Zen teaches that our approach to today determines our whole approach to life.
I would love to be considered Zen, but I'm not sure that I am. Maybe just with animals and babies and in tough situations.
It’s interesting to look at your children as line-in Zen masters who can put their finger on places where you’re resistant, or thinking narrowly, in ways noone else can. You can either lose your mind and your authenticity in the process of reacting to all that stuff, or you can use it as the perfect opportunity to grow and nourish your children by attending to what is deepest and best in them and in yourself.
A zen couch potato is a person who contemplates the nature of televised existence.
When I was working at Omega, I took this Zen retreat, where you're quiet, you don't say anything for a week, and this guy there said, "You're going to be enlightened at the end of this week, that's my goal. " I was the engineer, so I was recording everything at it was happening, but I was also participating, because I felt like it. So at the end of it, I did understand what enlightenment was, one-hundred percent.
Zen masters say you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.
Zen is influenced by Daoism, which is not so much a nature-religion in the animistic sense as a nature-philosophy in a cosmic sense.
I consider writing practice a true Zen practice because it all comes back at you. You can't fool anyone because it's on the page.
I feel much more comfortable either up in a tree, or underwater. That's where I feel the most zen.
Zen has no business with ideas.
Zen is not a philosophy, it is poetry. It does not propose, it simply persuades. It does not argue, it simply sings its own song.
Harmonizing opposites by going back to their source is the distinctive quality of the Zen attitude, the Middle Way: embracing contradictions, making a synthesis of them, achieving balance.
There is really only one Zen Master. . . and that's yourself.
Zen is like soap. First you wash with it, and then you wash off the soap.
People say that practicing Zen is difficult, but there is a misunderstanding as to why. It is not difficult because it is hard to sit in the cross- legged position, or to attain enlightenment. It is difficult because it is hard to keep our mind pure and our practice pure in its fundamental sense.
You come back to the beginning. That's why in the "Searching for the Ox" sequence, at the very end of that sequence of the Zen paintings, we're back in the world again.
Old Zen was the reduction of concepts to absurdity.
What is Zen? Simple, simple, so simple. Infinite gratitude toward all things past; infinite service to all things present; infinite responsibility to all things future.
I am an architect. I try to feel the transparency in contemporary buildings and I try to understand the transparency in Zen poetry. I just want to mix all those things.
There is a beautiful flow to the study of Zen. If it is not making you happier, then you are not practicing correctly.