1,214 Quotes About Zen

The exact proportion and combination of the qualities within you, as they are, even while you search and struggle for them to be different or better, is a unique beauty.

Of course, the self-righteous demand and expectation for love, and exactly how it should be expressed, is not the most streamlined method for producing it in another for you. That is, it does not compel or create the love itself. You’re neither loving nor producing that which would compel the love toward you. You’re compressed between them both and incapable of accepting either. And rightly so. Which then accelerates the accumulating suffering.

The composite of what you know to do—that which compels you, that which you are naturally already drawn to, that which exploits the unique potentials inside you, that which you know you are capable of doing, that which will build a bridge between imagination and reality—causes a relationship that obliges sacrifice.

Because as you become better at everything, as the innate skills actually manifest in reality, the bar rises for the next jump. The core demand for evolution is relentless, and respect, happiness, love and joy are irrevocably tied to it.

One of the great images to come down to us through Zen Buddhism is the encounter between an enlightened master and an advanced apprentice during the course of a shared meal. The apprentice, becoming fed up with the stress and waiting and the master’s apparent disregard for him, demands an explanation without complication of exactly how to become enlightened. The master asks, “Have you finished your rice?” “Yes,” says the apprentice. “Then go wash your bowl.

Zen is important as a counterbalance to the western eagerness and performance thinking. As long as one cannot concede more than 60-100 years of earthly existence with appropriate vitality, the relativism will dominate the continuum for all times and makes the rational-materialist thinking totally annihilated, because all the material and utopian values can´t be transferred into the other sphere.

No matter how terrible my dreams, I'm always happy when I wake up.

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

That the self advances and confirms the myriad things is called delusion. That the myriad things advance and confirm the self is enlightenment.