Quotes About Meditation

The entire moon and sky can be reflected in a dewdrop on a blade of grass.

Buddhas do not make intentional efforts for this to happen," he says; "it happens when they are activated by the moment of the present." You get it when you allow the universe to act through you without hindering what it wants with your own petty needs and wishes.

He had the saffron robes, the shaved head, and that mellow spiritual way of talking that let you know here was a guy who had truly achieved a rare state of inner with-it-ness.

Practicing zazen is like gradually (or maybe not so gradually) getting your sight back.

At best, past and future are no more than reference material for the eternal now. The only real facts are those at the present moment.

So I do fear death in the sense that I find the prospect of dying pretty scary. But I no longer fear that I will one day be annihilated and cease to exist.

The Buddha was not full of shit when he said the cause of suffering could be uprooted and that you can put an end to it once and for all. There is a way out of this mess humanity has found itself in. It's just that the answer to the cause of suffering — and the way to end it — are nothing at all like what you think they are or imagine they should be.

If you don't want to be grabbed by God," Zen teacher Jiyu Kennet said, "don't stare at a wall. Definitely don't sit still.

Often statues depicting the Buddha's moment of enlightenment show him touching the ground. This symbolizes that his enlightened state included a firm grounding in this reality instead of serving as an escape from it.

In conclusion, polishing a stone really does transform it into a mirror. If stones couldn't become mirrors, regular people couldn't become Buddhas. If we hate stones for being hunks of dirt, you might as well hate people for being hunks of dirt. If people have minds, stones must also have minds. Who can notice that there are mirrors in which stones are reflected? Who can notice that there are mirrors in which mirrors are reflected?

When I teach zazen I often tell people that it's kind of like a yoga class where there is only one posture and you hold it for a very long time.

When you study Buddhism, you should have a general house cleaning of your mind. You must take everything out of your room and clean it thoroughly. If it is necessary, you may bring everything back in again. You may want many things, so one by one you can bring them back. But if they are not necessary, there is no need to keep them.

When you study a speck of dust thoroughly and completely, you study the entire universe.

Zen is the complete absence of belief. Zen is the complete lack of authority.

You can do zazen by yourself. You do Zen Buddhism with other people.

Dhammapada. Anyhow,

When you do zazen, you're not trying to achieve a totally empty mind. That would be impossible. But you are trying to avoid the deliberate habitual manipulation of thoughts and images we usually engage in.

Dwelling on past mistakes is a way of reinforcing your ego. The ego can be strengthened just as well by dwelling on what's bad about you as it can by dwelling on what's good. In fact, for some of us — myself included — dwelling on what's bad about ourselves reinforces the ego much more effectively than dwelling on what's good.

The practice of zazen can help you gradually clear away the layers of mental noise that prevent you from seeing how the things you're going through now relate to the stuff you did in the past.

As the French philosopher Blaise Pascal famously said, "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." It's a shame that simply being quiet is so difficult for us.

I never entered a monastery as a full-time live-in monk, which many people consider the only way to practice what D?gen preached. But this would ignore the fact that D?gen taught a number of lay students throughout his life and, indeed, recommended zazen as a daily practice not only for those who live in monasteries but also to anyone interested in self-discovery.

The truth is everywhere all around us, but if we don't practice, it doesn't show itself and we can't experience it.

So Buddhism is not the worship of a guy named Buddha; it's learning to manifest your unique inner Buddha.

In zazen we practice the oneness of reality.