Robert Aitken > Quotes

“The Buddha's original teaching is essentially a matter of four points -- the Four Noble Truths:

1. Anguish is everywhere.
2. We desire permanent existence of ourselves and for our loved ones, and we desire to prove ourselves independent of others and superior to them. These desires conflict with the way things are: nothing abides, and everything and everyone depends upon everything and everyone else. This conflict causes our anguish, and we project this anguish on those we meet.

3. Release from anguish comes with the personal acknowledgment and resolve: we are here together very briefly, so let us accept reality fully and take care of one another while we can.

4. This acknowledgement and resolve are realized by following the Eightfold Path: Right Views, Right Thinking, Right Speech, Right Conduct, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Recollection, and Right Meditation. Here "Right" means "correct" or "accurate" -- in keeping with the reality of impermanence and interdependence.”
― Robert Aitken, The Dragon Who Never Sleeps: Verses for Zen Buddhist Practice

“Our practice is not to clear up the mystery. It is to make the mystery clear.”
― Robert Aitken

“Watching gardeners label their plants
I vow with all beings
to practice the old horticulture
and let plants identify me.”
― Robert Aitken, The Dragon Who Never Sleeps: Verses for Zen Buddhist Practice

“Once one thinks like a mountain, the whole world is converted. All things confirm me. Then I sit on dojo cushions that do not move. There is no controller and no one to control.”
― Robert Aitken, The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics

“You and I come forth as possibilities of essential nature, alone and independent as stars, yet reflecting and being reflected by all things. My life and yours are the unfolding realization of total aloneness and total intimacy.”
― Robert Aitken, The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics

“The self is completely autonomous, yet exists only in resonance with all other selves.”
― Robert Aitken, The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics

“I don’t dream about the President any more, and when I talk to my friends, I find they don’t either. The Great Leader is a hollow man, the Law of the Market cannot prove itself, and the Nation State mocks its own values.”
― Robert Aitken, The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics

“When you reflect on the infinite number of happenstances that coalesced to produce you, then you understand how unique, how precious, how sacred you really are. Your task is to cultivate that precious, sacred nature and help it to flower.”
― Robert Aitken, Encouraging Words: Zen Buddhist Teachings for Western Students

“The Buddha challenged the idea of an immutable soul. He said nothing about the mutable soul, and its survival, though his successors in most streams of Buddhism have had a lot to say on this subject. For all their words, the question of what happens when one dies remains a mystery.”
― Robert Aitken, Encouraging Words: Zen Buddhist Teachings for Western Students

“Sloppy language is a kind of disloyalty to humanity, a kind of lying. Talent”
― Robert Aitken, The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics

“The one who praises you is a thief. The one who criticizes you is your true friend.”
― Robert Aitken, The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics

“When I'm moved to complain about others I vow with all beings to remember that karma is endless and it's loving that leads to love.”
― Robert Aitken, The Dragon Who Never Sleeps: Verses for Zen Buddhist Practice

“Clover is incapable of not nurturing. It can’t do anything but nurture. Shakyamuni is capable of not nurturing. With a poisonous thought, he is a poisonous person. With an enlightened thought, he is an enlightened person. With his great realization, he is unlikely to slip back into poisonous ways, but he could, for he is human.”
― Robert Aitken, The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics

“This very mind is Buddha.’” Indeed. Don’t you know that the very word “Buddha,” the very words “Jesus,” “enlightenment,” “salvation,” “heaven,” “Lotus Land,” and the rest of them, all self-destruct? There are three phases in the lives of such concepts. First, they are meaningful; next they become brittle; and finally they break into pieces and disappear. That is because from the beginning they have been without essence. Use them, but don’t be used by them.”
― Robert Aitken, The Gateless Barrier: The Wu-Men Kuan

“Mystery is the unknown in which we live. It is our nature. Mystification is the exploitation of mystery.”
― Robert Aitken, Encouraging Words: Zen Buddhist Teachings for Western Students

“In realizing all this, we understand how we are just bundles of sense perceptions, with the substance of a dream or a bubble on the surface of the sea. The vanity of the usual kind of self-preoccupation becomes clear, and we are freed from selfish concerns in our enjoyment of the universe as it is, and of our own previously unsuspected depths.”
― Robert Aitken, Taking the Path of Zen

“With the Great Death of realization—death to a life of abstraction and birth to intimacy with things as they are—the root of conceptual thinking is plucked out.”
― Robert Aitken, The Gateless Barrier: The Wu-Men Kuan

“We are shown that our life exists with the tree life, that our well-being depends on the well-being of the vegetable life, that we are close relatives of the four-legged beings. In our ways, spiritual consciousness is the highest form of politics.… We believe that all living things are spiritual beings. Spirits can be expressed as energy forms manifested in matter. A blade of grass is an energy form manifested in matter—grass matter. The spirit of the grass is that unseen force which produces the species of grass, and it is manifest to us in the form of real grass.8 This passage is part of the “Haudenosaunee Address to the Western World,”
― Robert Aitken, The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics

“It comes down to practice, and practice, after all, is conduct in keeping with Right Views. Of course, Right Views are not merely opinions, not even Skākyamuni’s opinions, but are views that accord with this realization: we are all in this together and we aren’t here very long. Let’s take care of one another while we can.”
― Robert Aitken, Encouraging Words: Zen Buddhist Teachings for Western Students

“THE MOTHER SPARROW take ni iza / ume ni iza to ya / oya suzume Let’s be off to the bamboo, to the peach trees, says the mother sparrow. Issa was more than sympathetic. He felt an intimacy with the mother sparrow that relates to what John Keats must have felt when he wrote, “The setting sun will always set me to rights, and if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and peck about the gravel.”6 Issa and Keats lived in different times and in far distant cultures, yet unknowingly their relationship was mar velously close—as close as their relationship with the little birds was. LOOK”
― Robert Aitken, The River of Heaven: The Haiku of Basho, Buson, Issa, and Shiki