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Quote by Mehmet Murat Ildan

“Student: Master, you are a wise man, give me the secret of happiness! Master: Is there a nail where you are sitting? Student: No, master. Master: Then you're happy! Student: What if I said there is a nail on my seat, master? Master: Then I would say stand up and be happy!”

Author

Mehmet Murat Ildan

Mehmet Murat Ildan is a renowned Turkish writer born on May 16, 1965. His works span various literary forms including novels, essays, and poetry, and have gained widespread popularity among readers. more

“In sumi-e, he said, as in haiku aur in any Zen training, the aim was to develop a discipline so sure and a spirit so true that one could afford to be atleast spontaneous; to get into such a state of deliberateness that as soon as one put pen to paper, one would produce something powerful and true.”

Discipline Zen

Book:The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

Source: The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“In sumi-e, he said, as in haiku or in any Zen training, the aim was to develop a discipline so sure and a spirit so true that one could afford to be atleast spontaneous; to get into such a state of deliberateness that as soon as one put pen to paper, one would produce something powerful and true.”

Discipline Zen

Book:The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

Source: The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“As I read deeper in the Zen poets, I soon stumbled upon Ikkyū, the fifteenth-century sword-wielding monk of Daitokuji, who had entered a temple at the age of six and gone on to express his contempt for the corrupt monasteries of his time in famously controversial poems. Like the Sixth Dalai Lama, in his way, Ikkyū had been a patron - and a laureate - of the local taverns, and of the pretty girls he had found therein; and like his Tibetan counterpart, or John Donne in our own tradition, he had deliberately conflated the terms of earthly love with those of devotion to the Absolute. The very name he gave himself, "Crazy Cloud", had played subversively on the fact that "cloud water" was a traditional term for monks, who wandered without trace, yet "cloud rain" was a conventional idiom for the act of love. His image of the "red thread" ran through the austere surroundings of his poems as shockingly as the scarlet peonies of Akiko. And in his refusal to kowtow to convention, the maverick monk had turned every certainty on its head: whores, he said, could be like ideal monks - since they inhabited the ideal Zen state of "no min" - while monks, in selling themselves for gold brocade, were scarcely different from whores. Many of his verses trembled with this ambiguity. One couplet, taken one way, was translated as "Making distinctions between good and evil, the monk's skill lies in knowing the essential condition of the Buddha and the Devil"; taken another way, it meant: "That girl is no good, this one will do; the monk's skill is in having the appetite of a devilish Buddha.”

Zen Monks Ikkyū

Book:The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

Source: The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto