Z Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with Z. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Zen has an expression, "nothing special." When you understand "nothing special," you realize that everything is special. Everything's special and nothing's special. Everything's spiritual and nothing's spiritual. It's how you see, it's what eyes you're looking through, that matters.”
“Zen has its origin in India and was introduced to China where it united with the thought of Lao-tsu and the realistically oriented world outlook of the Chinese, stressing as it does the value of human labor. Zen further developed by incorporating the Confucian emphasis on etiquette and culture, reaching its zenith in the period from the Tang through the Sung dynasty (618–1279). It was transmitted to Japan in the Kamakura period (1185–1336) where it not only contributed to the disciplining of the spirit of the emotionally prone Japanese people but also deeply influenced the military and fine arts as well as daily life in general.”
Source: The Zen Life
“Zen has lost its zip, if you will, or its nothingness and has become ritualistic Its established in monastaries with strict codes of koan study.”
“Zen has no business with ideas.”
Source: An Introduction to Zen Buddhism
“Zen has no secrets other than seriously thinking about life and death.”
“Zen has no theory. It is a non-theoretical approach into reality. It has no doctrine and no dogma - hence it has no church, no priest, no pope.”
“Zen has nothing to teach us in the way of intellectual analysis; nor has it any set doctrines which are imposed on its followers for acceptance.”
Source: An Introduction to Zen Buddhism
“Zen history relates of many enlightened people, but only hesitatingly does it give any information about what the experience of enlightenment is.”
Source: Zen Enlightenment: Origins And Meaning
“Zen Hugs - the hugs that you would get, if we were there, if we could hug you, but we aren't, and we can't.”
Source: Brain Ships
“Zen in it's essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one's being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom.”
Source: Essays in Zen Buddhism
“Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us.”
Source: Mystics and Zen Masters
“Zen insists that the whole trouble is just our failure to realize that there is no problem.”
“Zen is a double-edged sword, killing words and thoughts, yet at the same time, giving them life. Although beyond human intellect and philosophy, Zen is their root and source.”
“Zen is a journey of exploration and a way of living that, in and of itself, does not belong to any one religion or tradition. It is about experiencing life in the here and now and about removing the dualistic distinctions between "I" and "you" between "subject" and "objective", between our spiritual and our ordinary, everyday activities.”
Source: Zen and the Art of Happiness
“Zen is a kind of unlearning. It teaches you how to drop that which you have learned, how to become unskillful again, how to become a child again, how to start existing without mind again, how to be here without any mind.”
“Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.”
Source: The Way of Zen
“Zen is a living tradition which can help to make sober, healthy, well-balanced, and stable people.”
Source: Zen Keys: A Guide to Zen Practice
“Zen is a path of liberation. It liberates you. It is freedom from the first step to the last. You are not required to follow any rules; you are required to find out your own rules and your own life in the light of awareness.”
Source: Dang Dang Doko Dang : Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh talks on zen
“Zen is a present state of mind where one honors the task they are partaking of, even if the task is sitting still and doing nothing. Zen is engrained in the Japanese way of life. You can see it everywhere: when a sushi chef delicately slices a piece of raw fish, when a retired man watches an autumn leaf fall from a tree in the park, when a mother prepares and places a cup of tea before her child. When actions and thoughts are done with mindfulness, being fully present in the moment, the person performing the action or thought gives honor to the food, an idea, a task, a person, etc.”
Source: The Beasts of Success
“Zen is a single step—the journey of one single step. You can call it the last step or the first step, it doesn’t matter. It is the first and it is the last, the alpha and the omega. The whole teaching of Zen consists of only one thing: how to take a jump into nothingness, how to come to the very end of your mind, which is the end of the world.”
Source: Zen: The Path of Paradox
“Zen is a special transmission outside the Canonical Scriptures; it does not depend upon texts.”
Source: Living Zen
“Zen is a special transmission outside the scriptures,With no reliance on words and letters.A direct pointing to the human mind,And the realization of enlightenment.”
Source: The Zen Art Book: The Art of Enlightenment
“Zen is a study. It's a discipline. It involves the active use of will to make things happen or not happen. These are the secrets of power.”
“Zen is a totally different kind of religion. It brings humanness to religion. It is not bothered about anything superhuman; its whole concern is how to make ordinary life a blessing.”
“Zen is a transcultural and trans-religious phenomenon. No matter where you are, you can always find it. Zen is in you.”
Source: The Zen Teachings of Jesus
“Zen is a very fast path to enlightenment, fast in comparison to some other paths, not fast for the person who practices it. There is no sense of speed.”
“Zen is a very quick path to enlightenment and development of the mind and all its facilities.”
“Zen is a very quick path. Zen is the path of meditation. The word Zen means emptiness or fullness, meditation. Meditation is the quickest path to enlightenment.”
“Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.”
“Zen is about breaking out of your ideas and experiencing life and not ideas.”
“Zen is about performing any task mindfully, thus every act can be turned into meditation like drinking tea, walking. Key is to do anything with awareness.”
“Zen is all-inclusive. It never denies, it never says no to anything; it accepts everything and transforms it into a higher reality.”
“Zen is an especially intriguing school of Buddhism because it brings to mind paradoxical images of monks happily living quiet lives, meditating on mountaintops, as well as powerful martial artists.”
Source: Practical Meditation for Beginners: 10 Days to a Happier, Calmer You
“Zen is based on the recognition of two incompatible types of thought: rational and intuitive.”
“Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness.”
Source: Thoughts On The East
“Zen is discipline - the discipline of living life, the discipline of taking a breath, the discipline of not knowing and not trying to know.”
“Zen is eminently practical in seeing nature as a model for human behavior to learn and practice the way of the dharma. For example, the pine trees weathering the harsh winter storms teach a lesson in the value of dedication and determination in pursing the path to enlightenment; bamboo branches that sway but are not broken by the breeze teach flexibility and the need to overcome stubborn one-sided or partial views; and evaporating dew, which accepts its brevity and inevitable demise, shows the demise, significance of adjusting and abandoning resistance to the impermanence of reality. These natural images, which are used extensively in the Chinese and Japanese poetic traditions, frequently enter into various styles of Zen verse and prose, not just as rhetorical flourishes but as indicators of inner spiritual transformation.”
Source: Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?
“Zen is everywhere.... But for you, Zen is right here.”
“Zen is forced to resort to negation because of our innate ignorance (avidya), which tenaciously clings to the mind as wet clothes do to the body. 'Ignorance' is all very well as far as it goes, but it must not go out of its proper sphere. 'Ignorance' is another name for logical dualism. White is snow and black is the raven. But these belong to the world and its ignorant way of talking. If we want to get to the very truth of things, we must see them from the point where this world has not yet been created, where the consciousness of this and that has not yet been awakened and where the mind is absorbed in its own identity, that is, in its serenity and emptiness. This is a world of negations but leading to a higher and absolute affirmation--an affirmation in the midst of negations. Snow is not white, the raven is not black, yet each in itself is white or black. This is where our everyday language fails to convey the exact meaning as conceived by Zen.”
Source: An Introduction to Zen Buddhism
“Zen is important as a counterbalance to the western eagerness and performance thinking. As long as one cannot concede more than 60-100 years of earthly existence with appropriate vitality, the relativism will dominate the continuum for all times and makes the rational-materialist thinking totally annihilated, because all the material and utopian values can´t be transferred into the other sphere.”
“Zen is influenced by Daoism, which is not so much a nature-religion in the animistic sense as a nature-philosophy in a cosmic sense.”
“Zen is just a lifestyle, your everyday life. It is doing your best at your job, relationships, health, hobbies, and other daily activities!”
“Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.”
Source: Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World
“Zen is like soap. First you wash with it, and then you wash off the soap.”
“Zen is magic. It gives you the key to open the miraculous. And the miraculous is in you and the key is also in you.”
Source: Zen: The Path of Paradox
“Zen is meditation, the actual experience of life directly, immediately with no buffers.”
“ZEN is MEDITATION. ARCHY is Social Order. ZENARCHY is the Social Order which springs from Meditation. As a doctrine, it holds Universal Enlightenment a prerequisite to abolition of the State, after which a State will inevitably vanish. Or - that failing - nobody will give a damn.”
“Zen is 'mind-satiation.”
“Zen is mind-less activity, that is, Mind-ful activity, and it may often be advisable to emphasize the mind, and say, Take care of the thoughts and the actions will take care of themselves.”
Source: Zen in English literature and oriental classics
“Zen is non-serious. Zen has a tremendous sense of humor. No other religion has evolved so much that it can have that sense of humor.”