Zen Koan Quotes

When you paint Spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots, but just paint Spring. To paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots is to paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots - it is not yet painting Spring.

that stone Buddha deserves all the birdshit it gets I wave my skinny arms like a tall flower in the wind

it isn't that we're alone or not alone whose voice do you want mine? yours?

I'd love to give you something but what would help?

we're lost where the mind can't find us utterly lost

Hearing a crow with no mouth Cry in the deep Darkness of the night, I feel a longing for My father before he was born.

clouds very high look not one word helped them get up there

don't wait for the man standing in the snow to cut off his arm help him now

born born everything is always born thinking about it try not to

When fishermen cannot go to sea, they repair nets.

You listen to people, you listen so deeply that you can hear their past lives, The crackle of their funeral pyres,

Every day Zuigan used to call out to himself, "Master!" and then he answered himself, "Yes, Sir!" And he added, "Awake, Awake!" and then answered, "Yes, Sir! Yes, Sir!" "From now onwards, do not be deceived by others!" "No, Sir! I will not, Sir!"

A sand trap is like a politician in its duality. It represents two opposing viewpoints. You see, it was designed to trap your ball. So it exists to have balls land in it. But it was also designed to be avoided. So it also exists to not have balls land in it. This is the beauty of golf. The game of golf is a Zen koan in action.

Christopher, like most people, didn't like his universe being unfathomable, so I doubted that a Zen koan would help him.

I wrote a zen koan once about love, but it didn’t make any sense. That’s how I knew I had accurately described love.

I had worked for a newspaper of sorts, word got around, and I became editor of our local school newspaper, The Drum. I don't recall being given any choice in this matter; I think I was simply appointed. My second-in-command, Danny Emond, had even less interest in the paper than I did. Danny just liked the idea that Room 4, where we did our work, was near the girls' bathroom. "Someday I'll just go crazy and hack my way in there, Steve," he told me on more than one occasion. "Hack, hack, hack." Once he added, perhaps in an effort to justify himself: "The prettiest girls in school pull up their skirts in there." This struck me as so fundamentally stupid it might actually be wise, like a Zen Koan or an early story by John Updike.

Wisteria hangs over the eaves like clumps of ghostly grapes. Euphorbia's pale blooms billow like sea froth. Blood grass twists upward, knifing the air, while underground its roots go berserk, goosing everything in their path. A magnolia, impatient with vulvic flesh, erupts in front of the living room window. The recovering terrorist--holding a watering can filled with equal parts fish fertilizer and water, paisley gloves right up over her freckled forearms, a straw hat with its big brim shading her eyes, old tennis shoes speckled with dew--moves through her front garden. Her face, she tells herself, like a Zen koan. The look of one lip smiling.

I decide to go outside to enjoy the weather. Out of the corner of my eye I see Thor pushing an empty wheelbarrow, and I wonder if it’s some sort of thought experiment. Either he just got done dumping mulch in the back yard, or this is a great set up for a Zen koan.

You need courage to find out what you really want in life, and what you want might be dangerous. But life is dangerous anyway, and there is a beauty in becoming more and more fully who you are, in paying attention to, as well as being pulled along by, your red thread.

Zhaozhou often quoted this saying by Sengcan: “The great way is not difficult if you just don’t pick and choose.

It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods. If no one heard it, did it happen? If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?

humanity’s propensity for error, every glass ever broken in all the Jewish weddings of history, a cymbal crash marking the death of God, a metaphorical token akin to the flash of insight produced by a Zen koan—and on and on.VI

The koan is not a conundrum to be solved by a nimble wit. It is not a verbal psychiatric device for shocking the disintegrated ego of a student into some kind of stability. Nor, in my opinion, is it ever a paradoxical statement except to those who view it from outside. When the koan is resolved it is realized to be a simple and clear statement made from the state of consciousness which it has helped to awaken. —from The Zen Koan, by Ruth Fuller Sasaki

It’s true though, that the impulse to give freely to the world seems to be at the bottom of the well of human intentions where the purest and clearest water arises. To be able to offer back what the world has given you, but shaped a little by your touch—that makes a true life.

[Once Ummon asked a lesser light Are you a gardener> Yes it replied Why have turnips no roots> Ummon asked the gardener who could not reply Because said Ummon rainwater is plentiful] I think about this for a moment. Ummon’s koan is not difficult now that I am regaining the knack of listening for the shadow of substance beneath the words. The little Zen parable is Ummon’s way of saying, with some sarcasm, that the answer lies within science and within the antilogic which scientific answers so often provide. The rainwater comment answers everything and nothing, as so much of science has for so long. As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not. It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the tree near the front gate refused to.

Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods. If no one heard it, did it happen? If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?

live your way into the answer.1 —RAINER MARIA RILKE’S ADVICE TO A YOUNG POET

The function of the zazen and koan is to undo the system that contains them.

Great doubt: great awakening. Little doubt: little awakening. No doubt: no awakening.

Beanpaste that smells like beanpaste is no good.

Does the cosmic space, we dissolve into, taste of us then?

how do you lead if you're being followed?

In spring, hundred of flowers; In autumn, a harvest moon In summer, a refreshing breeze; In winter, snow will you accompany you. If useless things do not hang in your mind, Any season is good season for you.

Still, the ground beneath me felt unsteady, as though at any moment it could shake and easily take me to the ground. I stumbled upon what Zen priest and author Susan Murphy calls the koan of the earth. How do we answer the riddle of our times? How do we sift through the shards of our broken culture, our fragmented psyches, and come once again into “our original undividedness and the freedom it bestows, right there in the suffocating fear itself.”90 This was the question at the heart of my despair, ripening in the vessel of my sorrow. What felt different this time was the interior experience of the grief and despair. It was not centered on personal losses—my history, wounds, losses, failures, and disappointments. It was arising from the greater pulse of the earth itself, winding its way through sidewalks and grocery lists, traffic snarls and utility bills. Somewhere in all the demands of modern life, the intimate link between earth and psyche was being reestablished or, more accurately, remembered. The conditioned fantasy of the segregated self was being dismantled, and I was being reunited, through the unexpected grace of fear, despair, and grief, with the body of the earth.

What is the significance of Zen?" Hotei immediately plopped his sack down on the ground in silent answer. "Then," asked the other, "what is the actualization of Zen?" At once the Happy Chinaman swung the sack over his shoulder and continued on his way.

French Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin would never have become Gauguin if he had not followed this principle. He was a bank employee for a good part of his life, until the day he decided he was an artist. That day he left the bank and became a genius painter.

A koan is like a riddle that’s supposed to help you toward enlightenment in Zen Buddhism. For my answer, I wrote about this guy Banzan. He was walking through the market on day when he overheard someone ask a butcher for his best piece of meat. The butcher answered, “Everything in my shop is the best. You cannot find a piece of meat that is not the best.” Upon hearing this, Banzan realized that there is no best and no worst, that those judgments have no real meaning because there is only was is, and poof, he reached enlightenment.

Now I was interested in difficult, gritty fictions, in large, expansive novels, in social realism. I was interested in Pynchon, Amis, Dos Passos. I was interested in Faulkner and Didion and Bowles, writers whose bleak, relentless styles stood in stark opposition to what I imagined Salinger to be: insufferably cute, aggressively quirky, precious. I had no interest in Salinger’s fairy tales of Old New York, in precocious children expounding on Zen koans or fainting on sofas, exhausted by the tyranny of the material world. […] I didn’t want to be entertained. I wanted to be provoked.

Zen Koans The koan is an enigmatic or paradoxical question used to develop a person’s Intuition.  Koans are a valuable tool in your quest for enlightenment, but how do they work and why use them? Koans work by confounding logic and forcing a person out of their normal thinking and into the realm of Intuition. In other words, the inherent meaning is inaccessible to rational understanding, but perhaps accessible to Intuition. This book presents some of the classic koans from traditional Zen, originally written hundreds of years ago in Japanese, and re-interpreted from early English translations into early 21st Century English. The underlying meaning is still there, so they will still work as a koan should, but they are expressed in language more easily understood by people in the 21st Century. Each koan encapsulates a profound truth for reflection. Zen counsels the lessening of the ego, not the strengthening of it as consumer culture would urge. Instead of making a name for ourselves in society, we should listen to the voice of pines and cedars when no wind stirs, in other words become no-thing, entering instead the field of pure being that is behind the phenomenal world.

Cree que ser olvidada es un poco como volverse loca. Empiezas a preguntarte qué es real, si tú misma eres real. Después de todo, ¿cómo puede ser real algo si nadie es capaz de recordarlo? Es como ese koan Zen, el del árbol que cae en el bosque… Si nadie lo oyó caer, ¿ocurrió? Si alguien es incapaz de dejar una huella, ¿existe?

He hadn't encountered a single soul on his run. This wasn't a popular part of the wood. You could probably die here and not be found for weeks. If ever. The same was true for a tree, he supposed. If a tree fell in the forest and there was no one to hear it, did it make a sound? Although it sounded like a Zen koan (yes, he knew the word "koan"), really it was a scientific question, to do with vibration and air pressure and the physiology of the ear. If a man fell in the forest--? He went flying, tripping on a tree root that had been waiting in hiding to ambush him and exact revenge for his ignorance. More punishment for his knees. At least there was no one around to see his pratfall, although if he listened carefully Jackson thought he could hear the sound of one hand clapping.

Reading while listening to the sounds of birds and the rush of water. This is the way of life that has come to be idealized. Don't think of unpleasant things right before bed. A five minute "bed zazen" before going to sleep. People who do their best to enjoy what is before them have the greatest chance to discover inner peace. Often, whatever it is they are enjoying - the thing before them - has the potential to turn into an opportunity. Stop dismissing whatever it is that you are doing and start living. Seek not what you lack. Be content with the here and now. When you are uncertain, simplicity is the best way to go. Conscientious living begins with early to bed, early to rise. This is the secret to a life of ease and contentment. Don't be bound by a single perspective. There is more than just "the proper way". Possibility springs from confidence. When someone criticizes us, we immediately feel wounded. When something unpleasant happens, we cannot get it out of our head. What can we do to bounce back? One way to strengthen the mind is though cleaning. When we clean, we use both our head and our body. Recognize the luxury of not having things. Desire feeds upon itself and the mind becomes dominated by boundless greed. This is not happiness. The three poisons are greed, anger and ignorance. Be grateful for every day, even the most ordinary. The happiness to be found in the unremarkable. Your mind has the power to decide whether or not you are happy. There is not just one answer. The meaning behind Zen koans. When there are things we want to do, we must do them as if our lives depend on it. Time spent out of character is empty time.

A Cup of Tea Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!" "Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?

Un samurái le pidió a su maestro que le explicara la diferencia entre el cielo y el infierno. Sin responderle, el maestro se puso a dirigirle gran cantidad de insultos. Furioso, el samurái desenvaino su sable para decapitarle. -He aquí el infierno- dijo el maestro antes que el samurái pasara a la acción. El guerrero impresionado por la respuesta del maestro se calmo al instante y volvió a enfundar el sable. Al hacer este último gesto, el maestro añadió: -He aquí el cielo.

82. Nothing Exists Yamaoka Tesshu, as a young student of Zen, visited one master after another. He called upon Dokuon of Shokoku. Desiring to show his attainment, he said: "The mind, Buddha, and sentient beings, after all, do not exist. The true nature of phenomena is emptiness. There is no realization, no delusion, no sage, no mediocrity. There is no giving and nothing to be received." Dokuon, who was smoking quietly, said nothing. Suddenly he whacked Yamaoka with his bamboo pipe. This made the youth quite angry. "If nothing exists," inquired Dokuon, "where did this anger come from?

[T]he koan is only a piece of brick used to knock at the gate, an index-finger pointing at the moon. It is only intended to synthesize or transcend—whichever expression you may choose—the dualism of the senses. So long as the mind is not free to perceive a sound produced by one hand, it is limited and is divided against itself. Instead of grasping the key to the secrets of creation, the mind is hopelessly buried in the relativity of things, and, therefore, in their superficiality. Until the mind is free from the fetters, the time never comes for it to view the whole world with any amount of satisfaction.

The principle of avoiding conflict and never opposing an aggressor’s strength head-on is the essence of aikido. We apply the same principle to problems that arise in life. The skilled aikidoist is as elusive as the truth of Zen; he makes himself into a koan—a puzzle which slips away the more one tries to solve it. He is like water in that he falls through the fingers of those who try to clutch him. Water does not hesitate before it yields, for the moment the fingers begin to close it moves away, not of its own strength, but by using the pressure applied to it. It is for this reason, perhaps, that one of the symbols for aikido is water.

Here lies the value of the Zen discipline, as it gives birth to the unshakable conviction that there is something indeed going beyond mere intellection. The wall of koan once broken through and the intellectual obstructions well cleared off, you come back, so to speak, to your everyday relatively constructed consciousness. [...] Zen is now the most ordinary thing in the world. A field that we formerly supposed to lie far beyond is now found to be the very field in which we walk, day in, day out. When we come out of satori we see the familiar world with all its multitudinous objects and ideas together with their logicalness, and pronounce them "good".

Buddhist meditation takes this untrained, everyday mind as its natural starting point, and it requires the development of one particular attentional posture—of naked, or bare, attention. Defined as “the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us at the successive moments of perception,”1 bare attention takes this unexamined mind and opens it up, not by trying to change anything but by observing the mind, emotions, and body the way they are. It is the fundamental tenet of Buddhist psychology that this kind of attention is, in itself, healing: that by the constant application of this attentional strategy, all of the Buddha’s insights can be realized for oneself. As mysterious as the literature on meditation can seem, as elusive as the koans of the Zen master sometimes sound, there is but one underlying instruction that is critical to Buddhist thought. Common to all schools of thought, from Sri Lanka to Tibet, the unifying theme of the Buddhist approach is this remarkable imperative: “Pay precise attention, moment by moment, to exactly what you are experiencing, right now, separating out your reactions from the raw sensory events.” This is what is meant by bare attention: just the bare facts, an exact registering, allowing things to speak for themselves as if seen for the first time, distinguishing any reactions from the core event.

One way to evaluate our practice is to see whether life is more and more OK with us. And of course it’s fine when we can’t say that, but still it is our practice. When something’s OK with us we accept everything we are with it; we accept our protest, our struggle, our confusion, the fact that we’re not getting anywhere according to our view of things. And we are willing for all those things to continue: the struggle, the pain, the confusion. In a way that is the training of sesshin. As we sit through it an understanding slowly increases: “Yes, I’m going through this and I don’t like it—wish I could run out—and somehow, it’s OK.” That increases. For example: you may enjoy life with your partner, and think, “Wow, this is the one for me!” Suddenly he or she leaves you; the sharp suffering and the experience of that suffering is the OKness. As we sit in zazen, we’re digging our way into this koan, this paradox which supports our life. More and more we know that whatever happens, and however much we hate it, however much we have to struggle with it—in some way it’s OK. Am I making practice sound difficult? But practice is difficult. And strangely enough, those who practice like this are the people who hugely enjoy life, like Zorba the Greek. Expecting nothing from life, they can enjoy it. When events happen that most people would call disastrous, they may struggle and fight and fuss, but still they enjoy—it’s OK.

sophisticated reader that he is simply referring to magical aspects of sexual activity that were bound to be misunderstood by the general public anyway. His attitude being: if only a handful of individuals will ever understand what is being written, write it in such a way that it will never go out of print. The modern reader must also bear in mind that the transcendent nature of spiritual subject matter often can only be represented by images terrible and strange. Language is not representative of reality. That Crowley was a master of metaphor is unarguable. But what is more significant is his ability to utilize words and images in the same manner as the Zen Master's Koan; expressing what appears technically to be a logical formula of language in such a way as to force the mind of the reader to deal with realities that transcend logic. The Hindu Goddess

CONFESSIONS OF A CLING-ON If a man is walking in a forest and makes a statement, but there is no woman around to hear it, is he still wrong? Or if a woman is walking in the forest and asks for something, and there is no man around to hear her, is she still needy? These Zen koans capture some of the frustrations people have with the opposite gender. And where is the dividing line between someone simply having a need, and someone being a needy person? Is it written in heaven somewhere what is too much need, too little need and just right amount of need for the “normal person?” Ask pop radio psychologists Dr. Laura, or Sally Jessie Rafael, or any number of experts who claim to know for sure, and you’ll get some very different answers. And isn’t it fun to see the new sophisticated ways our advanced culture is developing to make each other wrong? You better keep up with the latest technical terminology or you will be at the mercy of those who do. Whoever has read the latest most recent self-help book has the clear advantage. Example: Man: “Get real, would you! Your Venusian codependency has got you trapped in your learned helpless victim act, and indulging in your empowerment phobia again.” Woman: “When you call me codependent, I feel (notice the political correctness of the feeling word) that you are simply projecting your own disowned, unintegrated, emotionally unavailable Martian counterdependency to protect your inner ADD two year old from ever having to grow up. So there!” Speaking of diagnosis, remember the codependent. Worrying about codependency was like a virus that everyone had from about 1988 to 1994. Here’s a prayer to commemorate the codependent: The Codependent’s Prayer by Kelly Bryson Our Authority, which art in others, self-abandonment be thy name. Codependency comes when others’ will is done, At home, as it is in the workplace. give us this day our daily crumbs of love. And give us a sense of indebtedness, As we try to get others to feel indebted to us. And lead us not into freedom, but deliver us from awareness. For thine is the slavery and the weakness and the dependency, For ever and ever. Amen.

Zen can be seen as having a special kind of structure with basic demands that are structural demands and therefore open to scientific investigation—and the more it can seem to have a definite character to be grasped and “understood.” When Zen is studied in this way, it is seen in the context of Chinese and Japanese history. It is seen as a product of the meeting of speculative Indian Buddhism with practical Chinese Taoism and even Confucianism. It is seen in the light of the culture of the T’ang dynasty, and the teachings of various “houses.” It is related to other cultural movements. It is studied in its passage into Japan and its integration into Japanese civilization. And then a great deal of things about Zen come to seem important, even essential. The Zendo or meditation hall. The Zazen sitting. The study of the Koan. The costume. The lotus seat. The bows. The visits to the Roshi and the Roshi’s technique for determining whether one has attained Kensho or Satori, and helping one to do this. Zen, seen in this light, can then be set up against other religious structures—for instance that of Catholicism, with its sacraments, its liturgy, its mental prayer (now no longer practised by many), its devotions, its laws, its theology, its Bible; its cathedrals and convents; its priesthood and its hierarchical organization; its Councils and Encyclicals.

Jesus," for example, speaks in sayings as cryptic and compelling as Zen koans: Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

When I am silent it seems that nothing is happening, but everything is happening. Nothing ever stops happening. Everything is happening. To see into this is a way of melting down this carapace, this shell, of what we call existence.

The koan describes three monks watching a banner flutter in the breeze. One monk observes, "The banner is moving," but the second insists, "The wind is moving.

I met a man of Zen once”, said the snake, “and he gave a koan “Coal is black says the Englishman. I protest; coal is not black.

What is your original face, before your mother and father were born?

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it does it make a sound?”.

Why do the numbers on a phone go down, while the numbers on a calculator go up?

Why is it when you are transporting something by car it is a shipment, but when you transport something by ship it is a cargo?

If you try to fail and succeed which have you done?

Let’s consider a reevaluation of the situation in which we assume that the stuckness now occurring, the zero of consciousness, isn’t the worst of all possible situations, but the best possible situation you could be in. After all, it’s exactly this stuckness that Zen Buddhists go to so much trouble to induce; through koans, deep breathing, sitting still and the like. Your mind is empty, you have a “hollow-flexible” attitude of “beginner’s mind.” You’re right at the front end of the train of knowledge, at the track of reality itself. Consider, for a change, that this is a moment to be not feared but cultivated. If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas.

Kawajiri Hogin writes in his Zazen no Shokei, “When you are engaged in some work or other, you become one with it. In the intervals of your work, you immediately resume your contemplation on the koan. For instance, when you are smoking by the fireside or doing something like that, you are considered to be in the intervals of your work. At such a time you are absorbed in the contemplation on the koan free from dualistic thoughts and imaginations. This is one example of kufu in movement.

It is said that there are as many as one thousand seven hundred koan. They are classified according to the specific styles of the different schools in which they have been employed. In our School of Tekisui, koan problems are generally classified into hosshin (The body of Dharma), kikan (dynamism), gonsen (verbal expression), nanto (difficulty in passing through), kojo (stage of refinement), and matsugo no rokan (the final gate).

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 are apt to instantaneously come out of samadhi as soon as we are on our feet for a few moments. This is because we are lacking in the full power of Zen concentration. By getting to our feet and walking in kinhin while we are one with susoku or koan, we discipline ourselves to realize the oneness of tranquility and movement so that we may not be controlled and upset by our environment in our everyday life.

This day will not come again. Each minute is worth a priceless gem.

Thinking that a koan is something to be thought about and solved objectively is out of keeping with Zen teachings.

When viewed in terms of its discipline, Rinzai Zen is distinguished from Soto Zen by its requirement of the realization of the True Self that transcends this five-foot body and fifty-year life span through integration with koan. For instance, there is the koan of mu which derives from Master Joshu’s question about the Buddha nature of a dog.

Therefore, in the Soto sect, one is expected to sit in zazen, not out of necessity for seeing one’s true self, but for the sake of discipline in enlightenment. All one is expected to do is to forget and abandon both mind and body, throw them into the house of Buddha and act as Buddha in every move of one’s hands and in every step of one’s feet. In this sense, one sits in meditation in such a way that by doing so one is regarded as a Buddha. It is for this reason that, in the Soto sect, neither koan nor kufu for the sake of enlightenment is required. Only in sitting with all one’s might will Dharma be realized. Zazen anticipates nothing. The physical form of one in zazen in itself is the form of the enlightened Buddha.

it is important to take care to adjust our breathing to our koan as we inhale and exhale properly, saying to ourselves, “Mu.” This method is what is called “nentei.

The concrete methods of adjusting the mind are called susoku-kan and koan kufu21 in Japanese.

Kawajiri Hogin classifies those who sit for wrong reasons as: 1) those who sit in order to tranquilize their minds; 2) those who sit to be empty in their minds; 3) those who solve koan as if they were guessing games; 4) those who start sitting, motivated by their wish for escape from this disturbing world.

The publication Koan Kaito Shu15 (The Collection of Answers to Koan)

Hogin further writes that by doing so “such a man practices zazen in the wrong way.” Here lies the mistake of the believers of “no-thought and no-thinking.” These people forget that the true meaning of the phrase comes alive when they become one with susoku and koan.

Sanzen is classified into sosan (mandatory interviews for those with koan) and dokusan (individual interviews).

A Koan is a riddle or dialectic meditation device used in Zen Buddhist practice that is intentionally designed to, at least on the surface, be unclear and obscure. Its point is not to provide a conclusion or answer to the question presented, but rather, to disregard the relevance of the answer, to detach itself from the functions of conclusion and singular resolution. There are over a thousand known Koan that follow this format, used to test and challenge Zen Buddhists, and reveal the obscurity and limits of the mind. In general, life is uncertain, confusing, and paradoxical. As hard as we work against this, it mostly remains so. No matter our efforts, every time we believe we have some understanding or control over life, like water in the palm of the hand, the tighter we squeeze, the further it eludes our grip. Sciences, religions, and philosophies make sense of the world through various methods, some more successful than others, but nonetheless, all face the inevitable limits of themselves, the human mind, and the time in which they are erected. By sheer lack of alternatives, we understand the world with thoughts and words. Through which, we can create systems of order and understanding like logic, story, social structure, and so on. This can greatly assist our ability to survive, coexist, communicate, deal with physical stuff, and so on. However, thoughts and words, of course, can only describe and understand the world with thoughts and words. As a result, they cannot make sense of what exists beyond thoughts and words, which a great measure of life arguably does. Like any tool thinking and language are limited to the confines of their abilities. Like a hammer cannot screw in a screw, and a nail cannot cut a board of wood, the human mind cannot make sense of the mindless. A hammer can perhaps smash a screw in, and a nail can perhaps split a board of wood like the mind can perhaps consider life, but none of these items or tools fully suit the jobs they are carrying out, and thus, will fall short in their abilities to properly complete them. A Koan embodies this notion. As opposed to most stories, ideas, and answers that attempt to fight against the concept of obscurity and absurdity in life by using defined structure, logic, and resolutions, the Koan harmonizes with the absurdity of life and disregards the need for conclusive answers. In rough terms, Zen Buddhism, in general, is founded on this synchronization with the obscure and abstract.

Shōbō-genzō: Genjō Kōan (Actualizing the Koan):

Jesus’s parables are more like Zen koans than theological propositions.

Physics joined linguistics, mathematics and psychology in this metaprogramming hall of mirrors when Schrödinger demonstrated that quantum events are not "objective” in the Newtonian sense. For fifty years since then, physicists have been struggling to build a system that will get them out of this Strange Loop. The results have been as funny as a Zen koan.

Who is the Master who makes the grass green?" (Zen koan)

Koans offer the possibility that you could free the mind in one jump, without passing through stages or any pretense at logical steps. In the territory that koans open up, we live down a level, before explanations occur, beneath the ground that fear is based on, before the wanting and the scrambling around for advantage, before there is a handle on the problem, before we were alienated from the world. A koan doesn’t hide or even

Master Zuqin instructed me [as follows]: “From now on, I do not want you to study the Buddha Dharma or investigate [the sayings of] ancient and modern [Zen teachers]. Just eat when hungry and sleep when tired. As soon as you awaken from sleep, mobilize your spirit [and ponder this question:] ‘Ultimately where does the master of this wakefulness of mine put his body and his life?’” I swore to stake my whole life [on this question]: I would act oblivious of everything else, determined to see clearly into this issue.

Not only was Zen not anti-intellectual, it was actually the intellectual spearhead of Buddhism in East Asia.

Those who are familiar with the branches of Buddhist theory that the Zen school drew on can readily decode the koans in terms drawn from Madhyamika and Yogacara philosophy, and the Mahayana sutras, especially the Flower Ornament Scripture.

At the conceptual level, Zen theory and practice is obviously rooted in the formulations of the Avatamsaka Sutra and certain other Mahayana scriptures, and of the Indian philosophical schools known as Madhyamika and Yogacara

Impetus to Advance in the Zen Gate Zhuhong’s Preface

Lesson from Zen teacher Wuzu Fayan [d. 1104] when seeing off disciples about to embark on their travels on foot

Open Talk by Zen Master Zhen of Yi-an at Buddha’s Footprint Temple [14th century] When belief is a hundred percent, doubt is a hundred percent. When doubt is a hundred percent, awakening is a hundred percent.

Do we give up on the the messianic after a particular moment fails to actualise every element of expansive dreams?

When a problem is intractable and you cannot conceive of a solution to it, you will just have to live through it without a neat story about how it is to be solved.

For a long time I felt cut off from the world, a billiard ball in a Cartesian space, and a gulf separated me from the fish, animals, trees, and people—my mind was not content or whole. There were symptoms, such as having more thoughts than I could possibly use at any given moment, and clumsiness with people, but probably the main symptom was of being shut out of the magic in things. I worried at the problem, studying animals and plants and noticing that all the steps I took did not help. Then one day the gap wasn’t there anymore. After the gap disappeared, I could let a situation tell me what it was about, let people reveal themselves to me, without finding a problem. Sometimes wholeness is just given. It has to be given actually, because effort leads to effort, not to wholeness.

We might believe that we are our thoughts and feelings, but our thoughts and feelings are objects in the world, just like tables and mirrors. We might have to negotiate with them at any time.

Often what you might think of as yourself is a list of problems and achievements, particularly problems. Without a problem, you wouldn’t need anything. You could lose your citizenship in the society of people who need things. If you have a problem, you need closure, or revenge, or to understand your mother, or to have your partner meet your needs. Yet most of these things are extremely unlikely to occur. And not one of these things would bring happiness if it did occur.

If you are busy thinking that you should be kind, you might miss the reality that kindness is already present, in you.

I consider the positions of kings and rulers as that of dust motes. I observe treasures of gold and gems as so many bricks and pebbles. I look upon the finest silken robes as tattered rags. I see myriad worlds of the universe as small seeds of fruit, and the greatest lake in India as a drop of oil on my foot. I perceive the teachings of the world to be the illusion of magicians. I discern the highest conception of emancipation as a golden brocade in a dream, and view the holy path of the illuminated ones as flowers appearing in one's eyes. I see meditation as a pillar of a mountain, Nirvana as a nightmare of daytime. I look upon the judgment of right and wrong as the serpentine dance of a dragon, and the rise and fall of beliefs as but traces left by the four seasons.

My miracle is that when I feel hungry I eat, and when I feel thirsty I drink.

Uchiyama Rōshi helped me a great deal in not allowing me to use zazen as an escape. He said, “You must know that behind zazen are the teachings of Buddhism, and behind them, your own life experience.” These words went a long way in clarifying for me a passage in the Shōbō-genzō: Genjō Kōan (Actualizing the Koan): “To study Buddhism is to study the Self.

In the Zendo no books are allowed except when they are absolutely needed, for instance, when the monks have to look up a passage expressive of their understanding of a koan.