187 Quotes About Zen-buddhism

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

We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body — a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange.

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

God is the Self of the world, but you can't see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can't see your own eyes, and you certainly can't bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding.

[T]he less I preach, the more likely I am to be heard.

[F]ast intercommunication between points is making all points the same point.

When the outcome of a game is certain, we call it quits and begin another. This is why manypeople object to having their fortunes told: not that fortunetelling is mere superstition or that the predictions would be horrible, but simply that the more surely the future is known, the less surprise and the less fun in living it.

Asian philosophy and culture never endured an intellectual upheaval like the Cartesian split of mind and body that brought the so-called Enlightenment to the West. The consequent achievements of scientific method and the less fortunate by-products of secular self-interest together laid the groundwork, in Europe and America, for the personal psychology of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

We can’t fabricate our being, we can only receive it.