Quotes About Zen

As Hindus say, the mind is like a chattering, drunken monkey.

The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.

Should you desire the great tranquility prepare to sweat white beads.

Abandonnez les offrandes d'encens, les prosternations, le nenbutsu, la pratique du repentir et la lecture des sutras : restez simplement assis (shikantaza).

The Book of Five Rings, by Miyamoto Musashi,

Reece's time with the bow was not so much about hitting the target as it was about the discipline of the art. It was a meditative state where any outside influences and distractions ceased to exist.

When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, 'What is the sound of the waterfall?' 'Silence,' he finally told me.

wisdom? As the Zen texts explain, "To live in trusting

Samadhi doesn't just come of itself; it takes practice.

In Buddhist practice, the outward and inward aspects of taking the one seat meet on our meditation cushion.

No past. No future. Just this perfect Now.

As your Zen says, go with the flow, even if the flow is meaningless.

She reads a book about Zen and she writes down on a piece of paper the eight parts of Buddha's eightfold path and thinks she might follow it. She sees that it mainly involves doing everything right.

I know just enough about myself to know I cannot settle for one of those simplifications which indignant people seize upon to make understandable a world too complex for their comprehension. Astrology, health food, flag waving, bible thumping, Zen, nudism, nihilism—all of these are grotesque simplifications which small dreary people adopt in the hope of thereby finding The Answer, because the very concept that maybe there is no answer, never has been, never will be, terrifies them.

Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.

Underlying great doubt there is great satori, where there is thorough questioning there will be thoroughgoing experience of awakening.

Personal experience, therefore, is everything in Zen. No ideas are intelligible to those who have no backing of experience.

Zen culture invites us to experience reality without the intervening distractions of intellect, categories, analysis.

Zen values the simple, concrete, living facts of everyday direct personal experience.

Nothing to say, nothing to prove, nothing to gain and nothing to lose.

First you have to do all that you can do, and then you have to learn non-doing. The doing of the non-doing is the greatest doing, and the effort of effortlessness is the greatest effort.

Mindfulness has been called the heart of Buddhist meditation.

New Yorker cartoon: Two Zen monks in robes and shaved heads, one young, one old, sitting side by side cross-legged on the floor. The younger one is looking somewhat quizzically at the older one, who is turned toward him and saying: "Nothing happens next. This is it.

No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.