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Zen Quotes

    “Your duty is to be; and not to be this or that.”

    Ramana Maharshi, via Sunbeams (Page 155)

      “To the most trivial actions, attach the devotion and mindfulness of a hundred monks. To matters of life and death, attach a sense of humor.”

      Zhuangzi

        “Siddhartha listened. He was now listening intently, completely absorbed, quite empty, taking in everything… He could no longer distinguish the different voices—the merry voice from the weeping voice, the childish voice from the manly voice. They all belonged to each other… They were all interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways. And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life… when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his sound to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity, then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om—perfection.”

        Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, via Sunbeams (Page 128)

          “One windy day two monks were arguing about a flapping banner. The first said, ‘I say the banner is moving, not the wind.’ The second said, ‘I say the win is moving, not the banner.’ A third monk passed by and said, ‘The wind is not moving. The banner is not moving. Your minds are moving.”

          Zen parable, via Sunbeams (Page 125)

            The man in whom Tao
Acts without impediment
Does not bother with his own interests
And does not despise
Others who do.
He does not struggle to make money
And does not make a virtue of poverty.
He goes his way
Without relying on others
And does not pride himself
On walking alone.
While he does not follow the crowd
He won't complain of those who do.
Rank and reward
Make no appeal to him;
Disgrace and shame
Do not deter him.
He is not always looking
For right and wrong
Always deciding "Yes" or "No."

— Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu, via Sunbeams (Page 121)

              “Spirituality doesn’t look like sitting down and meditating. Spirituality looks like folding the towels in a sweet way and talking kindly to the people in the family even though you’ve had a long day. People often say to me, ‘I have so many things that take up my day. I don’t have time to take up a spiritual practice.’ And the thing is, being a wise parent or a spiritual parent doesn’t take extra time. It’s enfolded into the act of parenting.”

              Sylvia Boorstein, via Becoming Wise (Page 223)

                “No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.”

                Zen saying, via Sunbeams (Page 84)

                  “Have you ever sat very quietly without any movement? You try it, sit really still, with your back straight, and observe what your mind is doing. Don’t try to control it, don’t say it should not jump from one thought to another, but just be aware of how your mind is jumping. Don’t do anything about it, but watch it as from the banks of a river you watch the river flow by. In the flowing river there are so many things—fishes, leaves, dead animals—but it is always living, moving, and your mind is like that. It is everlastingly restless, flitting from one thing to another like a butterfly… just watch your mind. It is great fun. If you try it as fun, as an amusing thing, you will find that the mind begins to settle down without any effort on your part to control it. There is then no censor, no judge, no evaluator; and when the mind is thus very quiet of itself, spontaneously still, you will discover what it is to be gay. Do you know what gaiety is? It is just to laugh, to take delight in anything or nothing, to know the joy of living, smiling, looking straight into the face of another without any sense of fear.”

                  J. Krishnamurti, Think On These Things, via Sunbeams (Page 41)