Quotes About The Koan

#1. 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

#2. low expectations were the key to a happy life.

I. W. Gregorio

#3. 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

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

Ikkyu

#5. A sure way to irritate people and to put evil thoughts into their heads is to keep them waiting a long time. This makes them immoral.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#6. 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

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

A. Aimee

#8. 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

#9. 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

#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. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. I don't take life seriously but I see life as an opportunity.

Debasish Mridha

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

Scarlett Thomas

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

Ikkyu

#17. 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

#18. They are who we thought they were!

Dennis Green

#19. 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

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

Ikkyu

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

Ikkyu

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

Ikkyu

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

Ikkyu

#24. 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

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

Ikkyu

#26. In the night's in their thousands to dream the dreams of a child's imaginings, worlds rich or fearful such as might offer themselves but never the one to be.

Cormac McCarthy

#27. Winners win not because they're allowed to, but because they decide to.

Ralph Marston

#28. I do not think that it is right for me to start giving opinions about the human rights situation of any country, including Gambia, except when those crimes translate into the crimes that I have to investigate.

Fatou Bensouda

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. Mark felt eyes on him as tight as a sniper's aim.

Davis Bunn

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

Dick Allen