Quotes About Mindfulness

The life of a Zen master is eating cornflakes and doing the dishes. From the distant past up till today, that's what the masters have all taught.

Zen is the complete absence of belief. Zen is the complete lack of authority.

You can do zazen by yourself. You do Zen Buddhism with other people.

Buddhism is a philosophy about just doing things bit by bit until the work is done. Ah, but the work is never really done. That's the beauty of it. You'll be doing it all your life, and you will never stop improving at it

Dhammapada. Anyhow,

we forget our ideas of self when we stop concentrating exclusively on how we experience the universe and learn how the universe experiences us.

Don't waste any time during the day. What you do right now becomes the seeds for raising up the next crop of wise people. Putting everyone at ease by doing your job well is how you transform yourself and everybody else.

Buddhist morality includes everything we do. You can never know just how far-reaching the effects of your actions might be.

When you do zazen, you're not trying to achieve a totally empty mind. That would be impossible. But you are trying to avoid the deliberate habitual manipulation of thoughts and images we usually engage in.

Dwelling on past mistakes is a way of reinforcing your ego. The ego can be strengthened just as well by dwelling on what's bad about you as it can by dwelling on what's good. In fact, for some of us — myself included — dwelling on what's bad about ourselves reinforces the ego much more effectively than dwelling on what's good.

The practice of zazen can help you gradually clear away the layers of mental noise that prevent you from seeing how the things you're going through now relate to the stuff you did in the past.

As the French philosopher Blaise Pascal famously said, "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." It's a shame that simply being quiet is so difficult for us.

Chasing after fantasies is always a bad idea. Stick with reality. Reality's all you've got. But here's the real secret, the real miracle: it's enough.

A person is a Buddha when she acts like a Buddha, when she manifests wisdom. When she fails to do so, she's not a Buddha. Thus a person can be a Buddha one minute and a jackass three minutes later. You don't just become a Buddha at the moment of your first enlightenment experience and then stay a Buddha forever.

Buddhism doesn't ask us to deny our natural desires. But it does ask us to regulate how we respond to them.

Part of the Zen way is learning to enjoy the fact that you cannot possibly have all the things you desire. In the truest sense none of your desires, no matter what they are, can ever be fulfilled because nothing will ever be the way you imagine it to be.

Even if the whole world is nothing but a bunch of jerks doing all kinds of jerk-type things, there is still liberation in simply not being a jerk.

The truth is everywhere all around us, but if we don't practice, it doesn't show itself and we can't experience it.

I vow to save all beings ...from myself.

So Buddhism is not the worship of a guy named Buddha; it's learning to manifest your unique inner Buddha.

If it doesn't sound like "don't be a jerk" it's not Buddhist teaching.

Zazen is a physical practice as much as it a mental one.

A quiet room is best for zazen. We shouldn't eat or drink too much, or too little. Put aside everything else. Don't think of good or bad. Don't judge your practice. Stop ruminating and deliberating about stuff. Don't try to become a Buddha.

Each time I get caught up in thought, I adjust my posture. I have never once found myself caught up in thought and not had my posture go subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) wrong. The body follows the mind.