A Quote by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
To say one is revolutionary is a little like saying one is a Zen Buddhist - if you say you are, you probably aren't.
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And finally, be assured that Zen asks nothing even as it promises nothing. One can be a Protestant Zen Buddhist, a Catholic Zen Buddhist or a Jewish Zen Buddhist. Zen is a quiet thing. It listens.
Sometimes people come up and they get infatuated with some little brief imagistic poem or something, and they say, "Oh, I really like your Zen poems." And I say, "Which ones are not Zen poems?"
There's something Zen-like about the way I work - it's like raking gravel in a Zen Buddhist garden.
The great achievement of Zen Buddhism, and all of its cultural expressions in painting or the tea ceremony or rock gardens, is a rejection of earlier Buddhist ideas which were dependent
upon narrative - all the mythological creatures that populate the Buddhist galaxy. Zen insisted on the real located in nature.
The most important part of the practice is for the question to remain alive and for your whole body and mind to become a question. In Zen they say that you have to ask with the pores of your skin and the marrow of your bones. A Zen saying points out: Great questioning, great awakening; little questioning, little awakening; no questioning, no awakening.
To an experienced Zen Buddhist, asking if one believes in Zen or one believes in the Buddha, sounds a little ludicrous, like asking if one believes in air or water. Similarly Quality is not something you believe in, Quality is something you experience.
People come up to me on the street and make some little joke - like they'll say, 'Excuse me, sir, what time is it?' And I'll say, you know, '5:15,' and they'll say, 'Hey! Made you talk!' And that's merely a way of saying, 'I know your work and I like you.'
When I say that Zen is life, I mean that Zen is not to be confined within conceptualization, that Zen is what makes conceptualization possible.
What I term Zen, old Zen, the original face of Zen, new Zen, pure Zen, or Tantric Zen is - Zen in its essence.
When you say, 'I am a Christian,' you are saying, 'I am mashiach,' in the Hebrew. I am a little messiah walking on earth, in other words. That is a shocking revelation. ...May I say it like this? You are a little god on earth running around
It's pretentious to say, but my art is like a little Zen story, a story with a question mark at the end. People can take from it what they need. If somebody says, "Your art is very funny," I say, "You are totally right." If somebody says, "Your art is very sad," I say, "You are totally right." In Japan they say, "Your art is very Japanese, you even look Japanese.Your great-grandfather was most surely a Japanese man." And I say, "You are totally right."
To remain caught up in ideas and words about Zen is, as the old masters say, to stink of Zen.
At times, Zen does get into some Buddhist Cosmology. Nishijima Roshi, my main teacher would talk about that and almost every time immediately say that it was only one way of looking at it. Whenever addressing realms of Heaven or Hell, he'd also address that it was just a psychological state.
Facts of experience are valued in Zen more than representations, symbols, and concepts-that is to say, substance is everything in Zen and form nothing.
Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift'... they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git.
You know, we spend so much of our lives not saying the things we want to say. The things we should say. We speak in code, we send little messages. Origami. So now, plainly, simply. I want to say that I love you both.
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