Quotes About Zen

My Dharma is the practice of nonpractice.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh

Sit in order to sit. Stand in order to stand. There is no goal or aim in sitting.

We sit as if we are sitting on a lotus flower, not on a heap of burning charcoal.

Sometimes people say they don't know what to do when they are sitting. You only need to sit is an exhortation of the Soto Zen meditation school. It means that you should sit without waiting for a miracle, and that includes the miracle of enlightenment. If you always sit in expectation, you're not in the present moment. The present moment contains the whole of life.

Zen Master Doc The says that when sitting in meditation, one should sit upright, giving birth to this thought, "Sitting here is like sitting on the Bodhi spot.

Many practitioners are inclined to think that sitting in meditation is a means for obtaining Awakening, which would thus be an end. However, a line of demarcation between the end and the means cannot truly be established. When we turn from forgetfulness to awareness of being, this state is already true Awakening. This is why the Ts'ao-t'ung [Soto] sect has said, To sit in meditation is to be Buddha. When one truly sits in meditation, one finds oneself Awakened; and Awakening is Buddha himself.

To sit with only the intention of finding the meaning of a kung-an [koan] is not truly to sit in Zen; it is to spend one's time and one's life vainly. If one sits in meditation it is not in order to reflect on a kung-an, but in order to light the lamp of one's true being; the meaning of the kung-an will be revealed quite naturally in this light which becomes more and more brilliant.

The kung-an is the lamp-shade, while Zen is the lamp itself.

One cannot become a practitioner of Zen just by imitating the way of eating, sitting, or dressing of Chinese or Japanese practitioners. Zen is life, Zen does not imitate. If Zen is to fully take root in the West, it must acquire a Western form, different from Oriental Zen.

Live every moment of your life deeply, and while walking, eating, drinking, and looking at the morning star, you touch the ultimate dimension.

My temple followed the Zen tradition; therefore every one of us from the highest monk to the newest member equally followed the principle of no work, no food.

The S?t? school of meditation has the saying: "You cannot conceive the inconceivable. Not trying to conceive what is inconceivable is the essence of meditation.

Zen is the very awareness of the dynamism of life living itself in us—and aware of itself, in us, as being the one life that lives in all.

Suzuki also frequently quotes a sentence of Eckhart's: "The eye wherein I see God is the same eye wherein God sees me" (Suzuki, Mysticism: East and West, p. 50) as an exact expression of what Zen means by Prajna.

It is true, the Zen-man's contempt for conventional and formalistic social custom is a healthy phenomenon, but it is healthy only because it presupposes a spiritual liberty based on freedom from passion, egotism and self-delusion. A pseudo-Zen attitude which seeks to justify a complete moral collapse with a few rationalizations based on the Zen Masters is only another form of bourgeois self-deception.

What Zen communicates is an awareness that is potentially already there but is not conscious of itself. Zen is then not Kerygma but realization, not revelation but consciousness, not news from the Father who sends His Son into this world, but awareness of the ontological ground of our own being here and now, right in the midst of the world.

Our product is still totally DeepArcher?" "Which is…" "Like 'departure', only you pronounce it DeepArcher?" "Zen thing," Maxine guesses. "Weed thing.

To cast off the delusive way of ordinary consciousness while sitting on a cushion in a quiet room is only the beginning. The student must learn to live in the ordinary world, while yet retaining the quality of his experience of absolute samadhi.

One may practice zazen for twenty, thirty, even fifty years, and go through failures and frustrations, but every defeat and time of despair is in reality a gain rather than a loss. Any experience is to be regarded as a part of one's assets.

Zen training is a means of enabling us to live our ordinary lives supremely well.

Zen is above all a matter of personal experience. The student is asked to accept nothing the truth of which he cannot demonstrate for himself, with his own mind and body.

Katsuki Sekida, Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy (New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1975; Boston: Shambhala, 2005).