Quotes About Zen

It's pre-photography, a fossilization of time, Americans have done the Zen garden to death. I wanted to do something different.

We shape clay into a pot, but it is emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. -TAO TE CHING

As the famous Zen master Dogen has said: To study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be one with others.

the greater the stillness, the farther you could travel, until, in absolute immobility, you achieved absolute speed.

transcendental volleyball

Life Infinite Beyond words, this no-thingness within, Which I've become. So to remain Only one thing's needed: Zen sitting. I think, breathe with my whole body - Marvellous. The joy's so pure, It's beyond lovemaking, anything. I can see, live anywhere, everywhere. I need nothing, not even life.

A student, filled with emotion and crying, implored, Why is there so much suffering? Suzuki Roshi replied, No reason.

What we call I is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale.

In zazen, leave your front door and your back door open. Let thoughts come and go. Just don't serve them tea.

May you find the path of peace.

Great doubt: great awakening. Little doubt: little awakening. No doubt: no awakening. —Zen mantra

All our efforts won't make water any wetter.

If I had the knack I'd sing like Cherry flakes falling

dozing on horseback smoke form the tea-fires drifts to the moon

Furi ika ya! Kawaza tobikomu Mizo no oto

Working with plants, trees, fences and walls, if they practice sincerely they will attain enlightenment.

Do your best, one shot at a time and then move on. Remember that golf is just a game.

Christopher, like most people, didn't like his universe being unfathomable, so I doubted that a Zen koan would help him.

To watch the sun sink behind a flower clad hill. To wander on in a huge forest without thought of return. To stand upon the shore and gaze after a boat that disappears behind distant islands. To contemplate the flight of wild geese seen and lost among the clouds. And, subtle shadows of bamboo on bamboo.

But for the first time, I had a religious identity. I had come home. And so I called myself a Zen Buddhist at the age of 18.

One has to adopt a sort of Zen calm, in which you know you wrote the best book that you could at the time.

It's been said that the entire philosophical foundation of Zen is contained in three small words: "Not always so." If you want to stop emotional eating (which means you'll eat only out of physical hunger, which means you'll eventually be the right weight for your body) you must become willing to apply those three words to your own beliefs. THE

By emphasizing doubt rather than belief, perplexity rather than certainty, and questions rather than answers, Zen practice granted me the freedom to imagine.

This deep not-knowing, in this case the Second Patriarch's inability to find his anguished mind, takes the notion of agnosticism down to another depth. One might call it a contemplative depth. Such deep agnostic metaphors are likewise found in such terms as wu hsin (no mind), and wu nien (no thought), as well as in the more popular "don't know mind" of the Korean Zen master Seung Sah?