Master Wu Quotes

Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends upon what we look for. What we look for depends upon what we think. What we think depends upon what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.

After Supper the Master dismissed all except Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie and Sha the Monk. He took them out with him and said, "Look at that wonderful moolight. It makes me long for the time when I can return home.

The master sees beyond what is obvious. He sees the unseen, feels the unfelt, and hears the unheard. He looks below the surface for what is hidden and so finds the great heartbeat of the Universe. He smiles, knowing it is his heartbeat, your heartbeat, our heartbeat.

It is an underacknowledged truism that, just as you are what you eat, how and what you think depends on what information you are exposed to.

You do an experiment because your own philosophy makes you want to know the result. It’s too hard, and life is too short, to spend your time doing something because someone else has said it’s important. You must feel the thing yourself…

The boatman then gently guided the raft across. They saw a dead body floating. At the sight of this, the Master was greatly frightened. But Sun smiled and said, "Master do not be alarmed! That corpse is none other than your own." Zhu Bajie said, "It is you, it is you!" Sha the Monk clapped his hands, and also said, "It is you, it is you!" The boatman also remarked "It was yours, I congratulate you." The three pilgrims congratulated him, and they quietly crossed over the Could Ferry in safety. The Master's shape was changed, and he jumped ashore on the other side with a very light body.

Nothing, save the hangman's noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash.

If this is so, then the distinction between scientists, poets, painters, and writers is not clear. In fact, it is possible that scientists, poets, painters, and writers are all members of the same family of people whose gift it is by nature to take those things which we call commonplace and to re-present them to us in such ways that our self-imposed limitations are expanded. Those people in whom this gift is especially pronounced, we call geniuses.

The economist John Maynard Keynes once said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

In the brush at the bottom of Master Wu’s garden, something snuffles. I do not know whether ninjas snuffle. It seems to me that a very subtle sort of ninja might snuffle so as to make you think he was a neighbourhood dog, or just to let you know he was there and yet leave you guessing. On the other hand, maybe a ninja would regard this kind of trick as amateurish.

In an information industry the cost of monopoly must not be measured in dollars alone, but also in its effect on the economy of ideas and images, the restraint of which can ultimately amount to censorship.

Maureen O'Brien's Bakery Lingo: A Partial Glossary • 9 donuts - A shutout • 2 croissants - A full moon • 3 croissants - A ménage à trois • 4 bear claws - Full smokey • 2 bear claws - Half smokey • The last one of any item - The gift of the Magi • A baker's dozen of doughnut holes - a PG-13 • Anything in the unlikely quantity of 36 or a lot of something - A Wu-Tang • Blueberry muffin - Chubby Checker • Bran muffin - Warren G the regulator • Any customer who left no tip - A libertarian • Any customer who only tipped the coins from their change - A couch shaker • Any person who requested a substitution - Master and demander • Any person who requested TWO substitutions - Demander in chief • Any person who requested MORE than two substitutions - The new executive chef and finally.... • Any vegan customer - A Morrissey

The value of a physical theory depends upon its usefulness. In this sense the history of physical theories might be said to resemble the history of individual personality traits. Most of us respond to our environment with a collection of automatic responses that once brought desirable results, usually in childhood. Unfortunately, if the environment that produced these responses changes (we grow up) and the responses themselves do not adapt, they become counterproductive. Showing anger, becoming depressed, flattering, crying, and bullying behavior are response patterns appropriate to times often long past. These patterns change only when we are forced to realize that they are no longer productive. Even then change is often painful and slow. The same is true of scientific theories.

Every age thinks it’s the modern age, but this one really is.

The subjective experience of wonder is a message to the rational mind that the object of wonder is being perceived and understood in ways other than the rational.

It is in the contest that Fred Friendly, onetime CBS News president, made it clear that before any questions of "who controls the master switch.

my master was kidnapped by your household’s demon chieftains. Return him early, and I’ll spare your lives! If you don’t, I’ll overturn your den and reduce you spirits to pus and blood!

Linear logic measures only the four dimensions: length, width, depth, and time. But in the fifth dimension, energy surpasses time. Light surpasses time. Time is just a controller of certain planes. It’s not the master. The true master is consciousness, and I mean true consciousness—not simply being awake—I’m talking about the consciousness that never sleeps. The part of you that is aware of your consciousness. There’s a part of you that’s always there, always consistent, that represents your true self—the part connected to God. That’s who you gotta get in touch with.

Being who you are is a pure religious experience. If you can stay with that experience, just being a part of All-That-Is, that's enough. Instead, we go searching chasing after masters because most of us want more than just being ourselves.

In The Cradle of Erotica by A. Edwardes and R.E.L. Masters, we are told that during the Tang Dynasty, the Empress Wu Hu ruled China. She knew that sex and power were inexorably linked, and she decreed that government officials and visiting dignitaries must pay homage to her imperial highness by performing cunnilingus upon her. No joke. Old paintings depict the beautiful, powerful empress standing and holding her ornate robe open while a high nobleman or diplomat is shown kneeling before her, applying his lips and tongue to her royal mound.

Unlike almost every other commodity, information becomes more valuable the more it is used. Consider

There is a saying in the army: I do not presume to be the master, But become the guest. I do not dare advance an inch, But retreat a foot. Shih wei hsing wu hsing This is called moving without moving, Rolling up sleeves without baring your arms, Repelling without opposing, Wielding without a weapon. There is no disaster greater than Contempt for the enemy. Contempt for the enemy— What a treasure is lost!

The field of boundless emptiness is what exists from the very beginning. You must purify, cure, grind down, or brush away all the tendencies you have fabricated into apparent habits. Then you can reside in the clear circle of brightness.

One of the features of quantum mechanics that leads to such controversy is its concern with the nonexistent, the potential. There is some of this in all language, or words could only be used once, but quantum mechanics is more involved with probabilities than classical mechanics. Some people feel this discredits quantum theory, makes it less than maximal theory. So it is important to mention in defense of quantum theory that in spite of indeterminacy, quantum mechanics can be entirely expressed in yes-or-no terms about individual experiments, just like classical mechanics, and that probabilities can be derived as a law of large numbers and need not be postulated.

The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu-Lei Masters,

Without exception, the brave new technologies of the twentieth century—free use of which was originally encouraged, for the sake of further invention and individual expression—eventually evolved into privately controlled industrial behemoths, the “old media” giants of the twenty-first, through which the flow and nature of content would be strictly controlled for reasons of commerce.

In 1915, a federal district court finally ordered the tattered Trust be dissolved.30 The American film industry was, for the first time, an open industry.

To close the loop entirely, AT&T set about designing its own radio sets, presenting President Coolidge with one of its handsomer models.11 In a final stroke, such as to this day inspires heated debate over network neutrality, AT&T’s new radios were engineered to receive only AT&T broadcast frequencies—and, not surprisingly, only AT&T programming.*

Thus did AT&T in deadly earnest go about hushing the Hush-A-Phone. At the two-week trial (technically a hearing), the company showed up with dozens of attorneys, including a top litigator from New York City, and no few expert witnesses. Legal representatives of each of the twenty-one regional Bells came as well, necessitating that extra seats be installed in the hearing room—bleachers for AT&T’s lawyers. On Hush-A-Phone’s side were Harry Tuttle, his lawyer, the acoustics professor Leo Beranek, and one expert witness, a man named J.C.R. Licklider.7

A man need merely light the filaments of his receiving set and the world’s greatest artists will perform for him,

a “wireless telephone,” the ancestor of our mobile phone, of which, by 1916, Bell already had a working prototype.

All these disconnected communities and houses will be united through radio as they were never united by the telegraph and the telephone. The President of the United States delivers important messages in every home, not in cold, impersonal type, but in living speech; he is transformed from what is almost a political abstraction, a personification of the republic’s dignity and power, into a kindly father, talking to his children.

by the FCC’s own reckoning, the cable companies will soon enjoy an uncontested monopoly over broadband Internet in much of the United States beyond the East Coast, and they are also seeking control of more Hollywood studios and television networks.

we see that the enlightened monopolist can occasionally prove a delusional paranoid.

if everything is entrusted to a single mind, its inevitable subjective distortions will distort, if not altogether disable, the innovation process.

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

This deep not-knowing, in this case the Second Patriarch’s inability to find his anguished mind, takes the notion of agnosticism down to another depth. One might call it a contemplative depth. Such deep agnostic metaphors are likewise found in such terms as wu hsin (no mind), and wu nien (no thought), as well as in the more popular “don’t know mind” of the Korean Zen master Seung Sahṇ

If we want to define how “open” any industry is, we should start with a number: the cost of entry. By this we simply mean the monetary cost of getting into the business with a reasonable shot at reaching customers. Is it in the neighborhood of $100? $10,000? Or more like $1 billion? Whatever the magnitude, that number, most definitively, is what determines whether an industry is open or closed.

JUST WHAT IS GOOGLE? In 1902, the New York Telephone Company opened the world’s first school for “telephone girls.” It was an exclusive institution of sorts. As the historian H. N. Casson described the qualifications for admission in 1910: “Every girl shall be in good health, quick-handed, clear-voiced, and with a certain poise and alertness of manner.” There were almost seventeen thousand applicants every year for the school’s two thousand places.10 Acquiring this credential was scarcely the hardest part of being a telephone girl. According to a 1912 New York Times story, 75 percent were fired after six months for “mental inefficiency.” The

It’s the same old story,” he would say, years later; “the inventor gets the experience, and the capitalist gets the invention.

It is an underacknowledged truism that, just as you are what you eat, how and what you think depends on what information you are exposed to. How

We sometimes treat the information industries as if they were like any other enterprise, but they are not, for their structure determines who gets heard. It

the best antidote to the disruptive power of innovation is overregulation. That is to say, the industry learned how to secure the enactment of seemingly innocuous and sensible regulations that nonetheless spelled doom for any rival. In

Hollywood’s content, AT&T’s lines, and Apple’s gorgeous machines—an information paradise of sorts, succeeding

The owner of an iPod or iPad is in a fundamentally different position: his machine may have far more computational power than a PC of a decade ago, but it is designed for consumption, not creation. Or,

An empire long united, must divide; an empire long divided, must unite. Thus it has ever been, and thus it will always be.

Markets are born free, yet no sooner are they born than some would-be emperor is forging chains. Paradoxically,

If we believe in liberty, it must be freedom from both private and public coercion.

There is no understanding communications, or the American and global culture industry, without understanding the conglomerate. Yet

like late Rome, the Bell system now existed as an eastern and a western empire—Verizon and AT&T (whose

the mogul makes the medium: the imprint of the personality inevitably informs it, often no less than the technology underlying it. Turner

Cable was born commercial, while the Internet was born with no revenue model, or

The rise of Hollywood and of the Zukor model is another definitive closing turn of the Cycle. In the course of a single decade, film went from one of the most open industries in the United States to one of the most controlled. The flip shows how abruptly industrial structure can change when the underlying commodity is information. For

while television is supposed to be free, it has in fact become the creature, the servant, and indeed the prostitute, of merchandising.

Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends upon what we look for. What we look for depends upon what we think. What we think depends upon what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality. ― Gary Zukav, Dancing Wu Li Masters

A wandering Taoist who for sake of this story we shall call Golden Sunlight At Deaths Dawn arrived in a town in the state of Wu. He was dressed quite shabbily. He looked a sorry thing. His hair was unkempt and his strange tattoos could hardly be seen for need of a wash. When he looked at people it was as if he could see right through them. Rumours of his mysterious abilities travelled afar. It was said that he could heal the sick, that he could catch ghosts, that he could read minds and that he could kill with just a look. One day he even defeated a master swordsman with just a tea cup held in his hand. The sword made from a long-lost art of metal forging was unbreakable they said, but the cup was slid only once along the blade guiding the sword tip into the ground, then with a slight tap of the cup the blade was shattered. He would teach those who would listen and ignore those who didn’t. One day he was approached by a rich merchant who threw a bag of silver at his feet, ‘Tell me about the art of effortless living,’ he said. Golden Sunlight At Deaths Dawn sat down and opened the bag of silver. He gazed at the money for some time, and with a heavy sigh he replied, ‘Only the dead know of this art.’ ‘Is that it? That is your answer?’ the merchant replied sharply. Not wanting to be outdone he then asked, ‘Do the dead know the highest Truth?’ ‘A blind man fights ghosts in daylight. The dead don’t know of death. The Truth remains silent,’ replied the Taoist as he handed the bag of silver back to the merchant.

As will be on display throughout this book, Zen has all along been an ironically "iconoclastic tradition." Some of its canonical stories include Bodhidharma (fifth–sixth centuries) telling Emperor Wu that he has gained no karmic merit from all of his meritorious activities, and that the most sacred truth is that that there is nothing sacred; depictions of Huineng (seventh century) tearing up the sutras; Linji (ninth century) encouraging his students to "kill the Buddha"; Ikkyū (fifteenth century) writing erotic poetry about his steamy love affair during the last decade of his life with a blind musician; and "an older woman of Hara" (seventeenth century) boldly retorting "Hey, you aren't enlightened yet!" after she told the eminent master Hakuin of her luminously enlightening experience and he tested her by saying that "Nothing can shine in your asshole. " Contemporary Zen Buddhists should feel free to carry on this irreverent and iconoclastic tradition of destroying false idols of Zen—but only insofar as they have sufficiently imbibed its true spirit and are doing so in a genuine effort to keep it alive and let it thrive.

A monk once asked the master, “Has a dog Buddhist nature, too?”, whereupon the master answered, “Wu.” As Suzuki remarks, this “Wu” means quite simply “Wu”, obviously just what the dog himself would have said in answer to the question.

Whenever a thought occurs, be aware of it, as soon as you are aware of it, it will vanish. If you remain for a long period forgetful of objects, you will naturally become unified. This is the essential art of zazen.

prejudices.

Newton was the first person to discover principles in nature which unify large tracts of experience. He abstracted certain unifying concepts from the endless diversity of nature and gave those concepts mathematical expression. Because of this, more than anything else, Newton’s work

Vast and far-reaching without boundary, secluded and pure, manifesting light, this spirit is without obstruction. Its brightness does not shine out but can be called empty and inherently radiant. Its brightness, inherently purifying, transcends causal conditions beyond subject and object. Subtle but preserved, illumined and vast, also it cannot be spoken of as being or nonbeing, or discussed with images or calculations. Right in here the central pivot turns, the gateway opens. You accord and respond without laboring and accomplish without hindrance. Everywhere turn around freely, not following conditions, not falling into classifications. Facing everything, let go and attain stability. Stay with that just as that. Stay with this just as this. That and this are mixed together with no discriminations as to their places. So it is said that the earth lifts up the mountain without knowing the mountain’s stark steepness. A rock contains jade without knowing the jade’s flawlessness. This is how truly to leave home, how home-leaving must be enacted.

You must completely withdraw from the invisible pounding and weaving of your ingrained ideas. If you want to be rid of this invisible [turmoil], you must just sit through it and let go of everything. Attain fulfillment and illuminate thoroughly, light and shadow altogether forgotten. Drop off [to lo—my italics] your own skin, and the sense-dusts will be fully purified, the eye readily discerning the brightness. Accept your function and be wholly satisfied.

Master Daie (Ta-hui) says this about kufu: In training ourselves to solve koan, we should neither make guesses or comments nor try to understand them. It is unnecessary to know the meanings of the words or justify our attitudes toward the koan presented to us. On the contrary, we should neither be empty and tranquil nor expect to be enlightened. It is still worse to be absent-minded. Whether we walk, dwell, sit, or lie down, we should always be one with the koan and try to keep in touch with them all the time.17 In the Mumonkan, Master Mumon Ekai (Wu-men Hui-k’ai) states, Arouse your entire body with its three hundred and sixty bones and joints and its eighty-four thousand pores of the skin. Summon up a spirit of great doubt and concentrate on this word “mu.” In order to do so, hold to the problem from morning to night without letting it go even for one second, and become one with the word “mu” (void) with all your strength.

We sometimes treat the information industries as if they were like any other enterprise, but they are not, for their structure determines who gets heard. It is in this context that Fred Friendly, onetime CBS News president, made it clear that before any question of free speech comes the question of “who controls the master switch.

The story of Daniel Lord and the Legion of Decency goes to a central contention of this book: in the United States, it is industrial structure that determines the limits of free speech.

The Cycle is powered by disruptive innovations that upend once thriving industries, bankrupt the dominant powers, and change the world. Such innovations are exceedingly rare, but they are what makes the Cycle go.

As a character in Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, set in 1876, remarks, “Every age thinks it’s the modern age, but this one really is.

Here is Lee De Forest addressing young people on the joys of the wireless: If you haven’t a hobby—get one. Ride it. Your interest and zest in life will triple. You will find common ground with others—a joy in getting together, in exchange of ideas—which only hobbyists can know. Wireless is of all hobbies the most interesting. It offers the widest limits, the keenest fascination, either for intense competition with others, near and far, or for quiet study and pure enjoyment in the still night hours as you welcome friendly visitors from the whole wide world.10

It is inconceivable,” said Herbert Hoover, secretary of commerce, at the first national radio conference in 1922, “that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education, and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising chatter.

The reason such prototypes are sustainable, however briefly, and ultimately important is not their capacity to do what the technology is meant to do; rather, their value is in exposing a working model to more minds that might muse upon it and imagine a more evolved version. And

Whenever a thought occurs, be aware of it, as soon as you are aware of it, it will vanish. If you remain for a long period forgetful of objects, you will naturally become unified. This is the essential art of zazen.32

Some experiments show that light is wave-like. Other experiments show equally well that light is particle-like. If we want to demonstrate that light is a particle-like phenomenon or that light is a wave-like phenomenon, we only need to select the appropriate experiment.

Studying the Buddha Way is studying oneself. Studying oneself is forgetting oneself. Forgetting oneself is being enlightened by all things. Being enlightened by all things is causing the body-mind of oneself and the body-mind of others to be shed. There is ceasing the traces of enlightenment, which causes one to forever leave the traces of enlightenment which is cessation.