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Quote by Shohaku Okumura

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The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo

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Shohaku Okumura

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“Harry, there is never a perfect answer in this messy, emotional world. Perfection is beyond the reach of humankind, beyond the reach of magic. In every shining moment of happiness is that drop of poison: the knowledge that pain will come again. Be honest to those you love, show them your pain. To suffer is as human as to breathe.”

“...a key idea in Russian literature: the meaning of life can be revealed only to those who suffer. The happy can doze, the miserable must reflect. 'Suffering lays bare the real nature of things,' Evgeniya Ginzburg observed. 'It is the price to be paid for a deeper, more truthful understanding of life.' Suffering sometimes reveals higher meanings and, as Solzhenitsyn insisted, 'nothing worthwhile can be built on a neglect of higher meanings.”

“Life is suffering Love is the desire to see unnecessary suffering ameliorated Truth is the handmaiden of love Dialogue is the pathway to truth Humility is recognition of personal insufficiency and the willingness to learn To learn is to die voluntarily and be born again, in great ways and small So speech must be untrammeled So that dialogue can take place So that we can all humbly learn So that truth can serve love So that suffering can be ameliorated So that we can all stumble forward to the Kingdom of God”

“The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths; of exquisite interrelationships; of the awesome machinery of nature. The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we've learned most of what we know. Recently we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

“...horror reminds us of the utter hopelessness and meaninglessness of evil and suffering; when a child dies of cancer there is no “hidden” meaning, no cosmic plan that we have to wait for to be revealed one day that will make sense of this great suffering, rather, the death of any child is an utter disgrace, a meaningless void of pain that hurts every part of what it means to be human, and any attempt to frame such tragedy as part of God’s plan needs to be exorcised from all our thinking.”