Quotes About Zen

This inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding. Physical quietness seems the easiest to achieve, although there are levels and levels of this too, as attested by the ability of Hindu mystics to live buried alive for many days. Mental quietness, in which one has no wandering thoughts at all, seems more difficult, but can be achieved. But value quietness, in which one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire, that seems the hardest.

Good and bad, happy and sad, all thoughts vanish into emptiness like the imprint of a bird in the sky.

In the Universe the difficult things are done as if they were easy.

It gets kind of zen after awhile, life is a journey, time is a river, the door is ajar.

In general, I call her every night, and we talk for an hour, which is forty-five minutes of me, and fifteen minutes of her stirring her tea, which she steeps with the kind of Zen patience that would make Buddhists sit up in envy and then breathe through their envy and then move past their envy.

Don't go to pieces. Go to peace.

Soul reward is the key element of a Tao-based job.

Once upon a time, there was a Zen sign at every small railway crossing in America Stop. Look. And listen.

I put down my book, The Meaning of Zen, and see the cat smiling into her fur as she delicately combs it with her rough pink tongue. "Cat, I would lend you this book to study but it appears you have already read it." She looks up and gives me her full gaze. "Don't be ridiculous," she purrs, "I wrote it."

Forgetting oneself is opening oneself

do not view mountains from the scale of human thought

Cold Mountain Son Forever not change I live alone Beyond life death

Surfing soothes me, it's always been a kind of Zen experience for me. The ocean is so magnificent, peaceful, and awesome. The rest of the world disappears for me when I'm on a wave.

Moment after moment everything comes out of nothingness. This is the true joy of life.

You have to relax when you're shooting an arrow. You can't be tense. And that just helps, in your day-to-day life.

Zen has no secrets other than seriously thinking about life and death.

A zen master's life is one continuous mistake.

Life, according to Zen, ought to be lived as a bird flies through the air, or as a fish swims in the water.

Concentrate the mind on the present moment.

When you're experiencing what's happening right now, all of a sudden everything that happened to you in your entire life melts away.

Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.

Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

Nurture the spontaneous peaceful life.

In some Zen monasteries, gossip is defined as talking about anything not directly in one's gaze.