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Zen Quotes

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Zen Quotes

“To sit with only the intention of finding the meaning of a kung-an [koan] is not truly to sit in Zen; it is to spend one's time and one's life vainly. If one sits in meditation it is not in order to reflect on a kung-an, but in order to light the lamp of one's true being; the meaning of the kung-an will be revealed quite naturally in this light which becomes more and more brilliant.”

ZenKoan
Book:Zen Keys: A Guide to Zen Practice
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“Zen certainly derives from Buddhism, but a form of Buddhism that belongs to a geographical zone influenced by the Chinese culture. The Chinese Zen tree, transplanted in Japan, in Vietnam, and in Korea, has grown well and greatly. Zen Buddhism, in each of these countries, differs with certain nuances from that practiced in China. One can, however, easily recognize its identity.”

BuddhismZenChinese Culture
Book:Zen Keys: A Guide to Zen Practice
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“Zen . . . does not belong to monks only. Everyone can study and practice it. Many laymen have been recognized as illustrious Zen Masters, and have aroused the respect of the monks themselves. The laity are related to the monasteries by the material support they provide to them, as it sometimes happens that the labor of the monks may not be sufficient to ensure the upkeep of the monastery. The laity are also related to the monasteries by their participation in the construction of temples and sanctuaries and by their cultural activities; for example, the printing and publishing of sutras and scriptural works by monks. A good number of monasteries each month organize bat quan trai gioi for laymen who wish to live for twenty-four or forty-eight hours in a monastery exactly like monks. Places are reserved for them for these periods of bat quan trai gioi, during which they practice Zen under the direction of monks.”

ZenLaymen
Book:Zen Keys: A Guide to Zen Practice
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“The development of Japanese economy has made Japan into a Western-like nation, in which many of the spiritual values have given place to materialism. The temples and monasteries must also participate in the present economic way of life and be based upon the present social needs of producing and consuming in order to exist. They can no longer play their role of spiritual leadership, as in the past. Zen is threatened on the very ground on which it was born and developed.”

ZenJapan
Book:Zen Keys: A Guide to Zen Practice
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“From the beginning, self-annihilation has been an important task imposed on Zen monks in everyday discipline. To cast aside the ego means to cast aside your selfhood, determinedly reducing yourself to nothing, all the while revering and obeying your seniors and carrying out your daily chores in perfect silence.”

ZenSelf Annihilation
Book:Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan's Most Rigorous Zen Temple
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“Without going into the history of Zen, let it be said that the relationship between master and disciple has always been fraught with peril. The hapless disciple is beaten with a stick, kicked, slapped on the head with his teacher's sandal. But to revile all such actions as violence is too hasty a conclusion. Before an act can be labeled violent, its underlying purpose must be ascertained. A little thought will show that in the context of Zen discipline, the fundamental purpose of a beating or thrashing is not to inflict injury or pain. Such acts are rather a means of conveying living truth from body to body and mind to mind, a form of spiritual training and cultivation.”

ZenDiscipleMaster
Book:Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan's Most Rigorous Zen Temple
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“The best way to do this is by putting these teachings into practice in our daily lives. Experience always goes beyond ideas. Tenth-century Vietnamese master Thiên Hôi told his students, “Be diligent in order to attain the state of no birth and no death.” One student asked, “Where can we touch the world of no birth and no death?” and he responded, “Right here in the world of birth and death.” To touch the water, you have to touch the waves. If you touch birth and death deeply, you touch the world of no birth and no death.”

ZenLife And DeathVietnamZen Buddhism
Book:The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching : Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy and Liberation
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“In Zen Buddhist texts they say, “You cannot nail a peg into the sky.” And so, to be a man of the sky, a man of the void, is also called ‘a man not depending on anything’. And when you’re not hung on anything you are the only thing that isn’t hung on anything – which is the universe. Which doesn’t hang, you see. Where would it hang? It has no place to fall on, even though it may be dropping; there will never be the crash of it landing on a concrete floor somewhere. But the reason for that is that it won’t crash below because it doesn’t hang above. And so there is a poem, in Chinese, which speaks of such a person as having above, not a tile to cover the head; below, not an inch of ground on which to stand.”

GodSpiritualityUniverseBuddhismZenVoidImpermanenceClingingAlan Watts
Book:Out of Your Mind
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“It is precisely this [transcendental] privilege that Christian missionaries in China and Japan failed to relinquish when they spoke about Buddhism; but the same failure is found in such "na(t)ive" exponents of Zen as D. T. Suzuki, and it would perhaps be hard to decide which version of Zen, the negative or the idealized, is most misleading. Even if the degree of reductionism is not quite the same in both cases, both interpretations share responsibility for the strange predicament in which Westerners who approach Chan/Zen find themselves: they are unable to consider it a serious intellectual system, for the constraints of Western discourse on Zen cause them to either devaluate it as an Eastern form of either "natural mysticism" or "quietism" or to idealize it as a wonderfully exotic Dharma. In this sense, Zen can be seen as a typical example of "secondary Orientalism," a stereotype concocted as much by the Japanese themselves as by Westerners.”

ZenChan
Book:Chan Insights and Oversights
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“The first encounter with Chan/Zen took place in Japan, where Francis Xavier arrived in August 1549. Xavier's stay in Japan was relatively short, and he had to rely in the beginning on the poor information provided by the Japanese convert Yajirō, who spoke some Portuguese. In contrast to Ricci's, Xavier's judgment reflects the sociopolitical importance of Buddhism in Japanese society prior to the anti-Buddhist repression of 1571, as well as the strong impressions left by his first encounters with Zen masters. Although Xavier and his confreres were puzzled by the many similarities between Buddhism and Christianity and first interpreted them as proof of a past knowledge, obscured in time, of Christian teachings, they eventually attributed them to the work of the devil (Schurhammer 1982, 224).”

ZenChan
Book:Chan Insights and Oversights
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“The first mention of Chan appears in [Matteo] Ricci's journals, while Japanese Zen is discussed in the letters of Francis Xavier (1506–1552). The images one gets from these accounts are strikingly different; they reflect not only the idiosyncrasies of the two Jesuits but also the different roles played by Buddhism in Chinese and Japanese societies. Whereas the Buddhist tradition in China, and Chan in particular, had been largely assimilated by popular religion, the Zen sect in Japan, under the system of the so-called Five Mountains, remained associated with the ruling class and dominated intellectual discourse.”

ZenChan
Book:Chan Insights and Oversights
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“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.”

Zen
Book:Chan Insights and Oversights
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“Suzuki also liked to compare Zen to Western philosophy, to Zen's advantage: "The philosopher according to whom cogito ergo sum is generally weak-minded. The Zen master has nothing to do with such quibbles" (Suzuki 1970, 408). We may also question the accuracy of his understanding of Western philosophy. If Meister Eckhart, despite (or because of) his undeniable spirituality, cannot be said to represent the entire Christian tradition, neither can the intellectualist strain emphasized by Suzuki be said to represent the entire Western philosophical tradition. From the pre-Socratics, Socrates and the Stoics, all the way to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, philosophy was a path of self-transformation, not merely the intellectual pastime that Suzuki describes.”

PhilosophyZenSuzuki
Book:Chan Insights and Oversights
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“Although Hīnayāna disciplines and traditions continue to exert their influence in the daily activities of Vietnamese Buddhists, Zen comes closest to expressing the Vietnamese character, and as such, their attitude in all walks of life can best be described as a “Zen outlook.”

ZenVietnamese Buddhism
Book:Buddhism & Zen in Vietnam: In Relation to the Development of Buddhism in Asia
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“What properly constitutes the study of Zen in the Zendo life is to study on the one hand the writings or sayings or in some cases the doings of the ancient masters and on the other to practise meditation. This practising is called in Japanese to do zazen, while the studying of the masters consists in attending the discourses given by the teacher of the Zendo known as Rōshi.”

StudyZen
Book:The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk
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“Much of this picture of Zen derives from portrayals found in such normative texts of the tradition as the lamp anthologies (Ch. teng-lu), huge collections of the hagiographies and basic instructions of hundreds of masters in the various lineages of Zen. But such texts were never intended to serve as guides to religious practice or as records of daily practice; they were instead mythology and hagiography, which offered the student an idealized paradigm of the Zen spiritual experience. Many scholars of Zen have mistakenly taken these lamp anthologies at face value as historical documents and presumed that they provide an accurate account of how Zen monks of the premodern era pursued their religious vocations. They do not.”

Zen
Book:The Zen Monastic Experience
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“Modern Zen training offers a matrix within which to evaluate the way one tradition of Zen understands—and puts into practice—the doctrines and teachings of its religion. While Zen training in Korea will differ in certain respects from that followed by the patriarchs and ancient masters of classical Ch'an in China or by Zen monks in Japan, it is an authentic model of how the monks of one national tradition of Zen have tackled "the practical matter of how to live with [their] belief.”

ZenKorea
Book:The Zen Monastic Experience
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“Korean Zen—known as Son—is also a tradition worthy of far more attention than it has gleaned to date in Western scholarship. Indeed, given the pervasive emphasis on Japanese forms of Zen found in Western literature on the tradition (as indicated by our common English usage of the Japanese pronunciation "Zen" to represent all the national branches of the school), we may forget that there are other, equally compelling and authentic approaches to Zen thought and practice found elsewhere in Asia.”

ZenKorea
Book:The Zen Monastic Experience
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