51 Quotes by Kenneth S. Leong

Every day is a good day" does not mean hitting the jackpot everyday. Nor does it mean getting a promise from God or Buddha. Rather it refers to the blissful state in which one can accept reality totally and unconditionally.

A sure sign of false faith is its militant stance. While true faith is marked by its gentleness to all aspects of life, false faith can be easily identified by its stubbornness, inflexibility, paranoia, and a desperate need to be right.

While a "don't-know mind" is alive and full of possibilities, a mind that claims to know is a closed and stagnant one.

[O]ur existential anxiety originates not from the objective state of reality but from our inflated expectations. The main problem is the discrepancy between our belief that we can handle everything by ourselves and the fact that, as mortals, we have several limitations. Unaware of this, we try to do the impossible: to control the uncontrollable, to predict the unpredictable, to hold on to the impermanent, and to secure the unsecurable. This illusion of omnipotence becomes our torture.

Disappointment is the fast track to enlightenment because it accelerates our coming to terms with reality.

When was the last time you noticed the beauty of a cool breeze or the wonder of a starry sky or the vibrancy of a wild flower on the roadside? I used to have the ability to instantly appreciate the beauty of all these when I was a child, but by the time I was twenty it was almost lost. (It took a lot of Zen practice for me to regain it.) The world has not changed that much; there are still summer breezes, night skies, and wild flowers. But where has the perception gone?

The fact of life is that the appreciation of true beauty cannot start without total renunciation.[...] But to live beautifully, one needs an unfettered mind, a mind that is not clogged up with all kinds of attachments, opinions, or fossilized ways of looking at things. There is no need to get rid of anything as long as we can sever our attachments to it.

D.T. Suzuki notes that "when Zen wants you to taste the sweetness of sugar, it will put the required article right into your mouth and no further words are said." In this sense, Zen is direct and not intermediated, concrete and not abstract, practical and not theoretical, sensual and not intellectual, down-to-earth and not otherworldly.

But in order to look, one has to start with a beginner's mind that carries no preconceptions or presumptions. The beginner's mind looks to find out what is new; it does not look to confirm.