Zen Buddhism Quotes

“A student, filled with emotion and crying, implored, "Why is there so much suffering?"

Suzuki Roshi replied, "No reason.”
― Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Is Right Here: Teaching Stories and Anecdotes of Shunryu Suzuki, Author of "ZEN Mind, Beginner's Mind"

“To have some deep feeling about Buddhism is not the point; we just do what we should do, like eating supper and going to bed. This is Buddhism.”
― Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice

“While you are continuing this practice, week after week, year after year, your experience will become deeper and deeper, and your experience will cover everything you do in your everyday life. The most important thing is to forget all gain
ing ideas, all dualistic ideas. In other words, just practice zazen in a certain posture. Do not think about anything. Just remain on your cushion without expecting anything. Then eventually you will resume your own true nature. That is to say, your own true nature resumes itself.”
― Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice

“In zazen, leave your front door and your back door open. Let thoughts come and go. Just don't serve them tea.”
― Shunryu Suzuki

“In the zazen posture, your mind and body have, great power to accept things as they are, whether agreeable or disagreeable.
In our scriptures (Samyuktagama Sutra, volume 33), it is said that there are four kinds of horses: excellent ones, good ones, poor ones, and bad ones. The best horse will run slow and fast, right and left, at the driver's will, before it sees the shadow of the whip; the second best will run as well as the first one does, just before the whip reaches its skin; the third one will run when it feels pain on its body; the fourth will run after the pain penetrates to the marrow of its bones. You can imagine how difficult it is for the fourth one to learn how to run!”
― Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice

“Let go or be dragged.”
― Zen Proverb

“A world which increasingly consists of destinations without journeys between them, a world which values only "getting somewhere" as fast as possible, becomes a world without substance.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Way of Zen

“When life is empty, with respect to the past, and aimless, with respect to the future, the vacuum is filled by the present - normally reduced to a hairline, a split second in which there is no time for anything to happen.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Way of Zen

“[T]he joy of travel is not nearly so much in getting where one wants to go as in the unsought surprises which occur on the journey.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Way of Zen

“Shohaku Okumura ~ We cannot expect any ecstasy greater than right here, right now—our everyday lives.”
― Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo

“KODO SAWAKI ~ To practice the buddha way is not to let our minds wander but to become one with what we’re doing. This is called zanmai (or samadhi) and shikan (or “just doing”). Eating rice isn’t preparation for shitting; shitting isn’t preparation for making manure. And yet these days people think that high school is preparation for college and college is preparation for a good job.”
― Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo

“Taking it all in all, Zen is emphatically a matter of personal experience; if anything can be called radically empirical, it is Zen. No amount of reading, no amount of teaching, no amount of contemplation will ever make one a Zen master. Life itself must be grasped in the midst of its flow; to stop it for examination and analysis is to kill it, leaving its cold corpse to be embraced.”
― D.T. Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism

“In Zen there must be satori; there must be a general mental upheaval which destroys the old accumulations of intellection and lays down the foundation for a new life; there must be the awakening of a new sense which will review the old things from a hitherto undreamed-of angle of observation.”
― D.T. Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism

“If we want the lotus bud to appear, it will appear. If we want it to grow, it will grow. When the lotus flower in our heart has grown, wherever we walk the Pure Land appears.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“KODO SAWAKI: Studying originally meant aspiring to discover the meaning of life. These days studying has become all about getting a job.”
― Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo

“While psychiatry is concerned with the question of why some people become insane, the real question is why most people do not become insane.”
― Erich Fromm, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis

“Followers of the Way, if you want insight into dharma as it is, just don’t be taken in by the deluded views of others. Whatever you encounter, either within or without, slay it at once. On meeting a buddha slay the buddha, on meeting a patriarch slay the patriarch, on meeting an arhat slay the arhat, on meeting your parents slay your parents, on meeting your kinsman slay your kinsman, and you attain emancipation. By not cleaving to things, you freely pass through.”
― Línjì Yìxuán, The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-Chi

“[Man] has transformed himself into a thing.”
― Erich Fromm, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis

“The breath you claim as yours,
Once stirred the dust of stars.
The blood that runs your course,
Flowed through forgotten winds.
The soil you walk, remembers you,
Not as an owner, but as its child.
You are just the turning page,
Of a universal, waking dream.”
― Alexis karpouzos, PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE: EXPLORING ONTOLOGY, AESTHETICS AND HERMENEUTICS

“All those Zen Masters throwing young kids in the mud because they can’t answer their silly word questions.'
'That’s because they want them to realize mud is better than words, boy.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Zen is when the neighbours think you've completely lost it!”
― Zen Splasher

“I went over to an old cook in the doorway of the kitchen and asked him “Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?” (Bodhidharma was the Indian who brought Buddhism eastward to China.)
'I don’t care,' said the old cook, with lidded eyes, and I told Japhy and he said, 'Perfect answer, absolutely perfect. Now you know what I mean by Zen.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“I went over to an old cook in the doorway of the kitchen and asked him 'Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?' (Bodhidharma was the Indian who brought Buddhism eastward to China.)
'I don’t care,' said the old cook, with lidded eyes, and I told Japhy and he said, 'Perfect answer, absolutely perfect. Now you know what I mean by Zen.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Destroy all your idols, only then can you learn to stand on your own.”
― Omar Delawar

“What a shame to have been born a human being and to spend your whole life worrying. You should reach the point where you can be happy to have been born a human.”
― Kodo Sawaki, To You: Zen Sayings of Kodo Sawaki

“Although wisdom is called immovable, this does not signify any insentient thing, like wood or stone; it moves as the mind is wont to move - forward or back, to the left, to the right, in the ten directions and to the eight points; and the mind that does not stop at all is called immovable wisdom.”
― Takuan Soho, The Unfettered Mind

“It is said that life is of small account compared to right-mindedness; in truth, it is right-mindedness that is most esteemed. Nothing is more precious than life, yet at the moment when we must throw away this valued life and stand on right-mindedness, there is nothing more highly esteemed than right-mindedness. Looking carefully at the world, we can see that there are many people who throw away their lives lightly, but do you suppose that one person in a thousand would die for right-mindedness? It would seem that, among the humble servant class, contrary to what you might expect, there are many who would. Yet, it would be difficult for people who think themselves wise to do the same.”
― Takuan Soho, The Unfettered Mind

“I want you to know that I love your ordinariness, because I, too, am ordinary. The truth is, we are all ordinary.
(...)
So I love you, you who shyly stood before me, murmuring softly that you are ordinary, offering the warm bottle of your heart.”
― Haemin Sunim, The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down: How to Be Calm in a Busy World

“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