Quotes About Zazen

#1. Zazen is the ultimate practice. This is indeed the True Self. The Buddhadharma is not to be sought outside of this.

Dogen

#2. Zazen isn't about blissing out or going into an alpha brain-wave trance. It's about facing who and what you really are, in every single goddamn moment. And you aren't bliss, I'll tell you that right now. You're a mess. We all are.

Brad Warner

#3. True zazen is surrendering every moment. But surrendering to what? It really does not matter what we call it: God or the Tao or the Dharma or the Buddha or our true nature ... It is the act of letting go, of surrendering, that matters. The very act of letting go opens us up completely.

Dennis Merzel

#4. The emphasis is on meditation in Tantric Zen. The experience of meditation in formal practice, zazen, where you're sitting down and meditating and concentrating.

Frederick Lenz

#5. Each moment of zazen is equally wholeness of practice, equally wholeness of realization. This is not only practice while sitting, it is like a hammer striking emptiness: before and after, its exquisite peal permeates everywhere. How can it be limited to this moment?

Dogen

#6. So it is not a matter of whether it is possible to attain Buddhahood, or if it is possible to make a tile a jewel. But just to work, just to live in this world with this understanding is the most important point, and that is our practice. That is true zazen.

Shunryu Suzuki

#7. Actually the best way to relieve your mental suffering is to sit in zazen, even in such a confused state of mind and bad posture.

Shunryu Suzuki

#8. If you think you will get something from practicing zazen, already you are involved in impure practice.

Shunryu Suzuki

#9. To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could just hang out happily as part of an open-ended quantum array.

Ruth Ozeki

#10. Practicing zazen and mindfulness constantly and correctly, over a period of time, can bring strength and clarity to your finite mind and eventually give you access to your infinite mind.

Frederick Lenz

#11. Zazen is better than a home. Zazen is a home that you can't ever lose.

Ruth Ozeki

#12. Do not make this practice a source of pressure, compulsion, anxiety or pride. It is none of these. Zazen is simply a way to find your true home.

Brenda Shoshanna

#13. But as long as you think you are practicing zazen for the sake of something, that is not true practice.

Shunryu Suzuki

#14. No matter how many years you sit doing zazen, you will never become anything special.

Kodo Sawaki

#15. Think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Nonthinking. This is the essential art of zazen.

Ruth Ozeki

#16. The more you practice zazen, the more you will be able to accept something as your own, whatever it is.

Shunryu Suzuki

#17. Life without zazen is like winding your clock without setting it. It runs perfectly well, but it dosen't tell time.

Shunryu Suzuki

#18. Zazen's music is composed in other dimensions and it is played by some of my students. I go through the music they have played with my aura and wash out anything impure.

Frederick Lenz

#19. Sports and athletics can be a path in Zen, in concordance with daily practice of zazen meditation. You need to move with your spirit, not just with your body.

Frederick Lenz

#20. It may look like we're doing nothing when we sit zazen. But actually we are exposing ourselves to ourselves.

Brad Warner

#21. Zazen practice and everyday activity are one thing. We call zazen everyday life, and everyday life zazen.

Shunryu Suzuki

#22. Whenever a thought occurs, be aware of it, as soon as you are aware of it, it will vanish. If you remain for a long period forgetful of objects, you will naturally become unified. This is the essential art of zazen.32

Yi Wu Taigen Leighton

#23. Tantric Zen is all about the practice of zazen meditation. If you meditate well, you'll be in very powerful states of mind and then it really doesn't matter what you do.

Frederick Lenz

#24. Concentration is not to try hard to watch something ... Concentration means freedom ... In zazen practice we say your mind should be concentrated on your breathing, but the way to keep your mind on your breathing is to forget all about yourself and just to sit and feel your breathing.

Shunryu Suzuki

#25. Know that the true dharma emerges of itself [during the practice of zazen], clearing away hindrances and distractions.

Dogen

#26. During zazen, brain and consciousness become pure. It's exactly like muddy water left to stand in a glass. Little by little, the sediment sinks to the bottom and the water becomes pure.

Taisen Deshimaru

#27. By perfecting the practices of zazen and mindfulness, by learning patience and love and by realizing the essential emptiness of all phenomena, you will discover nirvana.

Frederick Lenz

#28. When I'm writing a novel, which is what I like to write, I get up early, sit zazen, make a pot of green tea. I wear wrist cuffs to keep my wrists warm and minimize irritation from extended contact with the surface of my desk. I sit down and write.

Ruth Ozeki

#29. Practicing zazen is like gradually (or maybe not so gradually) getting your sight back.

Brad Warner

#30. 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.

Shunryu Suzuki

#31. If you want to study Zen, you should forget all your previous ideas and just practice zazen and see what kind of experience you have in your practice. That is naturalness.

Shunryu Suzuki

#32. Zen is not a particular state but the normal state: silent, peaceful, unagitated. In Zazen neither intention, analysis, specific effort nor imagination take place. It's enough just to be without hypocrisy, dogmatism, arrogance - embracing all opposites.

Taisen Deshimaru

#33. In zazen, leave your front door and your back door open. Let thoughts come and go. Just don't serve them tea.

Shunryu Suzuki

#34. When your consciousness has become ripe in true zazen-pure like clear water, like a serene mountain lake, not moved by any wind-then anything may serve as a medium for realization.

Matsuo Basho

#35. In other restless positions you have no power to accept your difficulties, but in the zazen posture which you have acquired by long, hard practice, your mind and body have great power to accept things as they are, whether they are agreeable or disagreeable.

Shunryu Suzuki

#36. If you want to discover the true meaning of Zen in your everyday life, you have to understand the meaning of keeping your mind on your breathing and your body in the right posture in zazen.

Shunryu Suzuki

#37. We stop the one who can't cease from seeking things outside, and practice with our bodies with a posture that seeks absolutely nothing. This is zazen.

Kodo Sawaki

#38. The uniqueness of zazen lies in this: that the mind is freed from bondage to all thought forms, visions, objects, and imaginings, however sacred or elevating, and brought to a state of absolute emptiness, from which alone it may one day perceive its own true nature, or the nature of the universe.

Philip Kapleau

#39. In Zen you practice zazen, mindfulness and other forms of introspection to find out who you are and what you want, to balance your spirit, develop willpower, increase your sense of humor and gain wisdom.

Frederick Lenz

#40. 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.

Yamada Koun

#41. What is called zazen is sitting on a zafu [pillow] in a quiet room, absolutely still, in the exact and proper position and without uttering a word, the mind empty of any thought, good or wicked. It is continuing to sit peacefully, facing a wall, and nothing more. Every day.

Taisen Deshimaru

#42. Zazen is an activity that is an extension of the universe. Zazen is not the life of an individual, it's the universe that's breathing.

Dogen

#43. Even when you practice zazen alone, without a teacher, I think you will find some way to tell whether your practice is adequate or not.

Shunryu Suzuki

#44. Put on the music, and listen. Zazen means to sit, to listen. You're listening to enlightenment, to the universes, to the planes of mind.

Frederick Lenz

#45. Zazen is seated meditation-the opposite of contemplation-the emptying of the mind of all thoughts in order simply to be. In the midst of all evil, not a thought is aroused in the mind-this is called za. Seeing into one's Self-nature, not being moved at all-this is called Zen.

Huineng

#46. In zazen, one is one's present self, what one was, and what one will be, all at once.

Peter Matthiessen

#47. you prefer to practice zazen at home, then there are not as much rules to follow. You have the freedom to choose from the different techniques that were mentioned, from to face the wall while sitting to the walking meditation.

Anong Sasithorn

#48. Think of Zen as the bow and Zazen as the arrow. The bow is the guiding theory behind the practice, while Zazen is the arrow which puts that practice into action. The better you understand the bow and the better you control the arrow, the better you'll be at hitting your target.

Bino Schree

#49. Actually we do not have any particular name for our practice; when we practice zazen we just practice it, and whether we find joy in our practice or not, we just do it.

Shunryu Suzuki

#50. Zazen practice is the direct expression of our true nature. Strictly speaking, for a human being, there is no other practice than this practice; there is no other way of life than this way of life.

Shunryu Suzuki

#51. Your breath is a unique object to meditation because it resides right at the boundary between inside and outside, between you and the outside world.

Steve Hagen

#52. [W]hen you practise right meditation, you 'cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inwardly to illuminate your self.

Steve Hagen