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Zen Quotes

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Zen Quotes

“Acceptance is a deceptive word. It suggests compliance, a consenting to my condition and to who I have become. This form of acceptance is often seen as weakness, submission. We say I accept my punishment. Or I accept your decision. But such assent, while passive in essence, does provide the stable, rocklike foundation for coping with a condition that will not go away. It is a powerful passivity, the Zen of Illness, that allows for endurance.”

AcceptanceIllnessZenDisabilityCopingPersonal Essays
Author:Floyd Skloot
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“Over time I began to recognize the possibilities for transformation. I saw another kind of acceptance as being viable, the kind espoused by Robert Frost when he said "Take what is given, and make it over your own way." That is, after all, the root meaning of the verb "to accept," which comes from the Latin accipere, or "take to oneself." It implies an embrace. Not a giving up but a welcoming. People encourage the sick to resist, to fight back [...b]ut it wasn't possible to resist [...]. I began to realize that the most aggressive act I could perform on my own behalf was to stop struggling and discover what I could really do.”

AcceptanceIllnessZenDisabilityCopingPersonal Essays
Author:Floyd Skloot
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“In his poems and in his teaching of other poets, Bashō set forth a simple, deeply useful reminder: that if you see for yourself, hear for yourself, and enter deeply enough this seeing and hearing, all things will speak with and through you. “To learn about the pine tree,” he told his students, “go to the pine tree; to learn from the bamboo, study bamboo.” He found in every life and object an equal potential for insight and expansion. A good subject for haiku, he suggested, is a crow picking mud-snails from between a rice paddy’s plants. Seen truly, he taught, there is nothing that does not become a flower, a moon. “But unless things are seen with fresh eyes,” he added, “nothing’s worth writing down.” A wanderer all his life both in body and spirit, Bashō concerned himself less with destination than with the quality of the traveller’s attention. A poem, he comments, only exists while it’s on the writing desk; by the time its ink has dried, it should be recognized as just a scrap of paper. In poetry as in life, he saw each moment as gate-latch. Permeability mattered more in this process than product or will: “If we were to gain mastery over things, we would find their lives would vanish under us without a trace.”

ZenMatsuo Basho
Author:Jane Hirshfield
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“This is why modern civilization is in almost every respect a vicious circle. It is insatiably hungry because its way of life condemns it to perpetual frustration. [...] [T]he root of this frustration is that we live for the future, and the future is an abstraction, a rational inference from experience, which exists only for the brain. The "primary consciousness," the basic mind which knows reality rather than ideas about it, does not know the future. It lives completely in the present, and perceives nothing more that what is at this moment. The ingenious brain, however, looks at that part of present experience called memory, and by studying it is able to make predictions. These predictions are, relatively, so accurate and reliable (e.g., "everyone will die") that the future assumes a high degree of reality - so high that the present loses its value.”

MindfulnessZen
Book:The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
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“Zen would say that in adopting, too completely, the scientific view of reality we have closed the door on a more holistic view of life and are limiting ourselves to a rather mundane view of something altogether extraordinary. Zen maintains that our dualistic view of life means that whatever we perceive goes through our mental filtering systems before being cognitively understood. We use mental boxes for all aspects of our daily lives so we can make sense of our world and interact with oth- ers. With the development of language, though, this cognitive grasp of reality means that everything we perceive is subject to these men- tal processes, and so from early childhood we lose the ability to directly perceive the world. This is the point where dualism starts.”

SpiritualityZen
Book:Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence - Understanding the Zen Philosophy of Beauty in Simplicity
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“Het losstaan van één specifieke traditie beaam ik als legitiem, maar het losstaan van traditie als zodanig beschouw ik als slechts één zijde van een munt, en als niet geheel terecht. Enerzijds is uitsluitend *nu* van belang, en daarin valt traditie inderdaad weg, maar anderzijds is het van belang ook te blijven erkennen wat precies de bronnen zijn geweest voor het inzicht dat 'louter nu van belang is'. Dat zijn toch de teksten uit de verschillende oosterse non-dualistische tradities, de teksten die juist omdat ze het tijdloze benadrukken, nu nog volkomen tijdloos en fris zijn gebleven. Ik zie het als wezenlijk dat ook de westerse leraar deze oosterse tradities onder de aandacht blijft brengen - althans de tijdloze kern ervan, datgene wat na onderzoek overblijft als waardevol, en wat om die reden het verdient om zo helder en verstaanbaar mogelijk in westerse taal vertaald en doorgegeven te worden.”

SpiritualityBuddhismTraditionZenAdvaitaNondualismDzogchen
Book:Non-dualisme: de directe bevrijdingsweg
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“If Zen master Dōgen had been a physicist, I think he might have liked quantum mechanics. He would have naturally grasped the all-inclusive nature of superposition and intuited the interconnectedness of entanglement. As a contemplative who was also a man of action, he would have been intrigued by the notion that attention might have the power to alter reality, while at the same time understanding that human consciousness is neither more nor less than the clouds and water, or the hundreds of grasses. He would have appreciated the unbounded nature of not knowing.”

ZenQuantum PhysicsQuantum MechanicsZen Buddhism
Book:A Tale for the Time Being
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“One of the blessings of easy communication between the great cultures of the world is that partisanship in religion and philosophy is ceasing to be intellectually respectable. Pure religions are as rare as pure cultures, and it is mentally crippling to suppose that there must be a number of fixed bodies of doctrine among which one must choose, where choice means accepting the system entirely or not at all. [...]. Those who rove freely through the various traditions, accepting what they can use and rejecting what they cannot, are condemned as undisciplined syncretists. But the use of one's reason is not a lack of discipline, not is there any important religion which is not itself a syncretism, a "growing up together" of ideas and practices of diverse origin.”

ZenTaoism
Book:psychotherapy east and west
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“The rules of communication are not necessarily the rules of the universe, and man is not the role or identity which society thrusts upon him. For when a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique. He is universal by virtue of the inseparability of his organism from the cosmos. He is unique in that he is just this organism and not any stereotype of role, class, or identity assumed for the convenience of social communication.”

Zen
Book:psychotherapy east and west
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“This is the whole meaning of polarity, of life implying death, of subject implying object, of man implying world, and Yes implying No. [...] Just as liberation involves the recognition of oneself in what is most other, it involves the recognition of life in death - and this is why so many rites of initiation take the neophyte through a symbolic death. He accepts the certainty of death so completely that, in effect, he is dead already - and thus beyond anxiety.”

Zen
Book:psychotherapy east and west
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“We washed her body, chanted, and stayed to witness the funeral director shrouding her and whisking her down the hall. I thought of the Zen teaching that talks about how all we need to do is allow ourselves and the world to change. Easy to say, I thought. And yet, here I was in the midst of my experience of fullness of the pain, grief, love, and joy of my grandma’s death. Everything did change. Everything I teach now I learned from my relationship with Mimi. Being deeply in relationship changes the world. I didn’t know then that my life would pivot to teaching others and to being with many, many Mimis.”

LoveRelationshipsChangeLearningZenIntimacyConnection
Book:Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care
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“Under any civilized conditions it is, of course, impossible for anyone to act without laying plans, or to refuse absolutely to participate in an economy of waste and violence, [...]. It is, however, possible to see that this competitive "rat race" need not be taken seriously, or rather, that if we are to persist in it at all it must not be taken seriously unless "nervous breakdowns are to become as common as colds”

ZenTaoism
Book:psychotherapy east and west
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“Whenever a tradition becomes venerable with the passage of time, the ancient masters and sages are elevated to pedestals of sanctity and wisdom which lift them far above the human level. The way of liberation becomes confused with a popular cult; the ancient teachers become gods and supermen, and thus the ideal of liberation or Buddha-hood becomes ever more remote. No one believes that it can be reached except by the most gifted and heroic prodigies. Consequently the medicine of the discipline becomes a diet, the cure an addiction, and the raft a houseboat. In this manner, a way of liberation turns into just another social institution and dies of respectability.”

ZenTaoism
Book:psychotherapy east and west
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