Chan Buddhism Quotes

Everything sacred, nothing sacred.

We took a bus to the nearby monastery of one of the last great Tang dynasty Chan masters, Yun-men. Yun-men was known for his pithy “one word” Zen. When asked “What is the highest teaching of the Buddha?” he replied: “An appropriate statement.” On another occasion, he answered: “Cake.” I admired his directness.

Many centuries after the Buddha, the Chinese Chan (Zen) patriarch Yunmen (c. 860–949) was asked: “What are the teachings of an entire lifetime?” Yunmen replied: “An appropriate statement.”6 For Yunmen, what counts is whether your words and deeds are an appropriate response to the situation at hand, not whether they accord with an abstract truth.

When no discriminating thoughts arise, the old mind ceases to exist. When thought objects vanish, the thinking-subject vanishes, as when the mind vanishes, objects vanish. Things are objects because of the subject; the mind is such because of things. Understand the relativity of these two and the basic reality: the unity of emptiness. In this Emptiness the two are indistinguishable and each contains in itself the whole world. If you do not discriminate between coarse and fine you will not be tempted to prejudice and opinion.

Retreating from the world will not liberate you. Happiness is not found in a secluded forest hut or an isolated cave. Enlightenment comes when you connect to the world. Only when you truly connect with everyone and everything else do you become enlightened. Only by going deeply and fully into the world do you attain liberation.

The enlightened mind is like a bird in flight that leaves no trace of its path. People will say, “A bird just flew by.” In their mind, there is a trace of the bird’s path. This is attachment. For the enlightened practitioner, that moment is already gone—the bird has left no trace of its flight. Like the bird, from moment to moment the enlightened practitioner’s actions do not leave any trace.

If the eye never sleeps, all dreams will naturally cease. If the mind makes no discriminations, the ten thousand things are as they are, of single essence. To understand the mystery of this One essence is to be released from all entanglements. When all things are seen equally the timeless Self-essence is reached. No comparisons or analogies are possible in this causeless, relationless state. Consider movement stationary and the stationary in motion, both movement and rest disappear. When such dualities cease to exist Oneness itself cannot exist. To this ultimate finality no law or description applies.

I want to tell you a story. It is about a friend who lost his eyesight in a car accident. His world is entirely one of darkness, all the time. Do you know what he told me? He said that if he could see again, he would be in paradise. How I wish I could fulfill his wish. If I cannot help him, at least I can share his insight with you: Do not wait until you lose your eyesight before knowing how happy you can be just by opening your eyes. You have excellent eyes, and each time you open them a marvelous paradise of forms and colors appears.

In Buddhism, the word “emptiness” is a translation of the Sanskrit sunyata. It means “empty of a separate self.” It is not a negative or despairing term. It is a celebration of interconnectedness, of interbeing. It means nothing can exist by itself alone, that everything is inextricably interconnected with everything else. I know that I must always work to remember that I am empty of a separate self and full of the many wonders of this universe, including the generosity of my grandparents and parents, the many friends and teachers who have helped and supported me along the path, and you dear readers, without whom this book could not exist. We inter-are, and therefore we are empty of an identity that is separate from our interconnectedness.

Before I had studied Chan for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and rivers as rivers. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and rivers once again as rivers.

If you want to help sentient beings, you have to get your hands dirty.

A prerequisite to progress on the path is to realize that you are ignorant.

To have self-esteem and to function in society, ordinary people usually place their mind on something; they need to identify themselves with something. People with the least spiritual capacity identify their minds with fame, fortune, and other kinds of self-benefit. People with mediocre spiritual capacity identify their minds with their family, career, and relations with others. People with high spiritual capacity generate compassion and place their minds on the benefit of others. Only people with the most superior spiritual capacity have no mind to place anywhere. This is like the ox, whose mind, while having no fixed agenda, is free to respond to circumstances.

The Buddha taught non-attachment not as a means of escaping reality, but as a means of dealing with the fundamental nature of reality. There simply is nothing to which we can attach ourselves, no matter how hard we try. The idea of behaving without attachment springs from understanding that everything is empty. The self is empty, the desires of the self are empty, and the objects of those desires also are empty. In time, things will change and the conditions that produced our current desires will be gone. Why then, cling to them now? The Buddha taught that our tendency to cling to the illusion of permanence is a fundamental cause of suffering.

The first encounter with Chan/Zen took place in Japan, where Francis Xavier arrived in August 1549. Xavier's stay in Japan was relatively short, and he had to rely in the beginning on the poor information provided by the Japanese convert Yajirō, who spoke some Portuguese. In contrast to Ricci's, Xavier's judgment reflects the sociopolitical importance of Buddhism in Japanese society prior to the anti-Buddhist repression of 1571, as well as the strong impressions left by his first encounters with Zen masters. Although Xavier and his confreres were puzzled by the many similarities between Buddhism and Christianity and first interpreted them as proof of a past knowledge, obscured in time, of Christian teachings, they eventually attributed them to the work of the devil (Schurhammer 1982, 224).

It is precisely this [transcendental] privilege that Christian missionaries in China and Japan failed to relinquish when they spoke about Buddhism; but the same failure is found in such "na(t)ive" exponents of Zen as D. T. Suzuki, and it would perhaps be hard to decide which version of Zen, the negative or the idealized, is most misleading. Even if the degree of reductionism is not quite the same in both cases, both interpretations share responsibility for the strange predicament in which Westerners who approach Chan/Zen find themselves: they are unable to consider it a serious intellectual system, for the constraints of Western discourse on Zen cause them to either devaluate it as an Eastern form of either "natural mysticism" or "quietism" or to idealize it as a wonderfully exotic Dharma. In this sense, Zen can be seen as a typical example of "secondary Orientalism," a stereotype concocted as much by the Japanese themselves as by Westerners.

If the eye never sleeps, all dreams will naturally cease. If the mind makes no discriminations, the ten thousand things are as they are, of single essence. To understand the mystery of this One essence is to be released from all entanglements. When all things are seen equally the timeless Self-essence is reached. No comparisons or analogies are possible in this causeless, relationless state. Consider movement stationary and the stationary in motion, both movement and rest disappear. When such dualities cease to exist Oneness itself cannot exist. To this ultimate finality no law or description applies.

I have found that we need to maintain relationships with all spheres of society: the local community, politicians from all parties, business leaders, artists, and farmers....We don't favor one kind of person over another, or one political party over another...My goal is for them to use the method and concept of Chan practice to benefit their work and their organizations....That is our duty.

The first mention of Chan appears in [Matteo] Ricci's journals, while Japanese Zen is discussed in the letters of Francis Xavier (1506–1552). The images one gets from these accounts are strikingly different; they reflect not only the idiosyncrasies of the two Jesuits but also the different roles played by Buddhism in Chinese and Japanese societies. Whereas the Buddhist tradition in China, and Chan in particular, had been largely assimilated by popular religion, the Zen sect in Japan, under the system of the so-called Five Mountains, remained associated with the ruling class and dominated intellectual discourse.

The relation between Christianity and Buddhism is compared by [D. T.] Suzuki to that between wine and tea: whereas tea is tasteless but stimulating, wine "first excitates and then inebriates" (Suzuki 1970, 273). This line of argument led Suzuki to the conclusion that Zen is neither a philosophy nor a metaphysics nor a religion, but it is, rather, "the spirit of all religion or philosophy." Suzuki went so far as to assert that "if there is a God, personal or impersonal, he or it must be with Zen and in Zen" (Suzuki 1969, 347). Implicit in such statements is an almost Protestant view of religion as a reality that has nothing to do with cults, dogmas, or collective beliefs, but rests on the "inner experience" of the individual. However, owing to the atypical character of such "mystical" experiences, their extreme rarity, and the Christian theology they often presuppose, it seems illegitimate to derive from them a general (if not always explicit) theory of religion, as Suzuki and Nishida, following William James, have done.

The earliest attempt to form an independent Zen group in Japan seems to have been led by Nōnin, who taught his form of Zen at Sanbōji (a Tendai temple in Settsu) during the latter part of the twelfth century. Because Nōnin's following, which styled itself the Darumashū (after Daruma, i.e., Bodhidharma, the semilegendary founder of the Chinese Ch'an school), failed to secure a permanent institutional base, scholars had not fully realized Nōnin's importance until recently. As early as 1272, however, less than eighty years after Nōnin's death, Nichiren had correctly identified Nōnin as the pioneer leader of the new Zen groups. Eisai, a contemporary of Nōnin, also founded several new centers for Zen practice, the most important of which was Kenninji in Kyoto. In contrast to Nōnin, who had never left Japan, Eisai had the benefit of two extended trips to China during which he could observe Chinese Ch'an (Jpn. Zen) teachers first hand. The third important early Zen leader in Japan was Dōgen, the founder of Japan's Sōtō school. Dōgen had entered Eisai's Kenninji in 1217 and, like Eisai, also traveled to China for firsthand study. Unlike Eisai (or Nōnin), after his return to Japan Dōgen attempted to establish the monastic structures he found in China. Dōgen's monasteries, Kōshōji (Dōgen's residence during 1230–1243) and Eiheiji (1244–1253), were the first in Japan to include a monks' hall (sōdō) within which Zen monks lived and meditated according to Chinese-style monastic regulations.

Another classic case in point is the reconstructive origins of the canonical Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, which is attributed to the seventh-century Chinese Zen master Huineng but in fact seems to have first appeared around 780 ce, "over a century after the events it describes were supposed to have taken place." The earliest versions of the autobiography and teachings of Huineng included in this text were in fact composed by Shenhui and other purported successors in the Southern School in order to differentiate their teachings from, and elevate them over, those of Shenxiu and other teachers of the rival Northern School. While the teachings presented in the Platform Sutra— the only Zen text to be audaciously designated a "sutra"—are indeed a "brilliant consummation" and "wonderful mélange of early Chan [i.e., Chinese Zen] teachings," they can hardly be attributed verbatim to the historical person Huineng. However spiritually inspiring and philosophically rich such classical texts of the Zen tradition may be, we cannot read them as unbiased and unembellished historical records or as innocent of sectarian politics and other mundane motives.

Zen is not coextensive with any one school, whether that be Korean Sŏn or Japanese Rinzai Zen. There have actually been many independent strands of what has come to be called Zen, the sorting out of which has occupied scholars of Buddhism for the last few decades. These sectarian divisions are further complicated by the fact that there are Zen traditions in all four East Asian countries—China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam—each of which has its own independent history, doctrine, and mode of practice. While each of these traditions has developed independently, all have been heavily influenced by the Chinese schools of Ch'an (Kor. Sŏn; Jpn. Zen; Viet. Thiên). We are therefore left with an intricate picture of several independent national traditions of Zen, but traditions that do have considerable synergy between them. To ignore these national differences would be to oversimplify the complicated sectarian scene that is East Asian Zen; but to overemphasize them would be to ignore the multiple layers of symbiosis between Zen's various national branches. These continuities and transformations between the different strands must both be kept in mind in order to understand the character of the "Zen tradition.

While Korean Buddhism did not begin as an exclusively Sŏn tradition, Sŏn was introduced into Korea perhaps as early as the late seventh century during Ch'an's incipiency on the Chinese mainland. By the thirteenth century, Sŏn came to dominate Buddhist doctrine and praxis, virtually eclipsing all other branches of Korean Buddhism after the fifteenth century.

The mainstream of Chinese Ch'an provided the background tradition for Buddhism in Vietnam, particularly Vietnamese Zen Buddhism. An Indian monk and student of the third patriarch of Chinese Ch'an, Sêng-ts'an, a Chinese monk and disciple of the prominent master Pai-chang, and a second Chinese monk and follower of the famous Hsüeh-t'ou founded the first three schools of Zen Buddhism in Vietnam. Other schools of Buddhist philosophy and practice were also introduced to the country, and various indigenous sects grew up around celebrated Vietnamese masters. In the later development of Vietnamese Zen, the Lâm-Tế (C. Lin-chi, J. Rinzai) branch of practice came to the country and found firm basis for its growth through the innovations of a talented Vietnamese master, so that today most Buddhist monks, nuns, and laymen in Vietnam belong to the Lâm-Tế Zen tradition.

The outstanding achievements of Matteo Ricci, the man whom Demiéville called the "founding father of Western Sinology" (Demiéville 1966, 38), had a high cost: in particular, his prejudices against Buddhism and Chinese religion have had enduring consequences; he circumscribed the field of Sinology by excluding entire areas of the Chinese intellectual and religious life. We may therefore wonder to what extent "every Western Sinologist should recognize his forebearer in him [Ricci]" (Demiéville 1967, 88). Certainly, this genealogy has lost some of its legitimizing power and needs to be questioned if it cannot be transcended.

Ricci's attitude toward Buddhism must be placed in its religious context-that of aggressive Counter-Reformation Catholicism engaged in a spiritual battle to win over Chinese society to Christianity. It is perhaps inappropriate to condemn him retrospectively for his lack of tolerance, when the very notion of tolerance would have seemed perfectly irrelevant to him. This virtue was associated with atheists like Voltaire and with whorehouses (maisons de tolérance), as in Claudel's witty remark: "Tolerance? Tolerance? There are houses for that" (Etiemble 1964, 50).

Admittedly, it would be naive to expect a sixteenth century Jesuit, a "warrior" for Christ, to apologize for or to compromise his faith, and to that extent Ricci's rejection of Buddhism is consistent. Ricci, however, did compromise with Confucianism, and his justification of his faith was not free of cunning and deception.

Although the discussions of quietism and nihilism conveyed by the Jesuits during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries paved the way for Western characterizations of Buddhism, only during the nineteenth century was Buddhism definitively constituted as an obiect of discourse and "reified as a textual object" (Almond 1988, 139). This textualization permitted the emergence of the "historical" Buddha and the convenient opposition between a pure, canonical, early Buddhism and the degenerate Buddhist religion of contemporary Asia (Almond 1988, 25, 37-40).

Only toward the middle of the nineteenth century did Indian Buddhism suddenly come to the forefront, with the discovery of the Lotus Sūtra in Nepal by Hodgson and its ground-breaking translation by Eugène Burnouf, a French scholar whom Max Müller called "the true founder of a scientific study of Buddhism" (Welbon 1968, 109). The romantic search for origins gave way, however, to cultural versions of evolutionism in which Buddhism, like Hinduism, was reduced to one early stage of mankind.

Owing to the lingering Jesuit influence, the study of Confucianism continued to prevail in Western Sinology, while Chinese Buddhism and Chan came to be considered mere offshoots of Indian mysticism.

After the eviction of the Jesuits from China, and until the early twentieth century, most information available in the West on Chan and Zen was provided casually, as part of material on China or Buddhism. In that period little attention was paid to Chan/Zen doctrine as such, for Chinese Buddhism, unlike Indian Buddhism, was not considered worthy of serious study.

Paradoxically, we may argue that precisely because of his biases Suzuki can be considered representative of Zen—as a sectarian tradition. The appeal to the "pure" tradition, to the "essence" of Zen, is indeed a typical feature of the sectarian attitude. This attitude was already exemplified by Dogen, for whom true Zen stood above the Zen school. Just as Dogen refused to call his teaching "Zen," Suzuki claims that Zen is "neither a religion nor a philosophy" or better that it is "the spirit of all religion and philosophy." The assumption that there is an "essence" of Buddhism, a kind of perennial Dharma to which only "authentic" masters would have access, is to be rejected as ideologically suspect.

In contrast to [Thomas] Merton, who hazarded "with diffidence" statements about Buddhism and was acutely aware that, as a Catholic priest and monk, he could not be sure that he had trustworthy insights into the spiritual values of a tradition with which he was not really familiar (Merton 1967, 5), Suzuki was always confident in his own judgment on Christianity. However, his interpretation of Christianity remained superficial and polemical. He argued, for example, that Christian tenets such as the crucifixion are merely symbolical, "while Buddhism is . . . free from the historical symbolism of Christianity" (Suzuki 1949–1953, 1: 152).

Analogously, the cultural appropriation of "Zen" in the popular culture of the West has often been as superficial as it has been enthusiastic. However, in Western universities these days the pendulum has swung in the other direction; the current academic trend is to use historical and philological scholarship to criticize the idealized spiritual and romantic image of Zen fashioned by earlier generations of writers. In erudite books with clever titles like Chan Insights and Oversights and Seeing Through Zen this this critical—and sometimes polemical—debunking is aimed not only at the ways in which authors like D. T. Suzuki and Alan Watts have presented Zen to Westerners; it is also aimed at the traditional self conceptions and self-presentations of the Zen tradition throughout its fifteen-hundred-year history in Asia.

In some Buddhist sutras, bodhisattvas are said to make buddha realms “magnificent” by their practice of the six paramitas. In the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha denies the possibility of any such magnificence. The Buddha taught on many different levels. If in one sutra he says that the six paramitas are “magnificent” while in another he says that they are not, he is not contradicting himself. He is simply rising to a higher level of truth to suit his audience. We can be certain that the Diamond Sutra teaches a very high level of truth because this discourse is directed at Subhuti, the Buddha’s foremost disciple in wisdom.

You can break Ch’an Buddhism down to three basic ideas. One is that every person has an inherent Buddha nature inside—anyone can become enlightened. Two, there’s no one single path to enlightenment, everybody has to find his own way. Three, it’s almost impossible to reach enlightenment solely through the exchange of words.

Thus, although orthodox Buddhists do believe that the religious value of Buddhism surpasses that of other religions, they do not discriminate against other religions or deny their value. If believers of other religions create the conditions for a fortunate rebirth and act constructively, aren’t these people better qualified to be the friends of Buddhism than those scoundrels who destroy human happiness? Although Buddhists encourage believers of other religions to convert to Buddhism, Buddhists have never ostracized or persecuted other religions. This is clear from the last 2,500-plus years of world history.

Their common interest in Western mystics like Meister Eckhart led both Nishida and Suzuki to misrepresent Christianity as some kind of inferior version of Mahayäna Buddhism, thus reversing the old schemas applied to the East by Westerners.

The Japanese word zen in fact means "meditation" or "state of meditative concentration." In Chinese, zen is pronounced chan. Chan is short for channa, which is how the CHinese pronounced dhyana, the Sanskrit word used in India for practices or rarified states of meditative concentration.

The importance of meditation for Zen is readily apparent in the fact that the word zen itself means "meditation." Zen (Chan in Chinese) is the school of Buddhism that more than any other prioritizes the practice of "seated meditation," called zazen in Japanese. The seminal thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master Dogen at times went so far as to claim that "you no longer have need for incense-offerings, doing prostrations, calling on the name of Amida Buddha, penance disciplines, or reading sutras. Just sit in zazen and cast off your body and mind.

I tell my students not to be frightened; in the history of Buddhism-for 2,500 years-no one has broken or fractured a leg because of sitting in meditation.

Xin Ming, Origin is the present moment.

Blankness is similar to being asleep or unconscious. If that is all it takes to experience enlightenment, my job would be much easier. I would just walk behind each one of you and knock you unconscious with a big stick.

By concentration is meant to know that all dharmas (elements of existence), from the very beginning have no nature of their own. They neither come into nor go out of existence. Because they are caused by illusion and imagination, they exist without real existence. They are only the one mind, whose substance admits no differentiation. Those who hold this view can stop the flow of erroneous thought. This is called concentration. (pg. 398, from "A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy," translated and compiled by Wing Tsit-Chan)

Zen is a branch of Mahayana Buddhism. It was brought to China roughly 15 centuries ago, in 6 CE. Zen was brought to China by an Indian Buddhist monk, Bodhidharma. There, it was known as “Ch’an,” which is the Chinese interpretation of the Sankrit term “dhyana,” meaning a mind that is immersed in meditation.