Quotes About Koan

#1. Zen has lost its zip, if you will, or its nothingness and has become ritualistic Its established in monastaries with strict codes of koan study.

Frederick Lenz

#2. We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality. So the work is often a general koan into how we go about forming this world in which we live, in particular with seeing.

James Turrell

#3. The question was how you ignored someone's request to be left alone - even if it meant jeopardizing the friendship. It was a wretched little koan: How can you help someone who won't be helped while realizing that if you don't try to help, then you're not being a friend at all?

Hanya Yanagihara

#4. Christopher, like most people, didn't like his universe being unfathomable, so I doubted that a Zen koan would help him.

Scarlett Thomas

#5. Robert calmly, like an Oriental sage himself, treated the situation as if it were a koan, a riddle to be entered until its very assumptions shifted.

Mark Nepo

#6. 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.

Tom Robbins

#7. I select people to work more closely when they are prepared to and I see that. They don't have to tell me. I know. I will give them a task of some type, and that task becomes the koan between us.

Frederick Lenz

#8. Sex koan #14: The secret to sex is having some.

A. Aimee

#9. Koan ninety-seven: "Do unto otters as you would have them do unto you." Hmm. No real help there. Besides, he'd occasionally been unsure that he'd written that one down properly, although it certain had worked. He'd always left aquatic mammals well alone, and they had done the same to him.

Terry Pratchett

#10. 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.

Frederick Lenz

#11. The O. Henry has become lingua franca among writers for saying, 'That guy can write a story.' It's prestigious, respected, coveted, dreamed about. It's very satisfying to be included in this group of writers. Here's a koan: Could O. Henry win an O. Henry?

Tony D'Souza

#12. When the resistance is gone, so are the demons. It's like a koan that we can work with by learning how to be more gentle, how to relax, and how to surrender to the situations and people in our lives.

Pema Chodron

#13. What is this true meditation? It is to make everything: coughing, swallowing, waving the arms, motion, stillness, words, action, the evil and the good, prosperity and shame, gain and loss, right and wrong, into one single koan.

Hakuin Ekaku

#14. Born born everything is always born
thinking about it try not to

Ikkyu

#15. When you paint Spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots, but just paint Spring. To paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots is to paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots - it is not yet painting Spring.

Dogen

#16. The Irish innovation was to make all confession a completely private affair between penitent and priest - and to make it as repeatable as necessary. (In fact, repetition was encouraged on the theory that, oh well, everyone pretty much sinned just about all the time.)

Thomas Cahill

#17. I don't want to just preach to the church. I feel like I have a broader message.

Joel Osteen

#18. And what if you don't come?"
"I will. No matter what happens."
"I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way,'" she murmured.

Anne Stuart

#19. When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, 'What is the sound of the waterfall?' 'Silence,' he finally told me.

Jack Gilbert

#20. Hearing a crow with no mouth
Cry in the deep
Darkness of the night,
I feel a longing for
My father before he was born.

Ikkyu

#21. After a few days of rain, the seedlings will push through the soil and unfold their tiny leaves. Two weeks later, if the rain is still good, we then carefully apply the first round of fertilizer, because each seedling requires love and attention like any living thing if it's going to grow up strong.

William Kamkwamba

#22. The proof of battle is action, proof of words, debate. No time for speeches now, it's time to fight.

Homer

#23. Successful crimes alone are justified.

John Dryden

#24. I worked at my high school newspaper at Andover, which came out weekly, unusual for a high school paper. Then my first day at Penn I went right to the 'Daily Pennsylvanian' and pretty much spent most of my college career working both as the sports editor and then editor of the editorial page.

H. G. Bissinger

#25. Don't wait for the man standing in the
snow
to cut off his arm help him now

Ikkyu

#26. I'm interested in social commentary.

Kathryn Bigelow

#27. Anytime you catch folks lying, they scared of something!

Zora Neale Hurston

#28. Every day Zuigan used to call out to himself, "Master!" and then he answered himself, "Yes, Sir!" And he added, "Awake, Awake!" and then answered, "Yes, Sir! Yes, Sir!"
"From now onwards, do not be deceived by others!" "No, Sir! I will not, Sir!"

Wumen Huikai

#29. It isn't that we're alone or not alone
whose voice do you want mine? yours?

Ikkyu

#30. Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable.

John F. Kennedy

#31. Clouds very high look
not one word helped them get up there

Ikkyu

#32. I'd love to give you something
but what would help?

Ikkyu

#33. That stone Buddha deserves all the
birdshit it gets
I wave my skinny arms like a tall
flower in the wind

Ikkyu

#34. We're lost where the mind can't find us
utterly lost

Ikkyu

#35. I used to hear a lot that all I could do was hit a serve, I couldn't volley, I can't hit a backhand, I don't return well, and then people would turn round and tell me I'm underachieving.

Andy Roddick

#36. In order to hold your faith intact be sure it's kept unsullied by fact.

Donald E. Westlake

#37. Not everyone is equipped to be a leader, but in a sense, everyone is a leader to someone, even though you're not equipped. I think parents are a leader to youngsters, teacher are leaders, coaches are leaders, businessmen are leaders.

John Wooden

#38. You listen to people, you listen so deeply that you can hear their past lives,
The crackle of their funeral pyres,

Dick Allen