Quotes About Zen

#1. Life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken! Take heed, do not squander your life.

Dogen

#2. Clarity clattered into my thoughts and brought about a satori, an enlightenment, if you will.

Stuart Ayris

#3. 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.

Rajneesh

#4. Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

Alan W. Watts

#5. Zen values the simple, concrete, living facts of everyday direct personal experience.

James H. Austin

#6. You will bring yourself the suffering you need to bring yourself so that you may awaken.

T. Scott McLeod

#7. Zen is the game of insight, the game of discovering who you are beneath the social masks.

Reginald Horace Blyth

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

Shunryu Suzuki

#9. I'm a poet who practices Zen. And it's not, I'm somebody who practices Zen who writes poetry. There's no separation for me.

Sam Hamill

#10. We should live every day like people who have just been rescued from the moon.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#11. 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.

Rajneesh

#12. Happiness will be fleeting if you constantly search for it in places that can be taken away. It's an inside job.

Nikki Rowe

#13. Zen: 'I kinda went about it all wrong last night, didn't I?
Melody: 'Kinda? It was a total fustercluck.'

Megan McCafferty

#14. Mastery of impulse is achieved through taking pauses during life's contrasting situations. Mastery of impulse is about developing strong willpower that can be used to redirect the flow of energy in any situation. Mastery of impulse is about responding to the world with a sense of reason and peace.

Alaric Hutchinson

#15. He knows not where he's going,
For the ocean will decide,
Its not the destination,
It's the glory of the ride

Edward Monkton

#16. Zen is the "spirit of the valley," not the mountaintop.

Robert M. Pirsig

#17. It is very possible to acknowledge another person's concerns without entering into their vibration.

Alaric Hutchinson

#18. We die, he said.
We die, I said. And kn owing this how do we live?
Knowing this, we live.
We live.

Alan Spence

#19. Most writers agree on the fact that Zen is not to be understood but to be lived; and far from being incompatible with the requirements of everyday life, Zen confers on it its own full revealing value.

Robert Linssen

#20. We cannot dim another person's light without first extinguishing our own.

Alaric Hutchinson

#21. Zen is discipline - the discipline of living life, the discipline of taking a breath, the discipline of not knowing and not trying to know.

Frederick Lenz

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

Frederick Lenz

#23. The dizziness in the face of les espaces infinis
only overcome if we dare to gaze into them without any protection. And accept them as the reality before which we must justify our existence. For this is the truth we must reach to live, that everything is and we just in it.

Dag Hammarskjold

#24. Your Treasure House is in yourself, it contains all you need

Hui Hai

#25. All beliefs are equally valid.

Alaric Hutchinson

#26. This is Zen, and in Zen, as we all know ... anything goes!

Frederick Lenz

#27. Render unto meditation the things that are meditation's, and unto medication the things that are medication's.

Barry Graham

#28. There is nothing to learn, nothing to attain, nothing to explain, nothing to do, and no place to go

Zen

#29. As a dialectical teacher, I have had many lives where I have taught Zen and Tibetan Buddhism and mysticism. I teach in many different modalites. But the theme that unites them - is love.

Frederick Lenz

#30. Zen professes
itself to be the spirit of Buddhism, but in fact it is the spirit of all
religions and philosophies,

D.T. Suzuki

#31. Zen is a path of liberation. It liberates you. It is freedom from the first step to the last. You are not required to follow any rules; you are required to find out your own rules and your own life in the light of awareness.

Osho

#32. Like the moon on the water, in a way. When you confront a Zen master, what you're really seeing are not his limitations but yours.

Pico Iyer

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

Dick Allen

#34. I suppose what I like about Zen is that the teachers are constantly questioning your insight and challenging it, looking for sloppiness or laziness in it, and ways you can go past that.

David O. Russell

#35. Old age and death are in the natural course of things. There is nothing a doctor can do about them.

Muso Soseki

#36. Good times come and go. And bad times do the same.

Steve Hagen

#37. Your immediate experience is Tantric Zen. How aware are you of your immediate experience? - Probably not that aware.

Frederick Lenz

#38. Zen is to have the heart and soul of a little child.

Takuan Soho

#39. No person is ever wrong in how they experience their reality.

Alaric Hutchinson

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

Alan W. Watts

#41. People say that practicing Zen is difficult, but there is a misunderstanding as to why. It is not difficult because it is hard to sit in the cross- legged position, or to attain enlightenment. It is difficult because it is hard to keep our mind pure and our practice pure in its fundamental sense.

Shunryu Suzuki

#42. When you get there, there isn't any there there.

Gertrude Stein

#43. Zen people love Buddha so tremendously that they can even play jokes upon him. It is out of great love; they are not afraid.

Rajneesh

#44. The lesson seems almost Zen: you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer.

Atul Gawande

#45. The prospect of future lives in remote heavens as a compensation for the inadequacy of our present lives is a bad tradeoff for losing out on the present.

Francis Harold Cook

#46. Here it is ... your moment of zen.

Jon Stewart

#47. His Zen is genetic. You should meet his parents. You could rob them at gunpoint and they would still ask you to dinner and make sure you got everything valuable in the house,

Rachel Higginson

#48. How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!

Brad Warner

#49. Find a Local Zen Temple To Visit Research the authenticity of the Zen teacher. Find out what school they are from, what country they came from, and the ideals they hold most important. If you're interested in a monastery,

Alexis G. Roldan

#50. A point of perspection dances in the balance of the seer's vision.

Zen Benefiel

#51. The secret of zen is just two words: not ... always ... so.

Shunryu Suzuki

#52. Great doubt: great awakening. Little doubt: little awakening. No doubt: no awakening. - Zen mantra

Barry L. Duncan

#53. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?

Henry David Thoreau

#54. Dare to be vulnerable, walk outside without your armor on and say YES to your heart.

Alaric Hutchinson

#55. To forget the self is to remember that we don't exist alone, but in relation to other people, to other creatures, to the planet, and to the universe.

Steve Hagen

#56. Whether you are cooking, cleaning house, or planting flowers, try to concentrate on the textures, the smells, colors, tastes, sounds, all Zen moments of focused joy.

Jerry Lynch

#57. Shall you live authentically who you are or will you spend your allotted living the life of someone you imagine your self to be?

Earl R. Smith II

#58. I just had to stay cool. Zen. No punching in the face. Punching would not be Zen.

Ilona Andrews

#59. 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.

Shunryu Suzuki

#60. The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.

Thomas Merton

#61. Zen is not, in my view, philosophy or mysticism. It is simply a practice of readjustment of nervous activity. That is, it restores the distorted nervous system to its normal functioning.

Katsuki Sekida

#62. His priorities for a rich and contented life were friendship, freedom, the pleasures of an examined life, and enough food and shelter to keep body and soul together.

Roger Housden

#63. Love was never meant to be contained solely in our hearts, just as life in a seed was always meant to break through into the world and become beauty to be shared.

Forrest Curran

#64. Love was like swallowing a cili padi whole.

Zen Cho

#65. There is a beautiful flow to the study of Zen. If it is not making you happier, then you are not practicing correctly.

Frederick Lenz

#66. Every hour of your life that ticks by, there are numerous points and moments when you can choose to pause - and be aware of your mental and physical state. At any given point, you can freeze the flow that is your life, and be fully conscious for a moment.

Kevin Michel

#67. All of us should treasure his (John Dillinger) Oriental wisdom and his preaching of a Zen-like detachment, as exemplified by his constant reminder to clerks, tellers, or others who grew excited by his presence in their banks: 'Just lie down on the floor and keep calm.

Robert Anton Wilson

#68. But until then, and right now, the sun is bright, the air is cool, my head is clear, there's a whole day ahead of us, we're almost to the mountains, it's a good day to be alive. It's this thinner air that does it. You always feel like this when you start getting into higher altitudes.

Robert M. Pirsig

#69. But the goal of Zen Housekeeping is not to have a home that is perfect. It is to embrace the process of keeping the house - one perfect moment at a time.

Lauren Cassel Brownell

#70. When you catch yourself slipping into a pool of negativity, notice how it derives from nothing other than resistance to the current situation.

Donna Quesada

#71. In the words of a Zen poem, At dusk the cock announces dawn; At midnight, the bright sun.

Fritjof Capra

#72. Vibration can be shifted through the mastery of thought

Alaric Hutchinson

#73. Zen teaches that once we can open up to the inevitability of our demise, we can begin to transform that situation and lighten up about it.

Allen Klein

#74. I've done a fair amount of that stuff ... when we did Lord of the Rings the transformation sequence from Smeagol to Gollum was a 19-hour make-up job. You have to have a kind of zen button that you press and allow the mind to be focused in a certain way.

Andy Serkis

#75. In the mind of the beginner, all things are possible, But in the mind of the expert, only a few. Zen Master Suzuki-Roshi

Barbara L. Jordan

#76. Old Zen was the reduction of concepts to absurdity.

Frederick Lenz

#77. I'm a lapsed Zen Buddhist. I've read hundreds of books on Zen, I meditated daily for about fifteen years, and once spent a month studying with Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh.

Will McIntosh

#78. It is easy to believe we are each waves and forget we are also the ocean.

Jon J. Muth

#79. Essays in Zen Buddhism

Alan W. Watts

#80. [H]uman experience is determined as much by the nature of the mind and the structure of its senses as by the external objects whose presence the mind reveals.

Alan W. Watts

#81. When you visit the Zen Monasteries, one of the first things required is that you bring a donation. They have to pay for those monasteries. The upkeep is fantastic. The monks have to be fed, and so on.

Frederick Lenz

#82. Peace does not demand that everyone like or want the same reality.

Alaric Hutchinson

#83. Zen Buddhism does not preach. Sermons remain words. It waits until people feel stifled and insecure, driven by a secret longing.

Eugen Herrigel

#84. A Buddha doesn't observe precepts. A Buddha doesn't do good or evil. A Buddha isn't energetic or lazy. A Buddha is someone who does nothing, someone who can't even focus his mind on a Buddha. A Buddha isn't a Buddha. Don't think about Buddhas.

Bodhidharma

#85. Zen is the path that focuses the most upon meditation. It is almost exclusively a path of meditation.

Frederick Lenz

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

Alan Watts

#87. All that exists is the present moment

Alaric Hutchinson

#88. I guess Zen is a day like this when you are part of the air and remember things

Stephen Chbosky

#89. Only when you can be extremely pliable and soft can you be extremely hard and strong.

Zen Proverb

#90. What I would say to filmmakers, if I may be so bold or so arrogant, is to draw inspiration from other filmmakers, but go to the place in your own gut where everything is nothing. That's a very Zen thing to say, but that place of nothing is where real creativity comes out of.

Lawrence Bender

#91. For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.

Alan W. Watts

#92. The cats were relaxing in a patch of sunlight on the rug without a thought in their sleek brown heads. What matter to them that it was Sunday-or even Thursday? Every day was Today in their scheme of things, and there was no such thing as Yesterday or Tomorrow.

Lilian Jackson Braun

#93. The buddha-dharma ... is about directly seeing Truth, prior to forming any ideas about it. It is about responding to each particular situation as it comes ... , not according to some ... program of dos and don'ts.

Steve Hagen

#94. Every time you run
you create the quality of your own experience

Fred Rohe

#95. In Zen we strive to bring both the mind and the body into perfect combination, so that there is no intrinsic difference between them.

Frederick Lenz

#96. Zen is very simple, it means being one with yourself at this very moment.

Paul Kain

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

Alan Watts

#98. Zen is ... joyous iconoclasm which respects nothing and no one, particularly itself.

Dave Brandon

#99. The quality of our lives is determined by the focus of our attention.

Cheri Huber

#100. So, without telling any of my Zen-snob buddies, I liked to pretend everything was the Pure Land, that my life was already perfect as it was.

Jaimal Yogis