Quotes About Zen

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.

To me Zen is a communal practice of individual deep inquiry.

Tibetan Buddhists talk a lot about rebirth, both the rebirth of normal unenlightened people and that of enlightened beings such as the Dalai Lama, who is thought to be a reincarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion. By contrast, Zen Buddhists rarely talk in detail or in literal terms about rebirth or reincarnation.

When Confucius was asked about death, he replied: "We do not yet understand life how could we possibly understand death?" Analogously, when asked questions about death, Zen masters are likely to turn the questioner's attention back to life.

In Zen, resolving the great matter of life and death requires facing up to mortality. In order to truly live, we have to come to terms with the termination of life as we know it.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." According to Dante, these lines are written over the gates of Hell. Zen masters, by contrast, have high hopes for going to Hell. For them, out of bottomless compassion, we should want to go to Hell. When asked by a college student in America if he thought people go to Heaven after they die, the modern Rinzai Zen master Fukushima Keid? replied: "Only the ego wants to go to Heaven!

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.

Whereas some schools of Buddhism distinguish more sharply between the preparatory practice of concentration and the liberating practice of insight, Zen views concentration and insight as two sides of the same coin: when the mind is cleared, settled, and focused, it naturally attains insight and manifests its innate wisdom.

Zen meditation is meant to bring an end to the delusory and destructive ego, not to serve it as a means for achieving its ends.

In the Western imagination, "Zen" has connotations of hip and cool, liberal and progressive; it is thought to be a fashionable and easygoing spirituality with just the right touch of esoteric exoticism and none of the stuffy and constrictive baggage of dogmatic institutional religions. In Japan, by contrast, Zen is generally associated with the strict discipline of a rigorous spiritual practice and also with a traditional, ritualistic, and culturally conservative religious establishment.

To properly set out on the path to Zen, we must empty our cups—in other words, we need to open our minds.

Faith does play an important role in Buddhism, including in Zen: faith as preliminary trust and ultimately faith as true self-confidence.

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.

Difficult as it may be, I think it is not impossible for the same person to be a scrupulous scholar and dedicated practitioner of Zen, and to let these two disciplines fruitfully supplement and constructively critique each other.

Zen is not, in the end, a Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, or Indian path. It is a path for all human beings who are sincerely interested in coming to know themselves.

Contrary to some popular opinions and partial teachings, Zen is not, in the end, opposed to rational thought. But it does teach that we need to dig down beneath discursive reasoning by means of meditation, reconnecting intellectual knowledge to a deeper, more holistic wisdom.

The Japanese word zen in fact means "meditation" or "state of meditative concentration." In Chinese, zen is pronounced chan . Chan is short for channa , which is how the CHinese pronounced dhyana , the Sanskrit word used in India for practices or rarified states of meditative concentration.

Inspired by Zen, the avant-garde composer John Cage shocked the music world in 1952 when he composed a piece that entailed just sitting in silence at a piano or other instrument(s) without playing a single note for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. He wanted the audience to hear the music that is going on around us all the time.

I remember a student presenting with great enthusiasm a summary of a book on Zen meditation while his own life experiences of restlessness, loneliness and desire for solitude and quietude remained an unknown book of knowledge to him. Just as words can become obstacles for communication, books can prevent self-knowledge.

One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?

How very like Zen is this from Whitman: "Is it lucky to be born? It is just as lucky to die." In summarizing his pages on Whitman, Bucke makes, among others, the following statements: In no man who ever lived was the sense of eternal life so absolute. Fear of death was absent. Neither in health nor in sickness did he show any sign of it, and there is every reason to believe he did not feel it. He had no sense of sin.