Top 846 Zen Proverb Quotes & Sayings - Page 12

Zen is Tantric Buddhism, Vajrayana is tantric Buddhism - these are various forms of it. Tantric Buddhism simply means cutting to the chase.

Having plants and flowers in my space makes me feel very calm and Zen. For me, it's important to meditate every morning to be very clear in the head, and nature really helps me do the same thing.

Yoga has had a profound effect on my songs and performances. I don't meditate in the traditional style of sitting and doing nothing. I prefer the zen of paying attention, such as the meditation of yoga flow, or walking meditations. I also consider singing, surfing and gardening to very meditative.

There is a director who should make 'Silver Surfer' - he is mentally committed to it. He's doing another movie now. What's most important to me about this guy, first, is that he's incredible with visuals. But he's also a spiritual guy, a Zen Buddhist. ... Galactus is a force of nature, not a being. That's all I'm saying.

Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness.

Zen taught me how to pay attention, how to delve, how to question and enter, how to stay with -- or at least want to try to stay with -- whatever is going on.

If our education had included training to bear unpleasantness and to let the first shock pass until we could think more calmly, many an apparently unbearable situation would become manageable, and many a nervous illness avoided. There is proverb expressing this. It says, trouble is a tunnel thorough which we pass and not a brick wall against which we must break our head.

I made a photograph of a garden in Kyoto, the Zen garden, which is a rectangle. But a photograph taken from any one point will not show, well it shows a rectangle, but not with ninety degree angles.

I didn't want a guru or a kung fu master or a spiritual director. I didn't want to become a sorcerer or learn the zen of archery or meditate or align my chakras or uncover mast incarnations...I was after something else entirely, but it wasn't in the Yellow Pages or anywhere else that I could discover.

I think about death a lot, I really do, because I can't believe I won't exist. It's the ego isn't it? I feel that I should retreat into a better form of Zen Buddhism than this kind of ego-dominated thing. But I don't know, I mean, I want to come back as a tree but I suspect that it's just not going to happen, is it?

There is that great proverb - that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It's not one man's job. It's not one person's job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail - the bravery, even, of the lions.

The entrance into Zen is the grasping of one's essential nature. It is absolutely impossible, however, to come to a clear understanding of our essential nature by any intellectual or philosophical method. It is accomplished only by the experience of self-realization through zazen.

If you ask Zen people they will say; tea is not something that you pour with unawareness and drink like any other drink. It is not a drink, it is meditation; it is prayer. So they listen to the kettle creating a melody, and in that listening they become more silent, more alert.

This is what Zen means by being detached—not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.

Zen goes directly to your own experience of the oneness of the universe, of your interconnectedness with all things. You learn to distrust whatever you clung to in your old sense of separation, and that realization can be the most liberating thing in your life, a freedom beyond anything you could have imagined.

Reading texts is no substitute for meditation and practicing Zen. If you read a book about a place, and you want to go there, you don't keep reading the book. You have to travel. That's what practice is about. Traveling. Walking the path.

In the early '60s there was very little reliable information on Tibetan Buddhism. I was living in London and I had joined the Buddhist Society. For the most part, people there were either interested in Theravada or Zen Buddhism. There was almost no one into Tibetan Buddhism at that time.

Zen says everything is divine so how can anything be special? All is special. Nothing is non-special so nothing can be special.

In Zen Buddhism, the greater your doubt, the greater will be your enlightenment. That is why doubt can be a good thing. If you are too sure, if you always have conviction, then you may be caught in your wrong perception for a long time.

Today, I regularly attend two Buddhist organizations, the Zen Center of Los Angeles and Against the Stream, but I also attend certain Christian functions. I try to cultivate a generous, kind spirit and am open to anything to help get me there.

The Zen masters have the right idea-no pain no gain: thwack a silly nebbish and he'll remember it far longer and more indelibly than any words you muster at him. Not absolutely everything can or should have to be explained, and particularly not to everybody. But a concussion is a value-judgment anyone gets the point of.

Every place is a place to practice. Every time is a time to practice. Zen is concerned with the thought we have this moment rather than with rituals or rules of behavior

Genuine recollections almost invariably explain oneself to oneself. Suppose, for example, that you feel an instinctive aversion to some particular kind of wine. Try as you will, you can find no reason for it. Suppose when you explore a previous incarnation, you remember you died by a poisoned administered in a wine of that kind, your aversion is explained by the proverb: 'A burnt child dreads the fire.'

How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: "Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe," in literal translation, "God gives but doesn't share." This meant... God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us.

I never thought much about God, certainly never wondered whether God was thinking about me, until I fell in love with a Zen Buddhist priest.

In Zen Buddhism, "The Great Cessation" is a term that points to the abandoning of the effort to define one's self by any outer definition and to give up acts of futility. It is to let the world remain a mystery that cannot be captured by science, language, or any invention of the mind.

When I'm looking for Zen and I'm not saying this facetiously at all - I would really rather surf, scuba dive, or fly my plane. And, when I feel tension about the grind of work, it's not getting the money to make films versus making films that constitutes the grind, it's all this stuff.

I have a deep-seated distrust and even contempt for people who are driven by ambition to conquer the world … those who cannot control themselves and produce vast amounts of crap that no one cares about. I find it unattractive. I like the Zen artists: they’d do some work, and then they’d stop for a while.

Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the most beloved Buddhist teachers in the West, a rare combination of mystic, poet, scholar, and activist. His luminous presence and the simple, compassionate clarity of his writings have touched countless lives.

Just like there are different roads that lead to different places, so there are different levels of awareness that lead to different places and we shift in and out of them. These are the ten thousand states of mind that we study in Zen.

There's a place where everything comes together and where it's all the same. That state of mind, in which all things are the same, is the state of mind of Tantric Zen.

Having plants and flowers in my space makes me feel very calm and Zen. For me, its important to meditate every morning to be very clear in the head, and nature really helps me do the same thing.

That's a waste of time. If you really understand Zen... you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because... the sound of the rain needs no translation.

I teach Zen, tantric mysticism, jnana yoga, bhakti yoga, Tibetan mysticism, occultism and psychic development. I also teach poetry and literature, film and many other different things.

There's an old proverb that says the Russian bear never dies, it just hibernates and the truth of the matter is the weak and feckless policy of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has awakened an aggression in Russia that first appeared few years ago with their move in Georgia, now their move into Crimea, now their move into the wider Middle East and all the while, all we do is fold our arms and say we're not having talks anymore.

Real Freedom is to not feel limited when wearing this Zen robe, this troublesome formal robe. Similarly, in our busy life we should wear this civilization without being bothered by it, without ignoring it, without being caught by it.

So what I liked about Zen was that it never goes off into the realm of imagination land, or if it does occasionally, the good teachers will openly address it specifically as only imagination. Both of my teachers were very good at that.

We sell tea in Starbucks, but I think the experience is very different. I think coffee is something that is quick - it's transactional. I think tea is more Zen-like. It requires a different environment.

I don't think I'm competing with anyone. I don't mean to sound Zen, but genuinely, when I stopped competing with anything is when I started enjoying my work and that brought out the best in me. I'm living in a universe of my own and I'm enjoying that. I love to appreciate other people's work.

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.

In deference to such spectacular carnage it is perhaps perverse to dwell upon one person's death, but we are creatures so constituted that the passing of one friend or one acquaintance has a profounder effect that that of 100,000 strangers. If there is any metaphorical truth in the Jewish proverb that he who saves one life saves the whole world, then there is equal metaphorical truth in the proposition that when one person dies, the whole world dies with them.

He had a tremendous propensity for getting lost when driving. This was largely because of his method of “Zen” navigation, which was simply to find any car that looked as if it knew where it was going and follow it. The results were more often surprising than successful, but he felt it was worth it for the sake of the few occasions when it was both.

I could say I believe in every drop of rain that . . . Well, I believe life is a Zen koan, that is, an unsolvable riddle. But the contemplation of that riddle--even though it cannot be solved--is, in itself, transformative. And if the contemplation is of high enough quality, you can merge with the divine.

You can do anything you like - really - but this Sci-Fi is absolutely disciplined, it's Zen, you have to be absolutely focused in an area. You have to zone into an area and you then you can achieve when you get there. It's really weird!

I recommend, for many people, the study of computer science. Our natural resource in America is the mind. The mindset in computer science is very similar to the mindset in Zen.

Through the study of Zen you can learn to move from lower to higher states of mind at will. Higher states of mind offer you a much more accurate picture of reality.

I love jeans and T-shirts, but for red carpets, I like Oscar de la Renta, who is timeless. Marchesa celebrates the female form in an ethereal way. Donna Karan does an Urban Zen collection, which is eco-friendly. I love socially conscious fashion.

The secret of Soto Zen is just two words: not always so.... In Japanese, it's two words, three words in English. That is the secret of our practice.

Writing doesn't come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency, I think - the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.

I can make a couple of good sandwiches: tuna salad and chopped egg salad. And Greek bean soup. I was a cook for my old Zen master for many years. So there were two or three dishes that he liked, you know. Teriyaki salmon, a few things.

Philosophy is speculation, Zen is participation. Participate in the night leaving, participate in the evening coming, participate in the stars and participate in the clouds; make participation your lifestyle and the whole existence becomes such a joy, such an ecstasy. You could not have dreamed of a better universe.

The study of Zen is the study of energy, power, knowledge and balance. It is the science of energy conservation and control. We use energy to aid others, to see beauty, to discover love where we saw no love at all.

I may discuss contemporary cinema, how to shop at a mall without losing energy, how to use the power of mind to increase career and academic success, the Zen of sports, reincarnation, karma, sex, the experience of "suchness" or a new book by Stephen King.

Zen practice is about not getting high on anything and in so doing getting high on absolutely everything. We then find that everything we encounter - bliss or nonbliss - possesses a tremendous depth and beauty that we usually miss.

Whereas a lot of Buddhism concerns itself with stages of enlightenment, various precepts and moral codes, and even power structures and hierarchies, Zen is just like, 'Shut up, sit down, and observe your thoughts - oh, and by the way, what you perceive as you' doesn't actually exist.' I loved the minimalist approach of it.

Apart from the underlying mystery of all things, there is also another possible specific mystery in this situation: Why did I become so interested in Buddhism, Zen and so on? I seem to have a Buddhist voice in my head, and someone asked me about this recently, saying he was intrigued.

We have been teaching together [with Kaz] now for more than twenty years in sesshins, in international travel programs in Japan and China, as well as intensives on Buddhism that focus on the work of Zen Master Dogen and Ryokan, as well as on many of the Mahayana sutras.

HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it's so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me.

Here is an old Oriental proverb: *A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.* It is difficult to anticipate just how a situation will develop in every detail until you take a step forward and try out your present equipment. Then, if weaknesses appear, you will have clues as to how to strengthen your resources. No scheme or plan is perfect. Perfection is a process, not an end.

I was talking to a Zen master the other day and he said, "You shall be my disciple."I looked at him and said, "Who was Buddha's teacher?" He looked at me in a very odd way for a moment and then he burst into laughter and handed me a piece of clover.