There will always be war, but we must always work to oppose it.
When you accept everything, everything is beyond dimensions. The earth is not great nor a grain of sand small. In the realm of Great Activity picking up a grain of sand is the same as taking up the whole universe. To save one sentient being is to save all sentient beings. Your efforts of this moment to save one person is the same as the eternal merit of Buddha.
As long as we have some definite idea about or some hope in the future, we cannot really be serious with the moment that exists right now.
When we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door, and we are purely independent of, and at the same time, dependent upon everything.
And we should forget, day by day, what we have done; this is true non-attachment. And we should do something new. To do something new, of course we must know our past, and this is alright. But we should not keep holding onto anything we have done; we should only reflect on it. And we must have some idea of what we should do in the future. But the future is the future, the past is the past; now we should work on something new.
A Master who cannot bow to a disciple cannot bow to Buddha.
There are, strictly speaking, no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity.
We have to study with our warm heart, not just with our brain.
The goal of our life’s effort is to reach the other shore, Nirvana. Prajna paramita, the true wisdom of life, is that in each step of the way, the other shore is actually reached.
For Zen students, a weed is a treasure.
To stop your mind does not mean to stop the activities of mind. It means your mind pervades your whole body.
If you want to enjoy the movie, you should know that it is the combination of film and light and white screen, and that the most important thing is to have a plain, white screen.
Christopher McCandless:"I will miss you too, but you are wrong if you think that the joy of life comes principally from the joy of human relationships. God's place is all around us, it is in everything and in anything we can experience. People just need to change the way they look at things.
When you try to attain something, your mind starts to wander about somewhere else. When you do not try to attain anything, you have your own body and mind right here. In Buddhism it is a heretical view to expect something outside this world. We do not seek for something besides ourselves.
If your practice is good, you may become proud of it. What you do is good, but something more is added to it. Pride is extra. Right effort is to get rid of something extra.
Wabi means spare, impoverished; simple and functional. It connotes a transcendence of fad and fashion. The spirit of wabi imbues all the Zen arts, from calligraphy to karate, from the tea ceremony to Zen archery.
Instead of respecting things, we want to use them for ourselves and if it is difficult to use them, we want to conquer them.
The secret of zen is just two words: not... always... so.
We do not exist for the sake of something else. We exist for the sake of ourselves.
There should not be any particular teaching. Teaching is in each moment.
From True Emptiness The Wondrous Being Appears
Usually when someone believes in a particular religion, his attitude becomes more and more a sharp angle pointing away from himself. In our way the point of the angle is always toward ourselves.
The Zen way of calligraphy is to write in the most straightforward, simple way as if you were a beginner, not trying to make something skillful or beautiful, but simply writing with full attention as if you were discovering what you were writing for the first time; then your full nature will be in your writing.
Because all existence is founded upon the ever-present state of union, everything already exists in a state of tranquility. However, this state of tranquility is masked from us by our assumption that there is a separation, that there is a problem.
A tiger does not ignore or slight any small animal. The way he catches a mouse and catches and devours a cow are the same.
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