Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Morality is a personal matter.
As for enlightenment, that's just for people who can't face reality.
Do what you do as well as you possibly can. That's Buddhist morality.
Faith keeps you going, but doubt keeps you from going off the deep end.
If a tree falls in the forest and it hits a mime, would he make a noise?
The thinking brain influences the body’s responses and it makes a neat little loop.
Reality's all you've got. But here's the real secret, the real miracle: it's enough.
You can always improve your situation. But you do so by facing it, not by running away.
How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!
Suffering occurs when your ideas about how things ought to be don't match how they really are.
Just know that your expectations are only thoughts in your head, and keep on doing what you do.
Your role is to do and say the things that need to be done and said from your unique perspective.
Compassion is the ability to see what needs doing right now and the willingness to do it right now.
The problem is the way we let our desires stand in the way of our enjoyment of what we already have.
It may look like we're doing nothing when we sit zazen. But actually we are exposing ourselves to ourselves.
we ourselves are not something apart from our circumstances. What we are and where we are are one and the same.
Buddhism is all about finding your own way, not imitating the ways of others or even the ways of Buddha himself.
The real goal of Zen is to find a way of life that's easy and undramatic. Strong attachments lead to upset and drama.
True mindfulness is the awareness that everything you encounter is a vigorous expression of the same living universe as you.
Real morality is based on a single criterion: right action, appropriate action, in the present moment and present situation.
Disappointment is just the action of your brain readjusting itself to reality after discovering things are not the way you thought they were.
You can't live in paradise—but you are living right here. Make this your paradise or make this your hell. The choice is entirely yours. Really.
The state of ambiguity - that messy, greasy, mixed-up, confused, and awful situation you're living through right now - is enlightenment itself.
You won’t understand life and death until you’re ready to set aside any hope of understanding life and death and just live your life until you die.
I remember writing the post but not what I said specifically, so I'll either repeat myself or say something completely different and baffle everybody.
What attracted me to Zen was my first teacher, Tim McCarthy. He was extremely genuine. It wasn't even really a Zen thing, that sort of came along later.
Leaving home' to me means adopting the attitude that the pursuit of the truth is more vital than the pursuit of what society — your home — tells you is important.
The truth comes when you can see that your self-image is just a convenient reference point and nothing more, and that you as you had imagined yourself do not exist.
It's crazy to me how concerned people get with what it looks like and what you can do there. People may as well be talking about JRR Tolkien or Star Trek or something.
You can't function in society if you don't involve yourself in the fictions society accepts about time. But you do so with the understanding that you're playing a game.
People imagine enlightenment will make them incredibly powerful. And it does. It makes you the most powerful being in all the universe- but usually no one else notices.
I was very attracted to the way that Zen did not go into the imagination land. And now I've forgotten what your first question was and how we were going to tie this together.
I used to worry when I was a teenager, even into my twenties, after I'd heard something about schizophrenia and how people just suddenly become schizophrenic that I was insane.
Truly compassionate action arises spontaneously without thought and is carried out in real action with no anticipation of reward and, indeed, no concept of a doer of that action.
Buddha might be the one thing that could settle Godzilla down. He might say, "Listen Godzilla, you don't have to do all this. Just chill out a little bit and everything will be fine".
I really thought Reagan was going to push the button and blow us all up. It was scary. So when they did the 1998 American Godzilla film, Hollywood didn't understand what Godzilla was.
No matter what we predict for our futures, we're always wrong anyway. The only sensible thing to do is to live this life as it is right now. Leave what happens after you die till after you die.
But people do the same thing with the Bible. They memorize all the fictional characters, the parameters and the rules of the game and think it's important, but I can't get excited about that myself.
So I'm skeptical and cynical about the whole thing and it's only if something seems to be genuine that I would pursue it. That's why I've stuck with Zen for so long and not gone on to some other path with it.
It's sort of another innovation, probably a good innovation, of Western culture to separate the ideas between science and philosophy, but it's important to remember they weren't always separate realms of inquiry.
I never really got around to discussing that specific topic which I think it crucially important to understand. If you were a monk in Buddhist time and you had sex, there was a good chance a child would be conceived.
So I was first exposed to this guy Tim McCarthy, and he's talking about Zen, but deeper than that he was a genuine person. I thought maybe he's someone I can trust and follow this thing he's talking about all the time.
So he [Shoko Asahara] was insane but managed to convince a couple thousand people that he was enlightened. Western culture, which Japan is now definitely a part of, doesn't have an understanding of what Enlightenment is.
I think the understanding of oneness and interconnectivity of the whole Universe is something we have innately, something we're born with. We are however very skillful at ignoring and pretending we don't have or know it.
the only real time as far as Buddhism is concerned is right now. Right now there is no old age or death because old age and death are descriptions of things as they are now when we compare them to things as they used to be.
Zazen isn't about blissing out or going into an alpha brain-wave trance. It's about facing who and what you really are, in every single goddamn moment. And you aren't bliss, I'll tell you that right now. You're a mess. We all are.
Zen practice is about not getting high on anything and in so doing getting high on absolutely everything. We then find that everything we encounter - bliss or nonbliss - possesses a tremendous depth and beauty that we usually miss.
I guess that all figures into my approach because once I start hearing the imagination land stuff (that's my new phrase now I guess) I tend to tune out or start laughing at it like, "Haha, you guys really believe there is a heaven."
Consider this: 1. Would you ride in a car whose driver was on the consciousness-expanding "entheogenic" drug LSD? And here's a bonus question: 2. Why does an "expanded consciousness" include the inability to operate a motor vehicle?
The thing with the question of oneness or non-oneness is that you can literally discuss it forever. You can go into the philosophy section of any library and you'll see people have been discussing it forever and will continue to do so.