him away. Ting was stunned and stood motionless. A monk nearby said, "Ting, Why do you not bow?" At the moment Ting attained great enlightenment.
  ZEN KOAN

• When hungry, eat your rice; when tired close your eyes. Fools may laugh at me, but wise men will know what I mean.
  LIN-CHI

• Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.
  GOETHE

• The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the notes-ah, that is where the art resides!
  ARTUR SCHNABEL

• Great Faith. Great Doubt. Great Effort.
  THE THREE QUALITIES NECESSARY FOR TRAINING

• The more we understand individual things, the more we understand God.
  SPINOZA

• Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
  JOHN LENNON

• The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.
  LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

• We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
  H.L. MENCKEN

• A painting of rice cake does not satisfy hunger.
  ANCIENT SAYING

• It is not the same to talk of bulls as to be in the bullring.
  SPANISH PROVERB