Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Kaoru Nonomura

Quote by Kaoru Nonomura

“Without going into the history of Zen, let it be said that the relationship between master and disciple has always been fraught with peril. The hapless disciple is beaten with a stick, kicked, slapped on the head with his teacher's sandal. But to revile all such actions as violence is too hasty a conclusion. Before an act can be labeled violent, its underlying purpose must be ascertained. A little thought will show that in the context of Zen discipline, the fundamental purpose of a beating or thrashing is not to inflict injury or pain. Such acts are rather a means of conveying living truth from body to body and mind to mind, a form of spiritual training and cultivation.”

Quote by Kaoru Nonomura

Book:Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan's Most Rigorous Zen Temple
Create image

Work

Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan's Most Rigorous Zen Temple

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Kaoru Nonomura

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Kaoru Nonomura. more

You May Also Like

“The best way to do this is by putting these teachings into practice in our daily lives. Experience always goes beyond ideas. Tenth-century Vietnamese master Thiên Hôi told his students, “Be diligent in order to attain the state of no birth and no death.” One student asked, “Where can we touch the world of no birth and no death?” and he responded, “Right here in the world of birth and death.” To touch the water, you have to touch the waves. If you touch birth and death deeply, you touch the world of no birth and no death.”

ZenLife And DeathVietnamZen Buddhism
Book:The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching : Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy and Liberation
Create image

“In Zen Buddhist texts they say, “You cannot nail a peg into the sky.” And so, to be a man of the sky, a man of the void, is also called ‘a man not depending on anything’. And when you’re not hung on anything you are the only thing that isn’t hung on anything – which is the universe. Which doesn’t hang, you see. Where would it hang? It has no place to fall on, even though it may be dropping; there will never be the crash of it landing on a concrete floor somewhere. But the reason for that is that it won’t crash below because it doesn’t hang above. And so there is a poem, in Chinese, which speaks of such a person as having above, not a tile to cover the head; below, not an inch of ground on which to stand.”

GodSpiritualityUniverseBuddhismZenVoidImpermanenceClingingAlan Watts
Book:Out of Your Mind
Create image

“It is precisely this [transcendental] privilege that Christian missionaries in China and Japan failed to relinquish when they spoke about Buddhism; but the same failure is found in such "na(t)ive" exponents of Zen as D. T. Suzuki, and it would perhaps be hard to decide which version of Zen, the negative or the idealized, is most misleading. Even if the degree of reductionism is not quite the same in both cases, both interpretations share responsibility for the strange predicament in which Westerners who approach Chan/Zen find themselves: they are unable to consider it a serious intellectual system, for the constraints of Western discourse on Zen cause them to either devaluate it as an Eastern form of either "natural mysticism" or "quietism" or to idealize it as a wonderfully exotic Dharma. In this sense, Zen can be seen as a typical example of "secondary Orientalism," a stereotype concocted as much by the Japanese themselves as by Westerners.”

ZenChan
Book:Chan Insights and Oversights
Create image