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T Quotes

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All T Quotes

“The zazen I speak of is not learning meditation. It is simply the Dharma gate of repose and bliss, the practice-realization of totally culminated enlightenment. It is the manifestation of ultimate reality. Traps and snares can never reach it. Once its heart is grasped, you are like the dragon when he gains the water, like the tiger when she enters the mountain. For you must know that just there (in zazen) the right Dharma is manifesting itself and that, from the first, dullness and distraction are struck aside.”

“The zealous disdain for religion in American jurisprudence amounts to intolerance. Keith Fournier of the American Center for Law and Justice concludes that 'the ones not being tolerated are religious people who dare make any kind of religious reference or take any kind of religious posture outside the private arena.”

“The Zebra is striped all over so that the Lion can see him and eat him. Some people say he is striped so that the Lion can not see him. These people believe that the stripes of the Zebra simulate the bars of sunlight falling through the tall jungle grasses and that therefore the Zebra is invisible and that the earth is flat.”

“The Zen Master warns: 'If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!' This admonition points up that no meaning that comes from outside of ourselves is real. The Buddhahood of each of us has already been obtained. We need only recognize it. Philosophy, religion, patriotism, all are empty idols. The only meaning in our lives is what we each bring to them. Killing the Buddha on the road means destroying the hope that anything outside of ourselves can be out master. No one is any bigger than anyone else. There are no mothers or fathers for grown-ups, only sisters and brothers.”

“The Zen masters have the right idea-no pain no gain: thwack a silly nebbish and he'll remember it far longer and more indelibly than any words you muster at him. Not absolutely everything can or should have to be explained, and particularly not to everybody. But a concussion is a value-judgment anyone gets the point of.”

“The Zen meditative approach has a simple, unstated premise: moods and attitudes shape—determine—what we think and perceive. If we feel happy, we tend to develop certain trains of thought. If we feel sad or angry, still others. But suppose, with training, we become nonattached to distractions and learn to dampen these wild, emotional swings on either side of equanimity. Then we can enter that serene awareness which is the natural soil for positive, spontaneous personal growth, often called spiritual growth.”

“The Zen sect had been favored by the Ashikaga shogunate and had, during the Ashikaga (Muromachi) and the earlier Kamakura periods, supervised commercial and cultural relations with China through the famous Tenryūbune (Tenryūji ships) sponsored by the Tenryūji branch of the Rinzai school in Kyoto. Zen temples played an important cultural role with their schools, the so-called terakoya, and they controlled the celebrated Ashikaga College (referred to by Xavier as the "University of Bando"), a major center for classical Chinese learning. At the beginning of the Tokugawa period, the temples still had important administrative and diplomatic privileges, for instance in the issuing of passports (Boxer 1951, 262). Only later in that period did Zen suffer a setback owing to the rising tide of Confucian orthodoxy.”

“The Zen way of calligraphy is to write in the most straightforward, simple way as if you were a beginner, not trying to make something skillful or beautiful, but simply writing with full attention as if you were discovering what you were writing for the first time; then your full nature will be in your writing.”

“The zest for life of those unusual men and women who make a great zealous success of living is due more often in good part to the craftiness and pertinacity with which they manage to overlook the misery of others. You can watch them watch life beat the stuffing out of the faces of their friends and acquaintances, although they themselves seem to outwit the dense delays of social custom, the tedious tick-tock of bureaucratic obfuscation, accepting loss and age and change and disappointment without suffering punctures in their stomach lining.”

“The Zionist movement did not send any assistance, financial or otherwise, for the victims of Nazism and it did not allow any other side to provide any kind of aid. The Zionist movement concealed the information that came from within the ghetto walls and concentration camps, news that shed light on what was really happening. If it had to publish anything, it did so by questioning that information and diminishing its importance.”