Ch An Buddhism Quotes

“In classical Chinese, there is no fundamental distinction between heart and mind: the term hsin connotes all that we associate with both of those concepts. But in Wang Wei, as in most classical poets, this sense is almost always secondary to the technical use of hsin in Taoism and Ch'an Buddhism, where it means consciousness emptied of all content, or perhaps consciousness as empty awareness. At this fundamental level, mind is nothing other than the pregnant emptiness from which all things are engendered.”
― David Hinton, The Selected Poems of Wang Wei

“Self is but a fleeting form taken on by earth's process of change--born out of it, and returned to it in death. Or more precisely, never out of it: totally unborn. Our truest self, being unborn, is all and none of earth's fleeting forms simultaneously. This leads to the very core of Taoist thought and Ch'an practice. As natural process emerges from nonbeing, to say we are unborn is to say that we are most essentially nonbeing.”
― David Hinton, The Selected Poems of Wang Wei