Zen 2006 & 2007

[Lecter]

On the day you were born, you begin to die. Do not waste a single moment more.

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

[Lecter]

One can travel this world and see nothing. To achieve understanding it is necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see.

Giorgio Morandi

[Lecter]

What is the realm of buddhahood?

Keep mindful twenty-four hours a day, never giving up no matter what state of mind, and one day it will be like meeting an old friend on a busy street: Oh! There you are!

Ch’Ih-Chueh

[Lecter]

The laugh’s on me:
this year’s man
is last year’s man.

Ching An

[Lecter]

The fiftieth ancestor was the Priest T’ien-t’ung Ju-ching. One day his teacher Hsueh-tou asked him, “How can you purify what has never been defiled?”

The master spent more than a year working on this question. Suddenly he realized the point and exclaimed, “I have seen into what has never been defiled!”

Zen Mondo

[Lecter]

In the end one only experiences oneself.

Friedrich Nietzsche

[Lecter]

There is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it.

Bill Viola

[Lecter]

I have something.

When you look at it, it’s there, but when you look for it, it’s not. What is it?

Zen Koan

[Lecter]

Abjure the why and seek the how.

Sir Richard Francis Burton

[Lecter]

What thing is not found when painstakingly sought?
What thing comes of itself without being looked for?
What thing does not break under the blow of an iron hammer?
What thing closes by night and opens by day?

Chih-Men

[Lecter]

The squeaking of the pump sounds as necessary as the music of the spheres.

Henry David Thoreau

[Lecter]

How could the drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.

Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

[Lecter]

People want so much. We want to be someone else. “I want to be stronger.” “I want to be more directed.” “I want to be superwoman.” But it’s not possible. You must accept your condition. But “accept” is active. Who you are is active. Passive acceptance—that’s the immobile, inanimate Zen. It’s not the Zen I’m talking about. There’s passion here. Spirit for the quest. This is important: the sincerity of our quest and how we go about it. It’s a long path. Are you prepared? Do you want to walk on this path? Don’t think about it too much. Just walk! C’mon, let’s go! That’s Zen.

Jakusho Kwong

[Lecter]

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Walker Percy

[Lecter]

The mind is empty infinity, infinite emptiness, full of possibilities.

Yamada Roshi

[Lecter]

We feel and know that we are eternal.

Spinoza

[Lecter]

The world listens little to the lute-strings
of the heart....
Emerging from the pass,
you carry your own baggage.
Entering Ch’in, on whose door
will you knock?

Heng Chao

[Lecter]

Tu Fu comes from a saner, older, more secular culture than Homer, and it is not a new discovery with him that the gods, the abstractions, the forces of nature, are frivolous, lewd, vicious, quarrelsome, and cruel, and only men’s steadfastness, love, magnanimity, calmness, and compassion redeem the night-bound world.

Kenneth Rexroth

[Lecter]

People who seek the way, observe your own mind. When you know the Buddha is within, and do not seek it outside yourself, then mind itself is Buddha and Buddha is the mind.

Fu Shan-Hui

[Lecter]

Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.

Sogyal Rinpoche

[Lecter]

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.

Henry Miller

[Lecter]

My body is like deadwood, my thoughts ashes.
Snow rests on my skull, frost in my jaw.
I don’t turn my back on the world just because I’m old.
Dust finds no place to light on my eyes.

Han-Shan

[Lecter]

“Did you have a happy childhood?” is a false question. As a child I did not know what happiness was, and whether I was happy or not. I was too busy being.

Alistair Reid

[Lecter]

Somehow, in the process of trying to deny that things are always changing, we lose our sense of the sacredness of life. We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things.

Pema Chödrön

[Lecter]

Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown.

Claude Bernard

[Lecter]

I have been reading all day, confined to my room, and feel tired. I raise the screen and face the broad daylight. I move the chair on the veranda and look at the blue mountains. I draw a long breath, fill my lungs with fresh air and feel entirely refreshed. I make tea and drink a cup or two of it. Who would say that I am not living in the light of eternity?

D. T. Suzuki

[Lecter]

The sun is high in the sky, shining on everything. Why is it blocked by a cloud?
Everyone has a shadow, with us always.
Why can’t you step on it?
The whole world is a pit of fire. What state of mind can you attain to avoid being burned?

Kao-Feng

[Lecter]

A Zen master’s life is one continuous mistake.

Dōgen

[Lecter]

I have realized that the past and the future are real illusions, that they exist only in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

Alan Watts

[Lecter]

There is no special “thing” to Buddhism. It can energize people, and it can kill people, too. Seeing into essential nature and becoming enlightened is beyond any Buddhism and penetrates everywhere.

Hsuan-Sha

[Lecter]

The wise man says, “I am looking for the truth,” and the fool, “I have found the truth.”

Russian Proverb

[Lecter]

Do not try to predefine understanding, and do not make a principle out of non-understanding.

Ying-An

[Lecter]

The singular is not particular; it is universal.

Miguel De Unamuno

[Lecter]

Only so much do I know, as I have lived.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

[Lecter]

Three scholars on the way to a civil service examination stopped to buy refreshments from a woman who sold pastries. One scholar was calm and quiet while the other two argued over literature. The woman asked where they were going, and the latter two told her. “You two won’t pass the exam,” she said, “but the other man will.”

The results turned out just as the woman predicted, and the two who failed went back to find the woman and ask her if she knew some mystic art to predict the outcome. “No,” she said, “all I know is that when a pastry is thoroughly cooked it sits there quietly, but before it’s finished it keeps making noise.”

Zen Story

[Lecter]

Religion is a way of walking, not a way of talking.

Dean William R. Inge

[Lecter]

All things are Buddhist teachings; all things are liberating. Walking, standing, sitting, all are liberating acts.

Ma-Tsu

[Lecter]

Meditation is when you sit down and do nothing. Poetry is when you sit down and do something.

Norman Fischer

[Lecter]

Without the bitterest cold that penetrates to the very bone, how can plum blossoms send forth their fragrance to the whole world?

Bashō

[Lecter]

Icy wind
cuts through deep night,
missing only
the gibbon’s howl.

Pao T’An

[Lecter]

The nature of my mind is the empty sky.

Zen Saying

[Lecter]

Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.

John Cage

[Lecter]

The horse’s mind
Blends
So swiftly
Into the hay’s mind.

Fazil Hüsnü Daglarca

[Lecter]

You are lost the instant you know what the result will be.

Juan Gris

[Lecter]

That which man acquires by contemplation he should spend in love.

Meister Eckhart

[Lecter]

Only one koan matters: You.

Ikkyu

[Lecter]

If you ask me anything I don’t know, I’m not going to answer.

Yogi Berra

[Lecter]

A monk asked Kuei-tsung: “Is there no gate through which you can help me to enter?”

The Master said: “The power of Kuan-yin’s sublime wisdom can save the world from suffering.”

“What is the power of Kuan-yin’s sublime wisdom?” the monk asked.

Kuei-tsung struck the incense pot three times and said: “Do you hear that?”

“I heard it,” the monk said.

The master said: “Why didn’t I hear it?” The monk was speechless, and the master took his staff and left.

Zen Mondo

[Lecter]

All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.

Kabir

[Lecter]

Life is something that has to be lived and not talked about.

Carl Gustav Jung

[Lecter]

Do not attempt to become Buddha.

Dōgen

[Lecter]

The more deeply we are our true selves, the less self is in us.

Meister Eckhart

[Lecter]

In the sea of Isé, ten thousand feet down, lies a single stone. I wish to pick up that stone without wetting my hands.

Zen Koan

[Lecter]

Right now, at this very moment, we have a mind, which is all the basic equipment we need to achieve complete happiness.

Howard Cutler

[Lecter]

Ten thousand trees freeze, just about to crack.
One lone tree only, warm, reviving:
in the nearby village, deep in snow,
last night one branch came into bloom.

Ch’I-Chi

[Lecter]

Of course the Dharma-body of the Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of the garden. At the same time, and no less obviously, it was these flowers, it was anything that I—or rather the blessed Not-I—cared to look at.

Aldous Huxley

[Lecter]

It is as hard to see one’s self as to look backwards without turning around.

Henry David Thoreau

[Lecter]

Not yet having become a Buddha,
the ancient pine-tree
idly dreaming.

Issa

[Lecter]

Resolve to be thyself; and know that he who finds himself loses his misery.

Matthew Arnold

[Lecter]

Tung-shan was asked:

“The normal mind is the way; what is the normal mind?”

He replied: “Not picking up things along the road.”

Zen Mondo

[Lecter]

Zen is the madman yelling “If you wanta tell me that the stars are not words, then stop calling them stars!”

Jack Kerouac

[Lecter]

There is not a petal of a flower or a blade of grass that does not configure the Way.

Bassui

[Lecter]

Astonishing! Everything is intelligent!

Pythagoras

[Lecter]

Few people come to this mountaintop;
cranes do not huddle in the pines.
One Buddhist monk, eighty years old,
has never heard of the world’s affairs.

Chia Tao

[Lecter]

There is no end.
There is no beginning.
There is only the
infinite passion of life.

Federico Fellini

[Lecter]

Modern civilization is largely devoted to the pursuit of the cult of delusion. There is no general information about the nature of mind. It is hardly ever written about by writers or intellectuals; modern philosophers do not speak of it directly; the majority of scientists deny it could possibly be there at all. It plays no part in popular culture: no one sings about it, no one talks about it in plays, and it’s not on TV. We are actually educated into believing that nothing is real beyond what we can perceive with our ordinary senses.

Sogyal Rinpoche

[Lecter]

All that is visible clings to the invisible,
The audible to the inaudible,
The tangible to the intangible,
Perhaps the thinkable to the unthinkable.

Lama Anagarika Govinda

[Lecter]

Everyone wishes to have truth on his side, but not everyone wishes to be on the side of truth.

Richard Whately

[Lecter]

Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.

Simone Weil

[Lecter]

One should part from life as Odysseus parted from Nausicaa—blessing it rather than in love with it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

[Lecter]

Now, what is poetry? If you say it is simply a matter of words, I will say a good poet gets rid of words. If you say it is simply a matter of meaning, I will say a good poet gets rid of meaning. “But,” you ask, “without words and without meaning, where is the poetry?” To this I reply, “Get rid of words and get rid of meaning, and still there is poetry.”

Yang Wan-Li

[Lecter]

Ta-mei asked Ma-tsu: “What is Buddha?”
Ma-tsu said: “This very mind is Buddha.”
Later another monk asked Ma-tsu:
“What is Buddha?”
Ma-tsu said: “Not mind, not Buddha.”

Zen Koan

[Lecter]

When you are deluded, you have lost sight of your original mind. When you are enlightened, you have found your original mind, and you never become deluded again. It is like when the sun comes out. It does not combine with darkness. When the sunlight of wisdom and knowledge emerges, it does not combine with darkness and delusion.

Ma-Tsu

[Lecter]

When the word of the poet ceases, a great light begins.

George Steiner

[Lecter]

Break through the impassable barrier and get to know the opening beyond.

Fo-Hsing T’Ai

[Lecter]

You never enjoy the world aright,
til the Sea itself floweth in your veins,
till you are clothed with the heavens
and crowned with the stars,
and perceive yourself to be the
sole heir
of the whole world.

Thomas Traherne

[Lecter]

The essence of Buddhism: “No self, no problem.”

Jack Kornfield

[Lecter]

Don’t ask why I shut the gate
Against times past, few comings
and goings.
The way should rest in simplicity;
The body’s best suited to vacant
idleness.

Ch’I-Chi

[Lecter]

In baiting a mousetrap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse.

Saki

[Lecter]

In a single cry
the pheasant has swallowed
the fields of spring.

Yamei

[Lecter]

Trust only movement.
Life happens at the level
of events not of words.
Trust movement.

Alfred Adler

[Lecter]

A monk asked Yüeh-shan: “What must I think about in zazen?”
Yüeh-shan said: “Think non-thinking.”
“How can I think non-thinking?”
Yüeh-shan said: “By non-thinking.”

Zen Mondo

[Lecter]

If there are questions then, of course, there are answers, but the final answer makes the questions seem absurd.

John Cage

[Lecter]

The real miracle is not to walk on water or thin air but to walk on the earth!

Thich Nhat Hanh

[Lecter]

The self is the only foundation of the self.

The Buddha

[Lecter]

The pure nature of mind—emptiness, lucidity and intelligence without limit—has always been inside us.

Kalu Rinpoche

[Lecter]

If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted with pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It’s that simple. What you see is what you get.

Annie Dillard

[Lecter]

Lurking in my bowl: mountains
and rivers.
Wheeling through my breast:
A sun, a moon.

Shih-Shu

[Lecter]

Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn.

Charlie Parker

[Lecter]

Zen is your original face. There is no special Zen to study other than this. And there is nothing to see or hear either—all seeing and hearing is Zen. Outside of Zen, there is no other seeing or hearing.

Ming-Pen

[Lecter]

O to be delivered from the rational into the realm of pure song...

Theodore Roethke

[Lecter]

Remember these teachings, remember the clear light, the pure bright shining white light of your own nature. It is deathless.

The Tibetan Book Of The Dead

[Lecter]

Habit, laziness, and fear conspire to keep us comfortably within the familiar.

Jane Hirshfield

[Lecter]

You see the ball, you hit the ball. They hit the ball, you catch the ball. You catch the ball, you throw the ball. That’s it.

Kirby Puckett’S Zen Of Baseball

[Lecter]

When the Buddha was walking with his disciples, he pointed to the ground and said, “This would be a good place to build a pagoda.”

Indra took a blade of grass, stuck it in the ground, and said: “It is built.”

The Buddha smiled.

Zen Story

[Lecter]

What is in the mind of the spring wind,
blowing day and night in these groves
and gardens.
It never asks who owns the peach and
plum trees
but blows away their petals without
a word.

Ch’I-Chi

[Lecter]

A monk asked Nan-ch’uan: “How does one cultivate practice?”

Nan-ch’uan replied: “It cannot be told. To say to cultivate such and such practice in such and such a way is very difficult.”

“Then do you let students cultivate practice at all?”

“I cannot stop you.”

“How should I practice?” the monk asked.

Nan-ch’uan replied: “Do what you have to do. Don’t follow others.”

Zen Mondo

[Lecter]

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

Edward Abbey

[Lecter]

I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but caring little for it, and much more for my imperfect garden.

Michel De Montaigne

[Lecter]

When we speak of being highly developed spiritually, this does not mean that we float in the air. In fact, the higher we go, the more we come down to earth.

Chogyam Trungpa

[Lecter]

The great way of the Buddhas is profound, wondrous, inconceivable; how could its practice be easy? Have you not seen how the ancients gave up their bodies and lives, abandoned their countries, cities, and families, looking upon them as like shards of tile? After that they passed eons living alone in the mountains and forests, bodies and minds like dead trees; only then did they unite with the way. Then they could use mountains and rivers for words, raise the wind and rain for a tongue, explain the great void...

Dōgen

[Lecter]

Understanding illusion within enlightenment is like the moon lighting a thousand peaks. Wishing for enlightenment from within illusion is like clouds dotting the endless sky.

P’u-an

[Lecter]

I am what is around me.

Wallace Stevens

[Lecter]

Mind is originally clear and calm, fundamentally free from pollution, and there is no difference between doing and not doing meditation. It is only essential to understand one’s own mind clearly.

Ming-Pen

[Lecter]

“What is the sound outside?” Ching-ch’ing asked a monk.
“That’s the voice of a dove,” the monk said.
Ching-ch’ing scolded the monk: “If you want to avoid falling into hell, never slander the true Dharma.”

Zen Koan

[Lecter]

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

Erich Fromm

[Lecter]

Where is the master?
Gathering herbs, off
on the mountain,
hidden by clouds.

Zen Saying

[Lecter]

And once when she saw him pick up a bird that had stunned itself against a wire, she had realized another world, silent, where each creature is alone in its own aura of silence, the mystery of power.

D. H. Lawrence

[Lecter]

There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.

Hermann Hesse

[Lecter]

Awakened, I hear
the one true thing—
black rain on the roof
of Fukakusa temple.

Dōgen

[Lecter]

I should be content to look at a mountain for what it is, and not as a comment on my life.

David Ignatow

[Lecter]

Come back to square one, just the minimum bare bones. Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time—that is the basic message.

Pema Chödrön

[Lecter]

My nature is subdued
to what it works in,
like the dyer’s hand.

William Shakespeare

[Lecter]

I saw the different things you did,
But always you yourself you hid.
I felt you push, I heard you call,
I could not see yourself at all—
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind that sings so loud a song.

Robert Louis Stevenson

[Lecter]

All of us are watchers—of television, of time clocks, of traffic on the freeway—but few are observers. Everyone is looking, not many are seeing.

Peter M. Leschak

[Lecter]

All religion begins with the cry “Help!”

William James

[Lecter]

There is no other task but to know your own original face.

Yen-T’ou

[Lecter]

You ask why I live in the mountain forest,
and I smile and am silent,
And even my soul remains quiet:
It lives in the other world
Which no one owns.
The peach trees blossom.
The water flows.

Li Po

[Lecter]

The crooked arm of the
old oak-tree points
upwards to the moon.

Dorothy Wordsworth
A Western Haiku

[Lecter]

In the scent of plum blossoms,
Ah! the sun appears—
the mountain path.

Bashō

[Lecter]

When we have seen Reality, there is not a grain of dust which has not a sublime meaning.

J. Vanderleeuw

[Lecter]

Life shrinks or expands according to one’s courage.

Anaïs Nin

[Lecter]

It is like archers. If they start out competing, they’ll never become marksmen. It is only long after practice, with no thought of winning or losing, that they can hit the target. Same with the study of the Way. If even a single thought of winning or losing appears, you will be chained by winning and losing.

Ying-An

[Lecter]

The sound of the
stream, after all, is
without present,
without past.

Ching An

[Lecter]

Existence begins in every instant.

Friedrich Nietzsche

[Lecter]

Sit fixedly, think without thoughts. How do you think without thoughts? Non-thinking. This is the essential art of zazen. Zazen is not the practice of meditation: it is the dharma gate of ease and joy.

Dōgen

[Lecter]

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities crept in. Forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you should begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

[Lecter]

Nothing is permanent:
The sun and the moon rise and
then set,
The bright clear day is followed
by the deep, dark night.
From hour to hour, everything
changes.

Kalu Rinpoche

[Lecter]

Better nothing than something good.

Yun-Men

[Lecter]

The footstep I hear in the corridor in the early morning is myself, and so is the song of the thrush and the scent of the puakenikeni. The sun is my heart, as other teachers have said; the atmosphere is my breath—and this is true for you too, and for the cushions in this hall.

Robert Aitken

[Lecter]

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thought. With our thoughts, we make our world.

The Buddha

[Lecter]

A monk asked Chao-chou: “Has a newborn infant the sixth sense?”
Chao-chou said: “Tossing a ball on a swift current.”
The monk then went to T’ou-tzu and asked: “What does ‘Tossing a ball on a swift current’ mean?”
T’ou-tzu said: “Moment by moment it never stops flowing.”

Zen Koan

[Lecter]

This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what’s so.

Werner Erhard

[Lecter]

Coming along the mountain path,
I find something endearing
about violets.

Bashō

[Lecter]

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile is the source of your joy.

Thich Nhat Hahn

[Lecter]

The Zen “genius” sleeps in every one of us and demands an awakening.

D. T. Suzuki

[Lecter]

Let us dig our gardens and not be elsewhere;
Let us take long walks in the open air...
Let us bathe in the rivers and lakes...
Let us indulge in games...
Let us be more simple: simple and true in our gestures, in our words, and simple and true in our minds above all. Let us be ourselves.

Robert Linssen

[Lecter]

Don’t ask if I’ve ceased my
wanderings;
already I’ve trampled all over
the south.
Understanding should be what
you yourself understand.
Mind is not someone else’s mind.

Ch’i-Chi

[Lecter]

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Franz Kafka

[Lecter]

Nothing is worth more than this day.

Goethe

[Lecter]

To learn the way it is important to be sharp and inconspicuous. When you are sharp, you are not confused by people. When you are inconspicuous, you do not contend with people. Not being confused by people, you are empty and spiritual. Not contending with people, you are serene and subtle.

Liao-An

[Lecter]

There may be thousands of koans for us, and just to sit includes them all. This is the direct way to enlightenment, liberation, renunciation, nirvana, and whatever you say.

Shunryu Suzuki

[Lecter]

Only silence is the supreme speech, only illumination the universal response.

Hung-Chih Cheng-Chueh

[Lecter]

O lily springing clean,
O lily bursting white,
Dear lily of delight.
Spring to my heart agen
That I may flower to men.

John Masefield

[Lecter]

The forces which move the cosmos are no different from those which move the human soul.

Lama Anagarika Govinda

[Lecter]

The best things in life are nearest. Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you.

Robert Louis Stevenson

[Lecter]

As a man is,
so he sees.

William Blake

[Lecter]

When eating bamboo sprouts, remember the man who planted them.

Chinese Proverb

[Lecter]

In royal solitude you walk the universe.

Wu-Men

[Lecter]

my heart is free as the clouds
body light as a floating leaf
gibbons and birds pull me along

Shih-Shu

[Lecter]

There is only one great adventure and that is inwards toward the self.

Henry Miller

[Lecter]

Behind each jewel are three thousand sweating horses.

Zen Saying

[Lecter]

All the harm, fear, and suffering in the world are caused by attachment to the self: Why should I hold on to this great demon?

Shantideva

[Lecter]

“Who is there?” asks God.
“It is I.”
“Go away,” God says.
Later...
“Who is there?” asks God.
“It is thou.”
“Enter,” replies God.

Western Mondo

[Lecter]

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

Henry David Thoreau

[Lecter]

Paradise is where I am.

Voltaire

[Lecter]

In the misty blue haze, jagged peaks appear as if joined. When will I climb and set foot there, to gaze on all the world below?

Chia Tao

[Lecter]

When the mind is not aroused,
this is discipline.
When the mind is unmoved,
this is concentration.
When the mind is not
obscured, this is insight.

Hseuh-Yen

[Lecter]

Wherever there is a feeling of the mysterious, we can say there is Zen.

D. T. Suzuki

[Lecter]

If you’re afraid of being grabbed by God, don’t look at a wall. Definitely don’t sit still.

Jiyu Kennett

[Lecter]

Learning to live is learning to let go.

Sogyal Rinpoche

[Lecter]

People in the West are always getting ready to live.

Chinese Proverb

[Lecter]

If you go expressly to look at the moon, it becomes tinsel.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

[Lecter]

That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.

Willa Cather

[Lecter]

We are already wisdom.

Arnaud Desjardins

[Lecter]

Our life is this wisdom! Our practice is this realization.

Taizan Maezumi Roshi

[Lecter]

It is also helpful to realize that this very body that we have, that’s sitting right here right now...with its aches and its pleasures...is exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, fully alive.

Pema Chödrön

[Lecter]

Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole subject we study and learn.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

[Lecter]

There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple: The philosophy is kindness.

The Dalai Lama

[Lecter]

Just as there is no point of darkness in the sun, for the yogi, the universe and sentient beings are all deities, and he is fulfilled.

Shabkar

[Lecter]

Do not grasp truth,
do not grasp untruth,
and do not grasp that
which is not untruth.

The Diamond Cutter Sutra

[Lecter]

Sit straight, and before you buy your shoes measure your feet.

Zen Saying

[Lecter]

Zen is a razor to cut off birth and death. Zen is a mirror to distinguish the beautiful and the ugly. Zen is a sword to slice away error and delusion. Zen is an axe to cut down a forest of brambles....

Liao-An

[Lecter]

Know that the voices of frogs and worms, the sound of wind and raindrops, all speak the wonderful language of the dharma, and that birds in flight, fish in the water and floating clouds all turn the dharma wheel.

Bassui

[Lecter]

We learn something by doing it. There is no other way.

John Holt

[Lecter]

Among students of the Way, fools and dullards are hard to come by.

Nan-Ch’uan

[Lecter]

Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.

Elbert Hubbard

[Lecter]

Cliffside flowers
sometimes fall
on a robe that’s sitting in zazen.

Ching An

[Lecter]

A monk asked Yun-men:
“What is the pure and clear body of the Dharma?”
Yun-men replied: “Flowery hedge.”

Zen Mondo

[Lecter]

Nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small it takes time—we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.

Georgia O’Keeffe

[Lecter]

Let us be moral.
Let us contemplate existence.

Charles Dickens

[Lecter]

A hundred thousand worlds are
flowers in the sky.
A single mind and body is moonlight
in the water.
Once thinking ends and information
stops,
At that moment there is no place
for thought.

Han-Shan

[Lecter]

Great doubt results in great enlightenment, small doubt results in small enlightenment, no doubt results in no enlightenment.

Yuan-Hsien

[Lecter]

All wisdom comes out of one center, and the number of wisdom is one.

Paracelsus

[Lecter]

When did the lemons learn the same creed as the sun?
When did smoke learn how to fly?

Pablo Neruda

[Lecter]

Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.

Alan Watts

[Lecter]

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

[Lecter]

You see the hut, yet you ask, “Where shall I go for shelter?”

West African Proverb

[Lecter]

If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.

Pablo Picasso

[Lecter]

Know the mind and see its essence, and you may speak at will and go wherever your feet take you—nothing is not the path.

Liao-An

[Lecter]

Your mind is like a TV. When you want a busy channel, you switch to a busy channel. When you want a quiet channel, you switch to a quiet channel.

Thich Nhat Hanh

[Lecter]

Nothing is little to him who feels it with great sensibility.

Samuel Johnson

[Lecter]

Sounds of the valley stream
wash your ears clean;
the canopy of pine trees
touches your eyes green.

Zen Saying

[Lecter]

A cricket chirps and is silent.
The guttering lamp sinks and flairs
up again.
Outside the window evening rain
is heard.
It is the banana plant that speaks
of it first.

Po Chü-I

[Lecter]

Just as the waters of the great oceans all have one taste, the taste of salt, so too all true teachings have but one taste, the taste of liberation.

The Buddha

[Lecter]

Only in solitude do we find ourselves.

Miguel De Unamuno

[Lecter]

It is our mind, and that alone, that chains us or sets us free.

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

[Lecter]

In my saner moments I see the man over there, the too-familiar fellow who lives in that other bathroom behind the looking-glass and seemingly spends all his time staring into this bathroom—that small, dull, circumscribed, particularized, aging, and oh-so-vulnerable gazer—as the opposite in every way of my real Self here.

D. E. Harding

[Lecter]

Does one really have to fret about enlightenment? No matter what road I travel, I’m going home.

Shinso

[Lecter]

We see that life, composed of this mind and body, is in a state of continual, constant transformation and flux. There is always the possibility of radical change. Every moment—not just poetically or figuratively, but literally—every moment we are dying and being reborn, we and all of life.

Sharon Salzberg

[Lecter]

The beggar
wears heaven and earth
as his summer clothes.

Kikaku

[Lecter]

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered; it is something molded.

Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

[Lecter]

Bream and carp flash their golden
scales,
Pairs of ducks link wings.
All the while the poet stares this
way and that—
caught in a web beyond all speaking.

Shih-Shu

[Lecter]

A monk asked: “At the top of a 100-foot pole, how do I step forward?”

Ch’ang-sha said: “Mountains of Lang, rivers of Li.”

The monk confessed he did not understand.

Ch’ang-sha tried again: “The four seas and five lakes are all under the reign of the king.”

Zen Koan

[Lecter]

How terrible to watch a man who has the incomprehensible within his grasp, doesn’t know what to do, and sits down playing with a toy called God.

Feodor Dostoyevsky

[Lecter]

Speaking of Buddhas and Zen masters, talking about mysteries and marvels, is all saying too much or too little.

Zen Saying

[Lecter]

While you were walking, recluse, you tell me you have
stopped;
But now, when I have stopped, you say I have not
stopped.
I ask you, O recluse, about the meaning:
How is it that you have stopped and I have not?

Angulimala, I have stopped forever.
I abstain from violence towards living beings.
But you have no restraint towards things that live.
That is why I have stopped and you have not.

Buddhist Mondo

[Lecter]

As regards the quietude of the sage, he is not quiet because quietness is said to be good. He is quiet because the multitude of things cannot disturb his quietude.

Chuang-Tzu

[Lecter]

Everything that appears is singing one song, which is the song of emptiness and fullness. We experience the world of phenomena and consciousness, of light and dark, playing themselves out in a dance without separation.

Jack Kornfield

[Lecter]

To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter...to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird’s nest or a wildflower in spring—these are some of the rewards of the simple life.

John Burroughs

[Lecter]

A monk asked Ta-lung: “The body perishes. What is the eternal Dharma body?”

Ta-lung said: “The mountain flowers bloom like brocade, the river between the hills is blue as indigo.”

Zen Mondo

[Lecter]

Let us try to recognize the precious nature of each day.

The 14th Dalai Lama

[Lecter]

The sound of the valley stream is the
long, broad tongue.
The form of the mountains is the pure,
clear body.
In the course of the night, the eighty-four
thousand gathas.
Tomorrow, how could I explain to
anyone else?

Su Tung-P’o

[Lecter]

Greed is the basic cause of misery. Free yourself of greed, and the mountains, rivers, and earth do not block the light of your eyes.

She-Hsien

[Lecter]

The timpanist plays upon a living being. The stars are bursting with their messages: Turn to a child for the star’s announcement.

Robert Aitken

[Lecter]

Three monks, Hseuh-feng, Ch’in-shan, and Yen-t’ou, met in the temple garden. Hseuh-feng saw a water pail and pointed to it.

Ch’in-shan said: “The water is clear and the moon reflects its image.”

“No, no,” Hseuh-feng said, “it is not water, it is not moon.”

Yen-t’ou turned over the pail.

Zen Koan

[Lecter]

I wish to become like a great tree, shading all beings.

Yamada Roshi

[Lecter]

Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.

John Cage

[Lecter]

To enter one’s own self, it is necessary to go armed to the teeth.

Paul Valéry

[Lecter]

I should never have made my success in life if I had not bestowed upon the least thing I have ever undertaken the same attention and care I have bestowed upon the greatest.

Charles Dickens

[Lecter]

It is not easy to be reborn as a human being. It is rarer than for a one-eyed turtle, who rises to the surface only once every hundred years, to push his neck through a wooden yoke with one hole that floats on the surface of the wide ocean.

The Buddha

[Lecter]

Space and Time! now I see it is true,
what I guess’d at,
What I guess’d when I loaf’d on the
grass,
What I guess’d while I lay alone in
my bed,
And again as I walk’d the beach under
the paling stars of the morning.

Walt Whitman

[Lecter]

All times and all places are my livelihood.

Zen Saying

[Lecter]

The entire universe is the single eye of a monk. Where will you go to defecate?

Hsueh-Feng

[Lecter]

Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough.

Charles Dudley Warner

[Lecter]

In the midst of nothingness, there is a road that goes directly to my true home.

Gesshu

[Lecter]

Yun-yen was sweeping the grounds.

“You are very busy,” Tao-wu commented.

“You should know that there is someone who isn’t busy.”

“Oh really?” Tao-wu said. “You mean there’s a second moon?”

Yun-yen held up his broom and said, “Which moon is this?”

Zen Mondo

[Lecter]

Wherever there is a poetical action, a religious aspiration, a heroic thought, a union of the nature within man, and the Nature without, there is Zen.

R. H. Blyth

[Lecter]

My life is my message.

Mohandas K. Gandhi

[Lecter]

Traveler, there is no path. You make your path as you travel.

Antonio Machado

[Lecter]

To a worm
in horseradish,
the whole world
is horseradish.

Yiddish Proverb

[Lecter]

Everything is burning. The eye is burning and visible sights are burning. The ears and the sounds they hear are burning, the nose, the tongue, the body, the mind. With what fires are they burning? With the fires of greed, of hate, of ignorance, burning with anxiety, jealousy, loss, decay and grief. Considering this suffering, a follower of the way becomes weary of the fires, weary of greed and hate that fuel the grasping at sights, sounds, smells, tastes, body or mind. Being weary, one divests oneself of this grasping and by the absence of this grasping one becomes free.

The Buddha

[Lecter]

For others to approve me is easy; for me to approve myself is hard.

Yuan-Cheng

[Lecter]

There is no end to the opening up that is possible for a human being.

Charlotte Joko Beck

[Lecter]

Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.

Simone Weil

[Lecter]

“What is the sound outside?” Ching-ch’ing asked a monk.

“The sound of rain dripping.”

Ching-ch’ing said: “Ordinary people are upside down, falling into delusion about themselves and pursuing outside objects.”

Zen Koan

[Lecter]

Stillness—
soaking into the rocks,
the cicada’s cries.

Bashō

[Lecter]

Being is what it is.

Jean-Paul Sartre

[Lecter]

The whole moon and sky come to rest in a single dewdrop on a blade of grass.

Dōgen

[Lecter]

Men cannot see their reflection in running water, but only in still water.

Chuang-Tzu

[Lecter]

The trouble is that you think you have time.

Jack Kornfield

[Lecter]

Begin at once to live.

Seneca

[Lecter]

Clambering up Cold Mountain path,
The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:
The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,
The rushing creek, the dew-soaked grass.
The mossy rocks are slippery, though there’s been no rain.
The pine sings, though there’s no wind.
Who can leap the world’s ties
And sit with me among the clouds?

Han-Shan

[Lecter]

Hear me! In our future lives it will be hard to regain this precious human state, with all its privileges and freedoms. The moment of our death is impossible to predict. Who can say? Perhaps we will die tonight.

Shabkar

[Lecter]

When you see horns over a hedge, you know an ox is there.

Zen Saying

[Lecter]

Ah! What a day-to-day affair life is.

Jules Laforgue

[Lecter]

Learning and thinking are like being outside the door; sitting in meditation is returning home to sit in peace.

The Buddha

[Lecter]

Who can be a wild deer among
deserted mountains
happy with grass and pines.

Han-Shan

[Lecter]

The practice of Zen is forgetting the self in the act of uniting with something.

Yamada Roshi

[Lecter]

I learn by going where I have to go.

Theodore Roethke