Top 1130 Zen Buddhist Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

Wabi means spare, impoverished; simple and functional. It connotes a transcendence of fad and fashion. The spirit of wabi imbues all the Zen arts, from calligraphy to karate, from the tea ceremony to Zen archery.

The true purpose of Zen is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. Zen practice is to open up our small mind.

When you are free of form and not confused, you are focused. To be free of form externally is 'Zen.' Not to be confused internally is 'meditation.' External Zen and internal meditation, this is what we mean by 'Zen meditation.

A well known Los Angeles newspaper referred to a small group of gentlemen who live up on a mountain and practice Zen as 'the Zen cult'. The cult phenomenon is definitely journalistically 'in'.

The true "Way" cannot be used to look into the heart of another, and can only be appreciated and found on one's own. What others say is but "oral Zen" - Zen not practiced but simply preached or talked about.

In the old days, Zen was not really practiced so much in a monastery. The Zen Master usually lived up on a top of the mountain or the hill or in the forest or sometimes in the village.

I'm a Buddhist and active in my Buddhist's Association, and I'm actually a National Young Women's representative for the organization, so I travel a lot helping young women who are practicing Buddhism.

I'm not a New Age person, but I do believe in meditation, and for that reason I've always liked the Buddhist religion. When I've been to Japan, I've been to Buddhist temples and meditated, and I found that rewarding.

Zen enriches no one. There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the "nothing," the "no-body" that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey.

Don't become a Buddhist. The world doesn't need Buddhist. Do practice Compassion. The world needs more compassion.

The future of humanity will move closer and closer toward the approach of Zen, because the meeting of the East and West is possible only through something like Zen, which is earthly and yet unearthly.

Most writers agree on the fact that Zen is not to be understood but to be lived; and far from being incompatible with the requirements of everyday life, Zen confers on it its own full revealing value.

Zen... does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

I do a lot of reading on Buddhist philosophy, and a Buddhist nun named Pema Chödrön talks a lot about acceptance. It's one of the main tenets of Buddhism - accepting that what is, is. The root of our suffering is when we just don't want to accept a truth. We want something to be different than it is.

One Mongolian leader became a very, very brutal dictator and eventually became a murderer. Previously, he was a monk, and then he became a revolutionary. Under the influence of his new ideology, he actually killed his own teacher. Pol Pot's family background was Buddhist. Whether he himself was a Buddhist at a young age, I don't know. Even Chairman Mao's family background was Buddhist. So one day, if the Dalai Lama becomes a mass murderer, he will become the most deadly of mass murderers.

The whole zen attitude is to bring to your notice the fact that there is no effort to be made. The zen attitude is that of effortlessness.

There are monasteries in Japan where they teach Zen with rules, more rules than you can imagine, and you might feel comfortable with that. I don't teach that type of Zen.

The samurais were very interested in Zen because they admired the tremendous precision that the Zen Masters had, their lack of fear and pain and their absolute lack of fear of death.

In the advanced practice, the relationship between the Zen master and the student becomes very terse. The Zen master will expect things of the student because the student is in graduate school.

What is Tantric Zen? Well, I don't think I can give you a straight answer, since I don't happen to be a very straight Zen master.

I have my own way to walk and for some reason or other Zen is right in the middle of it wherever I go. So there it is, with all its beautiful purposelessness, and it has become very familiar to me though I do not know "what it is." Or even if it is an "it." Not to be foolish and multiply words, I'll say simply that it seems to me that Zen is the very atmosphere of the Gospels, and the Gospels are bursting with it. It is the proper climate for any monk, no matter what kind of monk he may be. If I could not breathe Zen I would probably die of spiritual asphyxiation.

By god the Buddhist means that from which the universe was born, the unborn of the Buddhist scriptures, and by soul that factor in the thing called man which moves towards enlightenment. Why need more be said of it, at any rate those who are not content with scholarship, but strive to attain that same enlightenment?

The basic idea of Zen is to come in touch with the inner workings of our being, and to do this in the most direct way possible, without resorting to anything external or superadded. Therefore, anything that has the semblance of an external authority is rejected by Zen. Absolute faith is placed in a man's own inner being. For whatever authority there is in Zen, all comes from within.

Fighting for one's freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

The Dalai Lama says that when a Catholic and a Buddhist speak, the Buddhist becomes a deeper Buddhist and the Catholic becomes a deeper Catholic.

If you are thinking, you can't understand Zen. Anything that can be written in a book, anything that can be said - all this is thinking . . . but if you read with a mind that has cut off all thinking, then Zen books, sutras and Bibles are all the truth. So is the barking of a dog or the crowing of a rooster. All things are teaching you at every moment, and these sounds are even better teaching than Zen books.

The way of Zen is to become independent and strong. Don't rely on others for perceptions of life and truth. Do it individually. Go to a teacher of Zen to learn how to do that, not to get answers for individual life situations.

There is competition in Zen. Let's not be ridiculous. There is competition in everything in life; being a winner in Zen means, competing and winning in the world of enlightenment.

What is Zen? Zen is looking at things with the eye of God, that is, becoming the thing's eyes so that it looks at itself with our eyes.

Haiku is a particularly Zen form of poetry; for Zen detests egoism in the form of calculated effects or self-glorification of any sort. The author of haiku should be absent, and only the haiku present.

Throwing away Zen mind is correct Zen mind. Only keep the question, 'What is the best way of helping other people?'

Zen was a reaction. Just as Buddha came into the world and spoke against the fall of Vedanta, so Buddhism lost its essence and became ritual. Zen was a reaction to that.

If you have the sense of participation in sports or athletics, of being a player, then you are not really into the Zen mind. In Zen mind there is no sense of self in the play.

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.

I just had to stay cool. Zen. No punching in the face. Punching would not be Zen.

When I was 18 I read a book about Buddhism and, before I was halfway through it I said to my mother, "I'm a Buddhist!" She said, "That's great. Finish reading the book and then you can tell me all about it." From that moment on I knew I was a Buddhist.

To have Zen is to be in a state of pure sensation. It is to be freed from the grip of concepts, to see through them. This is not the same as rejecting conceptual thinking. Thoughts and words are in the world and are as natural as flowers. It is a mistake therefore to think that Zen is anti-intellectual.

In Old Zen, the Zen Master would do literally anything to break down the concept of what the study was. He would present conflicting codes all the time, just to shake this fixation people had on how to attain liberation.

The ultimate purpose of Zen,' I remembered the roshi telling me, 'is not in the going away from the world but in the coming back. Zen is not just a matter of gaining enlightenment; it's a matter of acting in a world of love and compassion.

The object of Zen is not to kill all feelings and become anesthetized to pain and fear. The object of Zen is to free us to scream loudly and fully when it is time to scream.

When I speak in Christian terms or Buddhist terms I'm simply selecting for the moment a dialect. Christian words for me represent the comforting vocabulary of the place I came from hometown voices saying more than the language itself can convey about how welcome and safe I am what the expectations are and where to find food. Buddhist words come from another dialect from the people over the mountain. I've become pretty fluent in Buddhist it helps me to see my home country differently but it will never be speech I can feel completely at home in.

It is only in the last 800 years that the rules have come into being and conservative Zen has surfaced. It is not particularly popular in Japan at all. Hardly anybody practices Zen any more because it's just too strict; there are too many rules.

Zen wants us to acquire an entirely new point of view whereby to look into the mysteries of life and the secrets of nature. This is because Zen has come to the definite conclusion that the ordinary logical process of reasoning is powerless to give final satisfaction to our deepest spiritual needs.

What attracted me to Zen was my first teacher, Tim McCarthy. He was extremely genuine. It wasn't even really a Zen thing, that sort of came along later.

So the most difficult thing is always to keep your beginner's mind. There is no need to have a deep understanding of Zen. Even though you read much Zen literature, you must read each sentence with a fresh mind. You should not say, "I know what Zen is," or "I have attained enlightenment." This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner. Be very very careful about this point. If you start to practice zazen, you will begin to appreciate your beginner's mind. It is the secret of Zen practice.

The claim of the Zen followers that they are transmitting the essence of Buddhism is based on their belief that Zen takes hold of the enlivening spirit of the Buddha, stripped of all its historical and doctrinal garments.

If you exchanged wedding vows, tape them to your bathroom mirror and read them aloud to yourself every morning along with the ritual brushing of teeth. It's not realistic to believe that you will live your promises as a daily practice -- unless you're a saint or a highly evolved Zen Buddhist. Not where marriage is concerned. But you can make a practice of returning to your vows when the going gets rough.

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

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.

The Zen master can see precisely what it will take to cause your awareness to become free. But the Zen master can't do it for you.

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?"

No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over... the Zen attitude is that words and truth are incompatible, or at least that no words can capture truth.

The Zen Master was constantly attempting to break up concepts that people had about what it was like to be a spiritual teacher. We have a traditional image. Each Zen master was a complete character.

I'm a poet who practices Zen. And it's not, I'm somebody who practices Zen who writes poetry. There's no separation for me.

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.

This is Zen, and in Zen, as we all know ... anything goes!

Each of the small enlightenments that a Zen practitioner has, which are known in Zen as "Satori experiences," provides deeper insights into the nature of existence and helps a person prepare for complete enlightenment.

Suzuki's works on Zen Buddhism are among the best contributions to the knowledge of living Buddhism... We cannot be sufficiently grateful to the author, first for the fact of his having brought Zen closer to Western understanding, and secondly for the manner in which he has achieved this task.

Zen is everywhere.... But for you, Zen is right here.

I seemed to recall some words from an old Zen master, something like, "My Zen cuts down mountains." My rejection of Buddhism was a cutting down of mountains; that is precisely how it felt to me.