Prologue
- One of the problems of a well-read author is to be accused of repetition by critics who do not seem to understand that varied repetition is the essence of music.
- Generally speaking, the task of the autobiography so embarrasses the writer that he must either boast or confess.
- "pregnant emptiness.
- Love of money and imagination in spending it seem to be mutually exclusive. Furthermore, it could almost be stated as an equation: money=anxiety.
- It is now becoming obvious that the same may be said of almost all schools, and of universities as well. They are production lines turning out stereotyped personnel and consumers for the industrial machine -- a machine which is more and more subservient, not to human needs, but to the abstract purposes of technological expansion for its own sake, of the money game, and of competition for the hollow rewards of status.
- Too much za-zen is apt to turn one into a stone Buddha.
- We also acquired a vivid understanding of the ji-ji-mu-ge principle: that all things and events are mutually interpenetrating and interdependent.
- The koan are not solved unless you work at them with all your might until you are simply forced to give up, and the answer comes of itself.
- Though I might be considered by some to have reached a goal, I have discovered along the way that at every position in the whole hierarchy of beings there is as much above as below, and thus as much a failure as it is a success.
- I have never been felt so excited, and yet so calm, in my life. I have the same problems I've always had, and yet I can accept them. All of a sudden, I expect nothing. I have everything, and even if I lose all I have I still have everything! ... I'm at at a loss to explain to her (friend who lost a loved one) or even to you what I feel: that there is no God outside her letting things happen, but she herself who is making the trouble, and that God isn't anything -- he just IS. ... It has something to do with every minute being something of its own -- enough in itself -- although it might even be a very unhappy minute.
- But personal talking and praying to God in so many words just isn't my nature. I feel it as a clumsy encumbrance which not only puts God at a distance but also treats him as another person or creature, however exalted and holy, and distracts from the realization that "God is nearer to you than you are to yourself."
- Personal prayer simply got in the way of my fundamental mystical feeling that God is what there is and all that there is.
- I have no other self than this whole universe. I am not controlling it volitionally any more than I am controlling my automatic nervous system ... There is simply the whole process happening of itself, spontaneously, an with every pair of eyes it takes a fresh look at itself. this happening is what I call God, and what it is essentially is beyond all possible conception. I feel it most intensely in a stillness of mind where words and ideas are not running around in my brain.
- ordinary Christians has never, except by chance, involved interior or mystical silence.
- For true authority says, "Let go. You will only find God if you do not try to possess him."
- Walking meditation
- Mystical silence in which one is simply aware of what is, here and now, without verbal or ideational comment.
- By such reflections I think myself into silence and, by writing, help others similarly spellbound by thoughts and words to come to silence -- which is the realization that a linear code cannot justly represent a nonlinear world.
- Whenever I perform a ceremony of marriage for personal friends, I give some such discourse as this:
- "What I am about to say may at first sound depressing and even cynical, but I think you will not find it so in practice. There are three things I would have you bear in mind. The first is that as you now behold one another, you are probably seeing each other at your best. All things disintegrate in time, and as the years go by you will tend to get worse rather than better. Do not, therefore, go into marriage with projects for improving each other. Growth may happen, but it cannot be forced. The second has to do with emotional honesty. Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command. For the same reason, do not require love from your partner as a duty, for love given in this spirit doesn't ring true, and gives no pleasure to the other. The third is that you do not so cling to one another as to commit mutual strangulation. You are not each other's chattels, and you must so trust your partner as to allow full freedom to be the being that he and she is. I your observe these things your marriage will have surer ground than can be afforded by any formal contract or promise, however solemn and legally binding."
- Obviously a man who marries a woman (vice versa) for security does not love her. If he does love her, no law is necessary to protect such love.
- (realm of marriage and love between man and woman) Almost impossible to get churchmen face the subject frankly, or to approach it without laws and attitudes manifesting, not love, but possessiveness and fear. ... For when, in fear, we try to make the relationship of love absolute, we make it, not divine, but merely inhuman.
- Taoism
- Bankei (D.T. Suzuki's "Living by Zen," Lucien Stryk's "
- I make it very clear to those who attend that my role is more that of physician than of minister, for the former works to get rid of his clients and the latter to keep them in a permanent following. I insist that, after a certain time, they will have heard all the important things I have to say, and that having received the message they should hang up the phone.
- (old buildings resisting the new) illustration of the proverb that the worst is the corruption of the best.
- Morimoto-san: "Any book will do for studying Zen. ... There's no real point in going to all the trouble to translate our old Chinese texts about Zen -- not if you're serious about understanding real Zen. The sound of rain needs no translation."
- Simply listen. For when you have really heard the sound of rain you can hear, and see and feel, everything else in the same way -- as needing no translation, as being just that which it is, though it may be impossible to say what.
