Top 1200 Zen Life Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

Zen doesn't believe in the reconciliation of opposites because from the point of view of Zen, there is no point of view.

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.

The truth of Zen, just a little bit of it, is what turns one's humdrum life, a life of monotonous, uninspiring commonplaceness, into one of art, full of genuine inner creativity.

Tantric Zen, at first, does not appear to have a method. In Tantric Zen, you could meditate on a Brillo box or you could meditate on the clear light of reality.

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.

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.

We can see unmistakeably that there is an inner relationship between Zen and the warrior's life.

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.

When your private life has been dragged into public space, you tend to attain a zen-like composure.

Life, according to Zen, ought to be lived as a bird flies through the air, or as a fish swims in the water.

I feel I'm pretty zen and laid back. I don't have a lot of rage in my real life.

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.

Zen, on the other hand, is not so dogmatically sterile, though there are certainly traces and more than traces of this austerity. However, with Zen we have not only the void, but the fertile void. The ink lines in a sumi-e painting show this fertility of the void ever ready to brim over into existence.

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.

It is not good to talk about Zen, because Zen is nothingness... If you talk about it, you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it, no one knows it is there.

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?"

In life as well as in art Zen never wastes energy in stopping to explain; it only indicates.

I steeled myself for the next response. I knew it was going to be one of the Zen life lessons. [...] Instead he kissed me.

A very enjoyable meditation on the curious thing called 'Zen' -not the Japanese religious tradition but rather the Western clich of Zen that is embraced in advertising, self-help books, and much more. . . . Yamada, who is both a scholar of Buddhism and a student of archery, offers refreshing insight into Western stereotypes of Japan and Japanese culture, and how these are received in Japan.

A zen master's life is one continuous mistake.

I raise my hand; I take a book from the other side of this desk; I hear the boys playing ball outside my window; I see the clouds blown away beyond the neighboring woods:-in all these I am practicing Zen, I am living Zen. No worldly discussion is necessary, or any explanation.

Not to be bound by rules, but to be creating one's own rules-this is the kind of life which Zen is trying to have us live.

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

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.

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.

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 a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.

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 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 secret of this kind of climbing, is like Zen. Don't think. Just dance along. It's the easiest thing in the world, actually easier than walking on flat ground which is monotonous. The cute little problems present themselves at each step and yet you don't hesitate and you find yourself on some other boulder you picked out for no special reason at all, just like zen.~ Japhy

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.

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.

My blogging life is basically goalless. I like the zen nature of that, and paradoxically, it improves results.

Old Zen was very funny; there was a great deal of humor and happiness. Zen today seems much drier. While there's a certain amount of humor, it seems to lack that total intensity because humor is one of the primary tools for liberation.

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.

While I had cancer, I wrote these twenty-two personal essays about how I lived my life backed by Zen and writing.

For Zen students a weed is a treasure. With this attitude, whatever you do, life becomes an art.

Zen has no secrets other than seriously thinking about life and death.

My ethics, my sense of morality, my work ethic, my sense of compassion for suffering humanity, all of that comes directly out of the practice of poetry, as does my Buddhist practice. Poetry is a very important element in the history of Buddhism in general and in Zen in particular. It was really Zen that motivated me to change the way I perceive the world.

Every man now is responsible to create a buddhafield around himself, an energy field that goes on becoming bigger and bigger. Create as many vibrations of laughter, joy, celebration, as possible; dance, sing, let the whole of humanity by and by catch the fire of Zen and the wind of Zen.

Not thinking about anything is zen. Once you know this, walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is zen. To know that the mind is empty is to see the buddha.... Using the mind to reality is delusion. Not using the mind to look for reality is awareness. Freeing oneself from words is liberation.

Zen is about breaking out of your ideas and experiencing life and not ideas.

If you try to grasp Zen in movement, it goes into stillness. If you try to grasp Zen in stillness, it goes into movement. It is like a fish hidden in a spring, drumming up waves and dancing independently.

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 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.

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

I'm not an ascetic and please don't use the word zen, which is so lightly bandied about these days. Being zen . . . It's shameful to talk in such a way. I haven't become an ascetic but I'm not going to build up another collection. I'm going to create my new environment. I already know what I want.

If the Zen master sees that it will cause a person to progress, he will ask that person to do a task. The task is charged with power if it's performed properly. It's a koan between yourself and the Zen Master.

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.

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.

Find a teacher of Tantric Zen and study with them because it is transference of awareness, a sharing of the perception of the beauty of life.

I would have thought that I would have become one of those parents - just because it's my nature to be such a perfectionist - that anything falling short, I would have seen as a failure. But something has happened to me over the past few years - it's not Zen, believe me, I'm not at all Zen - but I'm so appreciative of even the chaos.

Zen is meditation, the actual experience of life directly, immediately with no buffers.

The truth of Zen is the truth of life, and life means to live, to move, to act, not merely to reflect.

The real goal of Zen is to find a way of life that's easy and undramatic. Strong attachments lead to upset and drama.

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.

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.

According to Zen Buddhist cosmology there are ten thousand different states of mind to view and understand life through.

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.

The thing about Zen is that it pushes contradictions to their ultimate limit where one has to choose between madness and innocence. And Zen. suggests that we may be driving toward one or the other on a cosmic scale. Driving toward them because, one way or the other, as madmen or innocents, we are already there. It might be good to open our eyes and see.