Quotes About Tradition

The teachings of Zen have been deployed in opposition to both religious fundamentalism and anti religious secularism. They have also been used to critique consumerism, technological destruction of and alienation from nature, and other perceived ills of the dominant and domineering worldviews and lifestyles of the modern West. All of this is now part of the ongoing development of Zen as a living and increasingly cross-cultural tradition.

Even if Zen is not currently undergoing the same kind of core doctrinal crisis as Christianity is for some, we should pay attention to suspicious critiques as well as to sympathetic interpretations of the Zen tradition.

I study and practice Zen Buddhism because I experience it as illuminating and liberating. I remain personally engaged with this tradition because I continue to experience it as capable of leading me to truth and liberation, rather than, for example, because it is the tradition that I happen to have been raised in or the one that is most socially convenient for me to adhere to.

The injunction to know oneself can be found in many traditions, including the Western philosophical tradition that goes back to Socrates. According to Zen, however, to truly discover what the self is, we need a more direct path than mere intellectual reasoning.

When one historical period is replaced by another, there is always a group of people left over from the old society

It was only in the Western world that old people were viewed with indulgence or contemptuous sympathy. In other cultures, age was respected as the period of enlightened wisdom.

We're not allowed to learn to die,' Jansson said. 'What do you mean?' 'In the past death was a part of life. Now it's completely separate. I remember I was six years old when my grandmother died. Her body lay on a door in the parlour at home. There was nothing odd about that. Death was a natural part of our lives. Not any more. We no longer learn to die in this country.

An African who loses the ability to die with dignity is a lost man.

the human mind is so constructed that it cannot begin to understand the new until it has done everything in its power to relate it to the old.

preaching means more than handing over a tradition; it is rather the careful and sensitive articulation of what is happening in the community

what is happening here is an unheard-of event: hurtful, offensive, and in radical contradiction to the most venerated tradition of the time. Kenneth Bailey, in his penetrating explanation of Luke's story, shows that the son's manner of leaving is tantamount to wishing his father dead.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains.

I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.

Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid.

We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun

Let us... work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe...till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake...

The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, "They do not make them so now," not emphasizing the "They" at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates

This American Government,-what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will.

Under certain circumstances there are few hours more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

There are few hours in life more agreeable than the ceremony known as afternoon tea

Ah, one doesn't give up one's country any more than one gives UP one's grandmother. They're both antecedent to choice—elements of one's composition that are not to be eliminated.