Z Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with Z. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Zen is none other than Buddhism.”
Source: Zen Keys: A Guide to Zen Practice
“Zen is not a particular state but the normal state: silent, peaceful, unagitated. In Zazen neither intention, analysis, specific effort nor imagination take place. It's enough just to be without hypocrisy, dogmatism, arrogance - embracing all opposites.”
“Zen is not a philosophy, it is poetry. It does not propose, it simply persuades. It does not argue, it simply sings its own song.”
“Zen is not a religion. There is no room for a cult. There is no dependence on a teacher. There is only learning how to use your own mind and making it strong.”
“Zen is not about eliminating thoughts but illuminating them.”
“Zen is not coextensive with any one school, whether that be Korean Sŏn or Japanese Rinzai Zen. There have actually been many independent strands of what has come to be called Zen, the sorting out of which has occupied scholars of Buddhism for the last few decades. These sectarian divisions are further complicated by the fact that there are Zen traditions in all four East Asian countries—China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam—each of which has its own independent history, doctrine, and mode of practice. While each of these traditions has developed independently, all have been heavily influenced by the Chinese schools of Ch'an (Kor. Sŏn; Jpn. Zen; Viet. Thiên). We are therefore left with an intricate picture of several independent national traditions of Zen, but traditions that do have considerable synergy between them. To ignore these national differences would be to oversimplify the complicated sectarian scene that is East Asian Zen; but to overemphasize them would be to ignore the multiple layers of symbiosis between Zen's various national branches. These continuities and transformations between the different strands must both be kept in mind in order to understand the character of the "Zen tradition.”
Source: The Zen Monastic Experience
“Zen is not effort. Effort is tension, effort is work, effort is to achieve something. Zen is not something to achieve. You are already that. Just relax, relax so deeply that you become a revelation to yourself.”
“Zen is not, in the end, a Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, or Indian path. It is a path for all human beings who are sincerely interested in coming to know themselves.”
Source: Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism
“Zen is not interested in high-flown statements; it wants its pupil to bite his apple and not discuss it.”
“Zen is not morality, it is aesthetics. It does not impose a code of morality. it does not give you any commandments: do this, don't do that.”
“Zen is not some fancy, special art of living. Our teaching is just to live, always in reality, in its exact sense. To make our effort, moment after moment, is our way. In an exact sense, the only thing we actually can study in our life is that on which we are working in each moment. We cannot even study Buddha’s words.”
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“So we should be concentrated with our full mind and body on what we do; and we should be faithful, subjectively and objectively, to ourselves, and especially to our feelings. Even when you do not feel so well, it is better to express how you feel without any particular attachment or intention. So you may say, “Oh, I am sorry, I do not feel well.”
Source: Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice
“Zen is not some fancy, special art of living. Our teaching is just to live, always in reality, in its exact sense. To make our effort, moment after moment, is our way.”
Source: Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
“Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine.”
Source: Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
“Zen is not “attained” by mirror-wiping mediation, but by “self-forgetfulness in the existential 'present' of life here and now.” We do not “come”, we “are.” Don't strive to become, but be.”
“Zen is not, in my view, philosophy or mysticism. It is simply a practice of readjustment of nervous activity. That is, it restores the distorted nervous system to its normal functioning.”
Source: Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy
“Zen is nothing to get excited about.”
Source: Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice
“Zen is perhaps best known not so much for the negation of speech, which would represent an extreme view, but for inventing a creative new style of expression that uses language in unusual and ingenious fashions to surpass a reliance on everyday words and letters.”
Source: Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?
“Zen is poetry; poetry is Zen.”
“Zen is really extraordinarily simple as long as one doesn't try to be cute about it or beat around the bush! Zen is simply the sensation and the clear understanding ... that there is behind the multiplicity of events and creatures in this universe simply one energy -- and it appears as you, and everything is it. The practice of Zen is to understand that one energy so as to "feel it in your bones.”
“Zen is really just a reminder to stay alive and to be awake. We tend to daydream all the time, speculating about the future and dwelling on the past. Zen practice is about appreciating your life in this moment. If you are truly aware of five minutes a day, then you are doing pretty well. We are beset by both the future and the past, and there is no reality apart from the here and now.”
“Zen is simple because it is a spontaneous journey to the truth, but difficult because of our conditioned minds, the insane world in which we live, by which we have been brought up, by which we have been corrupted.”
“Zen is Tantric Buddhism, Vajrayana is tantric Buddhism - these are various forms of it. Tantric Buddhism simply means cutting to the chase.”
“Zen is the complete cessation of mental suffering.”
“Zen is the enemy of analysis, the friend of intuition. The Zen artist understands the ends of his art intuitively, and the last thing he would do is create categories; the avowed purpose of Zen is to eliminate categories! The true Zen-man holds to the old Taoist proverb,
Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.”
“Zen is the fastest method I know of, aside from mysticism, of dissolving the fixations people have about spiritual practice and themselves.”
“Zen is the game of insight, the game of discovering who you are beneath the social masks.”
Source: Games Zen Masters Play: Writings of R. H. Blyth
“Zen is the most scientific method to inquire into your consciousness. It takes you beyond mind into a space called no-mind. No self, but pure awareness, and you have a taste of eternity and immortality.”
“Zen is the only religion in the world that teaches sudden enlightenment. It says that enlightenment takes no time, it can happen in a single, split second.”
“Zen is the path that focuses the most upon meditation. It is almost exclusively a path of meditation.”
“Zen is the period of time during which a person has true clarity of vision.”
“Zen is the purest of meditations: just sit silently, doing nothing.”
Source: The Secret of Secrets
“Zen is the spirit of a man. Zen believes in his inner purity and goodness. Whatever is superadded or violently torn away, injures the wholesomeness of the spirit. Zen, therefore, is emphatically against all religious conventionalism.”
Source: An Introduction to Zen Buddhism
“Zen is the study of mind in all of its manifestations. The purpose of Zen is to be happy.”
“Zen is the unsymbolization of the world.”
“Zen is the vehicle of reality.”
Source: The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems
“Zen is the very awareness of the dynamism of life living itself in us—and aware of itself, in us, as being the one life that lives in all.”
Source: Mystics and Zen Masters
“Zen is the way of complete self-realization; a living human being who follows the way of Zen can attain satori and then live a new life as a Buddha.”
Source: A Flower Does Not Talk: Zen Essays
“Zen is the way of splitting the self again and again, untilt there is nothing left.”
“Zen is to eat, breathe, cook, carry water, and scrub the toilet, to infuse every act of body, speech, and mind with mindfulness, to illuminate every leaf and pebble, every heap of garbage, every path that leads to our mind’s return home. Only a person who has grasped the art of cooking, washing dishes, sweeping, and chopping wood, someone who is able to laugh at the world’s weapons of money, fame, and power, can hope to descend the mountain as a hero.”
Source: Fragrant Palm Leaves: Journals, 1962-1966
“Zen is to have the heart and soul of a little child.”
“Zen is to religion what a Japanese "rock garden" is to a garden. Zen knows no god, no afterlife, no good and no evil, as the rock-garden knows no flowers, herbs or shrubs. It has no doctrine or holy writ: its teaching is transmitted mainly in the form of parables as ambiguous as the pebbles in the rock-garden which symbolise now a mountain, now a fleeting tiger. When a disciple asks "What is Zen?", the master's traditional answer is "Three pounds of flax" or "A decaying noodle" or "A toilet stick" or a whack on the pupil's head.”
“Zen is very easy! It's like touching your nose when you wash your face in the morning!”
“Zen is when the neighbours think you've completely lost it!”
“Zen is...joyous iconoclasm which respects nothing and no one, particularly itself.”
“Zen isn't the emptying of the mind; it's the complete satiation of the mind, which is why it's called 'mindful-ness'. Your mind is full; nothing else can go in there.”
“Zen lives in the present. The Whole teaching is: how to be in the present; how to get out of the past which is no more and how not to get involved in the future which is not yet, and just to be rooted, centered, in that which is.”
“Zen Makes use, to a great extent, of poetical expressions; Zen is wedded to poetry.”
“Zen martini: A martini with no vermouth at all. And no gin, either.”
Source: Modern manners
“Zen Master Dogen has pointed out that anxiety, when accepted, is the driving force to enlightenment in that it lays bare the human dilemma at the same time that it ignites our desire to break out of it.”
Source: Awakening to Zen: The Teachings of Roshi Philip Kapleau
“Zen masters say you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.”